I’ve watched a lot of friends start running with ambitious goals, finishing their first 10K, chasing a marathon, or just building consistency. Almost all of them turned to subscription-based apps like Runna or similar platforms to guide their training. The structure worked: personalized paces, weekly plans, and neatly tracked progress that made running feel measurable and motivating.

But there’s a catch most people don’t expect. When they cancel the subscription, everything vanishes. The plan, the insights, the tailored progression based on their data, all gone. No export, no PDF, no way to keep the plan they’ve already followed and paid for. Their training history might still live in Strava or on their watch, but the structured output that made sense of that data disappears behind the paywall.

These apps have built their success on user data. The more a runner uploads: workouts, GPS logs, heart-rate trends, the more the platform grows, both in value and reliance. You become part of the ecosystem, but you don’t own the experience. Stop paying, and you lose access to the very structure your data helped create.

That problem kept bothering me. Why should data you generate and plans you followed disappear when you stop paying? I decided to design something different, a way for runners to truly own their training data and plans, free from subscriptions or lock-in. That’s how bmprun.com was developed.