Klimat – Review

· by · in By Mike, Cycling, Review, Run, Swim, Tools, Triathlon. ·

Here in South Florida we typically describe our workouts as one of three ways – Hot, Rainy, or Rainy and Hot. But when reviewing your data that really isn’t good enough. More importantly when comparing workouts, you really want to understand the differences in your ability between 78F and 83F when its 38% humidity versus 83% humidity. Which is why we were quickly impressed with Klimat when its developer\owner\media relations (yes it’s all just one guy), Scott reached out to us. In a nutshell it adds simple weather metrics to your Strava uploads giving you a much better understanding of the true conditions you accomplished your workout in.

Klimat

Klimat at its core is almost as simple as it gets. When you upload your Strava data, Klimat automatically adds the weather conditions as the description for the workout. The weather data comes from either Dark Sky or Accuweather (your choice). And at its core that is it. Simple, easy, and incredibly useful.

When you first integrate with Klimat, basic weather information will be added to you next Strava activity. For those that upgrade to the paid tier ($5) you get to choose your weather provider, a whole bunch of options, and to remove branding.

With any service like this, the first question we always have is what personal data does the app store about you. And while https://help.klimat.app/ gives the highlight we asked Scott to get into the gory details:

  • Data stored from Strava:
  • Data stored if you subscribe:
    • An anonymous id provided by Stripe (https://stripe.com/) that tells Klimat your payments are processed successfully.
  • Other data stored:
    • Your Klimat preferences. For example, your units (mph/kph) and template string.
    • The weather string generated by Klimat, if you have ‘Add Weather To Description’ set to ‘Yes’.
    • The weather emoji generated by Klimat, if you have ‘Add Emoji To Title’ set to ‘Yes’.
    • The raw weather data used to generate the weather string – note that this does not include location information.
    • The weather provider for every activity processed – this is Dark Sky or AccuWeather.

“As a privacy advocate, I always like to point out that Klimat never stores any information considered to be personally identifiable (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_data). It never handles credit card information – this is done solely by Stripe.com. It also never stores any location information – it uses the activity’s GPS coordinates to get the weather then immediately discards them. The weather data’s location information is also immediately discarded.” – Scott

Klimat with basic weather information is free. But as we mentioned above, for $5 you do get additional options.

Our Thoughts + Wrapping Up

Let’s start with Klimat itself – it’s simple to use and gives us insight into our workouts. Basically, there isn’t much more we could ask for. What we do wonder and consider is if and when Strava may offer the same functionality. Either by putting it in a paid tier as well or offer it to its unpaid members. To those that heard – Strava recently got into a bit of a back and forth with Relive (covered by DCRainmaker here). We could easily see Klimat end up in a similar situation. Frankly though we don’t think that should deter anyone from giving Klimat a shot or even ponying up the $5 to support them now. But we must admit that Klimat could easily find itself in a difficult situation with little or no notice. And with that we say thanks for reading AeroGeeks.com and make sure to stay tuned for the latest news and reviews!

 

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