What is VeloViewer?
VeloViewer is a web app built by Ben Lowe, a UK software developer and cyclist, running since 2012. It pulls your Strava history in and turns it into charts, maps, leaderboards and 3D profiles, but the thing that made its name is Explorer Tiles, a grid over the world that you fill in by riding through the squares.
It won the 2025 Strava App Award for Data Analysis, and its 3D climb profiles have been used in professional cycling broadcasts on Eurosport since 2015. In 2016, VeloViewer became an Official Supplier to Team Sky (now INEOS Grenadiers).
That's the half most people know. The other half, which VeloViewer's homepage now gives equal billing, is the World Tour package: a Race Hub of race routes and waymarkers, plus a Live App built for race vehicles, used by UCI professional teams, race organisers and commissaires. It's VeloViewer's business-to-business offer, separate from the PRO subscription.
Key Features
Explorer Tiles
The feature people stay for. VeloViewer lays the standard OpenStreetMap tile grid at zoom 14 over the world, and any tile one of your activities crosses gets ticked. Then it counts two things: your total tiles, and your max square, the largest solid square of ticked tiles you can carve out. The max square is the one with the leaderboard, and it is brutal: a full square means every tile, so one military base or reservoir in the wrong place caps you for years. (VeloViewer added a Max Cluster for exactly that reason.)
3D Climb Profiles
A climb rendered in 3D, with gradient, elevation and distance readable at once instead of squashed into a flat elevation chart. If you watch bike racing you have already seen these: Eurosport has used them in race coverage since 2015.
Segment Analysis
Percentile rankings, effort history and power analysis on every segment you've ridden, so you can see where you actually sit on a leaderboard rather than just how far off the KOM you are. PRO rechecks your placings roughly once a week; PRO✚ lets you recheck whenever you want.
Activity Statistics
Dashboards covering your whole riding history: monthly/yearly summaries, power curves, speed distributions, elevation totals, and trend analysis over time.
The newest number there is the Mex score, announced on VeloViewer's blog in September 2026: the first whole-kilometre distance missing from your Strava history. Have activities of every length up to 91 km but none between 92 and 93, and your Mex is 92. It sits on the Eddington row of the Activity Stats on your Summary page, and sorting your Activities list by distance shows the gaps to fill.
Who It's For
- Segment hunters who want detailed performance analysis on specific climbs and sprints
- Tile collectors addicted to filling in the Explorer Tiles map
- Data enthusiasts who want deeper analytics than Strava provides natively
- Competitive cyclists tracking performance trends over time
- Cycling teams analyzing rider statistics
The Explorer Tiles Phenomenon
Explorer Tiles arrived in March 2015 and outgrew the rest of the site. There's an all-time max square leaderboard, and a Ride Every Tile Strava club that Ben Lowe himself points people at when they need ideas for reaching a tile stuck inside a military base or a port. His own write-up of the feature ends with a disclaimer about not being responsible if you get injured or arrested collecting tiles, which tells you roughly how people take it.
Is VeloViewer free?
There's a free tier, but it's a taste rather than a plan: a one-off sync of your 25 most recent activities, 250 segments from them and 10 routes. Almost every feature works, just on that slice. PRO is £10 a year and syncs your entire Strava history along with every segment you've completed. PRO✚ is £20 a year and lifts the roughly-once-a-week limit on rechecking your segment placings and scanning your activities for new segments, plus early access to beta features. Payment is via PayPal and renews annually unless you cancel the recurring payment.
What are Explorer Tiles?
They're the standard OpenStreetMap tiles at zoom level 14, and any tile one of your activities passes through gets ticked. Because that grid is drawn on a Web Mercator projection, a tile isn't a fixed size on the ground: it's about 2.4 km on a side at the equator and shrinks as you go towards the poles, so roughly 1.5 km in the UK and northern Europe. That's near enough a mile, which is why Squadrats, which uses the same grid, calls its tile a mile square. Ride in Norway and your tiles are smaller than someone's in Brazil, and VeloViewer says as much. The "max square" is the largest solid square of tiles you've visited.
Does VeloViewer work for running?
Yes. The cycling tools get the most attention, but VeloViewer's sign-up page pitches it for your riding, running and swimming data.
How often does VeloViewer sync with Strava?
You trigger it. VeloViewer pulls from Strava when you run an update, rather than watching your account in the background. Free accounts get one sync of their 25 most recent activities and that's it; PRO brings in your whole history and keeps it current. Rechecking your positions on segments is a separate job, limited to roughly once a week on PRO and unlimited on PRO✚.
