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- AllTrails has debuted a new premium subscription tier, Peak
- Peak comes with a raft of AI tools including Community Heatmaps, Trail Conditions and Outdoor lens
- It costs $79.99 / £79.99 (around AU$125) per year
Another day, another premium AI-powered subscription tier added to one of the best fitness apps. Following hot on the heels of Garmin, Strava, Polar, and Whoop, AllTrails has announced its latest subscription tier, Peak, which comes with a bunch of cool-looking AI tools.
AllTrails Peak, the new, most expensive membership tier at $79.99 / £79.99 (around AU$125 for Australian readers), includes everything from AllTrails Plus and the app's free tier Base, and adds a series of AI tools:
- Community Heatmap offers insights into AllTrails users' activity, allowing you to filter routes by recent popularity. It shares some similarities with Strava's recent Night Heatmap feature, but it's for hiking routes to identify which routes other hikers are using.
- Trail Conditions is likened to "an app all of its own" by Chief Product Officer Ivan Selin, aggregating 15 different weather factors every hour across the entirety of the trail. Selin says the feature will tell you "not just to expect snow, but how deep and where the snowpack will be," as well as other factors such as ground conditions and even mosquito activity.
- Custom Routes is a machine learning-assisted program designed to allow AllTrails users to create their own trails from scratch.
- Outdoor Lens uses your phone's camera, AllTrails' bank of photographs, and AI to identify landmarks, plants, mushrooms, and even insects. Outdoor Lens is not available at Peak's launch, and will be coming "a little later this summer".
AllTrails Peak's AI-powered features seem very comprehensive. However, the price hike (no pun intended) is significant, as AllTrails Plus costs just $35.99 / £35.99 per year (around AU$56). In our AllTrails review, we said the premium tier was worth it only for regular hikers, so the increase is likely to only be truly worthwhile for power users.
Base subscribers get access to a new Points of Interest feature to help users explore along the trail, and Plus subscribers also get Offline Areas, a feature allowing users to download a map of a large area and access all the trails within that map.
Analysis: A costly, powerful set of tools
Once heralded as Apple's iPhone app of the year, AllTrails' most premium tier is expensive enough that only very frequent recreational hikers and those who spend a lot of time outdoors will be tempted. A $45 / £45 price hike is not a small increase, especially when you're paying annually in a single lump sum.
However, dividing that price over 12 months leaves you with $6.66 / £6.66 a month, which isn't a dissimilar price point to Garmin Connect+ ($6.99 / £6.99) or Strava Premium ($11.99 / £8.99). For that price, you're getting (what seems to be) a very comprehensive set of AI-powered tools, ones that go far beyond those services' paragraphs of advice created by generative AI. Garmin, in particular, has been lambasted for the apparent design laziness in the AI features on its paid tier.
As an AllTrails user, I'm particularly excited to try the Trail Conditions and Outdoor Lens features, although I'd be unlikely to spring for the full subscription. As someone who's excited by (and largely clueless about) different plants and trees, it would be nice to have a tool I can use on the trail that will help me identify certain species.
Besides, as someone who lives in the UK, where the threat of rain is never far away, the Trail Conditions would allow me to time my hikes to ensure a minimal chance of downpours. Plus, it would improve my chances of packing the right shoes!