Sauce is a free browser extension that adds a number of subscription-level metrics to Strava, without costing you a penny.
Strava is the most popular cycling app available, but its best features are increasingly being hidden behind a paywall.
That’s understandable – every business needs to make money, after all – but if you want to add some cool features to Stava without signing up for a paid subscription, Sauce might be just what you’re looking for.
What is Sauce for Strava?
According to the app's inventor, Justin Mayfield, Sauce is “a browser extension that extends the Strava website with more in-depth analysis”.
Sauce has been around for a few years now, but it’s still not particularly well known – indeed, most here at BikeRadar hadn’t heard of it until recently.
For the most part, the additional features offered by Sauce take the form of performance metrics, such as peak power, normalised power, intensity factor and TSS.
It also offers in-depth analysis of peak efforts, across various durations and a performance predictor tool that might just help you snag your next KOM/QOM.
Notably, these metrics are available for every activity on Strava (providing the relevant data was recorded and uploaded, of course), not just your own – making it a great tool for analysing the performances of your favourite pros or riding buddies.
Sauce Performance Predictor
If you’re interested in improving your times over a segment or race course, Sauce’s Performance Predictor tool is great fun to play around with.
Once you’ve adjusted the various input data, such as what type of terrain it is and estimates for rolling resistance and your aerodynamic drag, you can play around with the figures to find out what you’d need to do to achieve a given time.
As always, that might mean simply pushing the pedals harder and putting out more power, or losing system weight (either from your bike or body), improving your aero or rolling resistance characteristics, or even finding out how big a tailwind you’d need.
The tool also offers a breakdown of the various forces acting on you while riding – gravity, aerodynamics and rolling resistance – and what percentage of your power output they are consuming.
This information can then be used as a guide for what to target for improvements – answering the question of whether you’d be better served by improving your power-to-weight ratio, or reducing your aerodynamic drag, for example.
What’s the catch?
Mayfield says Sauce is “the Eric Raymond of Strava extensions”, making reference to one of the founders of the Open Source Initiative – a group that seeks to promote open source software.
For this reason, Sauce for Strava is available free of charge in its basic form and doesn’t even come with a side serving of intrusive ads.
There is, however, the option to support Mayfield’s work via Patreon, which unlocks extra Strava features such as longitudinal fitness tracking and Mayfield’s other app, Sauce for Zwift.
Similar to Sauce for Strava, Sauce for Zwift adds customisable HUD elements to the interface of the popular indoor cycling app.
All of this costs only £2 a month, though – making it much cheaper than a Strava subscription (£8.99 per month or £54.99 per year).
Of course, Sauce for Strava doesn’t offer the plethora of premium features a Strava subscription offers – such as route exploration and creation, detailed segment leaderboards, group challenges and so on.
But if you’re a free Strava user, Sauce is an easy way of adding extra functionality to the site without spending a penny.
Which devices is Sauce for Strava compatible with?
Sauce for Strava is available as a browser extension for Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox.
You can use it on any device that's compatible with one of those, although it naturally works best on a device optimised for viewing Strava using a browser (such as a laptop or desktop computer).
Since Sauce can’t interface directly with the Strava app, using it on a smartphone or tablet isn’t quite as smooth an experience, because you’ll need to access Strava via a browser instead.
