How cost tracking works

Once your bike and its parts have purchase prices, the bike overview
adds two figures to the stats row at the top of the page:

• Total Build Cost — what the bike and everything on it cost you.
• Cost per km (or Cost per mi on imperial units) — what each
  kilometre you ride costs in parts.

The second one surprises people, because it is deliberately not
"build cost divided by distance". This page explains both, exactly as
the app computes them.

Cost tracking is available on Alloy and Carbon. On Steel you
can still enter and see the purchase price of each individual bike and
component — you just don't get the two combined figures. See
Subscription plans.

Total Build Cost

The simple one:

bike purchase price + sum of purchase prices of currently installed components

That's it. Only purchase prices count here — money you spent
acquiring things. Service and repair costs are not included, as covered
under What isn't counted below.

If neither the bike nor any component has a price, the tile is hidden
rather than showing a misleading zero.

Cost per kilometre

This is the useful number, and it is a sum of individual rates, not
one big division:

(bike price ÷ bike distance)
  + (component 1 price ÷ component 1 distance)
  + (component 2 price ÷ component 2 distance)
  + …

Every item is divided by its own accumulated distance, then the
rates are added together. A worked example:

Anything without a price contributes nothing. So does anything with a
price but no distance yet — a part fitted today, or a bike that hasn't
synced a ride.

On imperial units the same figure is converted to cost per mile.

Why not just build cost ÷ distance?

Because the parts on a bike have wildly different distances. Your
frame has covered every kilometre the bike has ever ridden. Your third
chain has covered only its own. Dividing the whole build cost by the
bike's distance quietly pretends every part has been there since day
one, which flatters a bike that has already eaten three drivetrains.

The two methods answer different questions:

They can differ a lot. On the author's own mountain bike, a
€4,611.57 build over 3,470 km works out to €1.33/km as a lifetime
average but €2.27/km by the app's method — a 70% spread on
identical spending. Both are correct.

There's a full write-up of the argument, with real numbers from a
four-bike garage, in
What does your bike actually cost per kilometre?

One consequence worth knowing

Because each part is divided by its own distance, fitting an
expensive part spikes the figure temporarily. A €60 chain with 50 km
on it contributes €1.20/km all by itself. Ride it in and that
contribution falls away as the distance grows. If the number looks
alarming right after a workshop session, that's why — check again in a
few hundred kilometres.

The flip side is the genuinely useful insight: the fastest way to
lower your cost per kilometre is not buying cheaper parts, it's riding
more kilometres on the parts you already own.

What isn't counted

Both figures are built from purchase prices only. Specifically not
included:

• Service and repair costs. Costs you record against a service
  entry are stored and shown on that entry in the service history, but
  they don't feed Total Build Cost or Cost per km. See
  Record a service.
• Components no longer on the bike. Both figures use currently
  installed components. Retire or transfer a part and it leaves the
  calculation, along with its cost.
• Anything priced at 0. A zero price is treated as "no price
  recorded" and the item is skipped.
• Consumables you never added as components — sealant, cables,
  bar tape — unless you track them as components with prices.

Where the numbers come from

Prices are yours to enter, in three places:

• The bike's purchase price field, on the bike edit form.
• A component's purchase price field, when adding or editing it —
  see Add a component.
• CSV import, which recognises a price column automatically —
  see Bulk import components.

Distances come from your ride data: bike distance from synced
activities, component distance accumulated while installed. If your
distances look wrong the costs will too, so start there — see
Connect Strava.

Currency follows the preferred currency on your account, so the
figures are formatted the same way everywhere. Changing it reformats
existing numbers; it does not convert them.

If a figure looks wrong

A good habit: price the frame and the expensive parts first. Those
dominate both figures, and you get most of the accuracy for a fraction
of the data entry.