Today's Plan

» see todaysplan.com.au as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

A subscription coaching platform for competitive cyclists, sold out of Canberra, is about as far from my own internet as software gets. The distance goes up front here because the rest is worth reading anyway: this is the uncommon case of a small company whose customers were the best teams in its sport, and being that good at the job did not keep the lights on.

Today's Plan began selling a training system to cyclists in late 2014. It started with Ben Bowley, formerly managing director of Apple in Australia and New Zealand, meeting a cycling coach called Mark Fenner as a customer, and what the two of them built was a coach's instrument rather than another step counter. You uploaded your rides and it read them against the course profile of the race you had entered, then laid out a periodized block that fit the hours you actually had in a week.

The strength was the layer above the data. A coach could dial a rider's week down to the individual workout and the road it should be ridden on, and for a triathlete could stack the disciplines against each other inside one plan. Team Sky announced a data partnership in September 2016. By the end the client list ran through BORA-Hansgrohe and what had become Team INEOS, and on 6 October 2021 AusCycling announced a partnership that let every member of the national federation sign into the Today's Plan app with their federation credentials.

~ the record ~

~ the december notice ~

The announcement came on 14 December 2023, and the trade coverage put the sharpest detail in its own subheading: the closure arrived four years after the platform had been bought. Today's Plan was acquired in 2019 into Zone5 Ventures, a sports technology group whose stated purpose was getting startups past each other's API differences so their apps could trade data.

Users were given until 12 March 2024 to turn off auto-renew and export their training history before moving somewhere else, with TrainingPeaks and Intervals.icu named in the coverage as the places to go. The open question at the time was what would happen to the professional teams and to hardware clients like Stages Cycling, who had built their own workflows on top of it.

~ what the goodbye page says ~

todaysplan.com.au still answers, and what it serves is 550 bytes: one centered image, nothing around it. The image is a line of text saved as a picture, and the alt attribute spells the line out for anybody whose browser does not load it. "Today's Plan is no longer in operation. We appreciate the years of support and wish you the best in your fitness journey."

The Internet Archive dates the handover to within a few weeks. The site was serving its full front page on 28 February 2024 and redirecting through most of March. By 21 April 2024 the only thing left at the address was that one kilobyte of farewell, and it has not changed since.

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