Which plan should you pick? Start by counting this year's races

AeroPacer has four plans: Free, Race Pass, CdA Pro and Coach. This piece explains where the lines are drawn, why they are drawn there, and which plan you should pick.

Before choosing, ask yourself one question: how many races are you doing this year? Answer that and the plan usually picks itself.

1. Free: building the plan itself costs nothing

A free account gives you the core of plan building: elevation profiles and speed scores for 208 real courses, the global course rankings, a CdA looked up from height, weight and position, and a six-level power plan calculated segment by segment against the course elevation, with the segment power chart, segment table and climbing check. Your own GPX works too. Changing parameters and recalculating is free, and every plan is saved to My plans automatically. Signing up takes an email address, no credit card.

What does the free plan not have? Three things: race-day weather and wind, tire pressure advice, and export files. Free plans always calculate at 21°C with no wind.

Why cut it there? Because all three are tied to "that one day of that one race". A course's gradients do not change for a decade; the wind changes every day. Penghu is a flat course, but on a day when the April monsoon is blowing, the same power produces a very different time from a calm day. What the free plan gives you is what the course itself looks like and roughly how your power should be spread over it. For deciding whether to enter, and which race to enter, that is plenty.

2. Race Pass: pay once for one race

A Race Pass is US$15 and buys "this course × this year". It adds back the three things the free plan lacks: the hourly race-day forecast (or historical same-date weather if it is still too early), converted into wind per segment, with headwind segments bumped up a level automatically; tire pressure advice from tire width, casing, road surface and predicted average speed; and the exports, a head unit course file (.FIT), a Zwift file and a race card. It also adds two things that only matter for that one race: your CdA solved from your own FIT file, taking the ±15% of a lookup down to about ±2% and applying it straight to this race's plan; and, after the race, uploading that day's file to compare the plan against reality segment by segment.

Why course × year rather than a monthly fee? Because preparing for a race takes months, the weather only becomes reliable a few days before, and you will come back to recalculate at different points along the way. Recalculate the same race as often as you like, right up until you have raced it.

At my full distance (226 km) in Vietnam in May 2026, the bike time predicted with a table-lookup CdA was 8.1% off; solved from my own power file afterwards, the gap shrank to 1.6%. I told that story in What is CdA. A Race Pass lets you do this before the race.

Who is it for? Someone racing once or twice a year who does not normally upload training files.

3. CdA Pro: turning aerodynamics into long-term data

CdA Pro is US$19 a month, or US$190 a year (two months free). Everything the Race Pass has, on every course, as often as you like, plus what a Race Pass cannot do:

• Estimate on any course, batch upload. Drag in training rides, outdoor rides and race files in bulk; each file is estimated and stored automatically.
• Converging history. Multiple records, weighted by accuracy, converge into a CdA with a confidence band that gets more accurate with every test. Drafting, flat tires, the wrong bike type and a slipping position are flagged automatically, with a plain-language explanation of why that record cannot be trusted.
• Equipment comparison. Label each estimate with its setup; matching labels are merged and compared automatically, with the difference converted straight into seconds over 90 km. My routes lets you put your CdA on the time trial stretch you ride most often and simulate it there.
• Deep analysis per record. A plain-language summary card, the virtual elevation curve and a 30-second rolling CdA, so every record shows you what happened that day.
• Apply the converged value to any plan in one click; raw files are kept, and when the engine is upgraded the whole history is re-estimated automatically.

Why is one race file not enough? A CdA from a single ride carries that day's wind and temperature error, so you accumulate: the more records, the narrower the confidence band, and the converged value is steadier than any single estimate. Every 0.01 of CdA is about 1.8 minutes over 90 km; improving from a tri bike position's 0.25 to 0.22 saves around 6 minutes, and that is the kind of change a different helmet or a relocated bottle can produce. To know whether a change worked, you first need a ruler that is accurate enough.

On money alone, the Race Pass is cheaper: one pass is less than half a month of Pro, and three races a year is still only three passes. What Pro buys is the thing a pass cannot do: accumulating all of your ride files into a CdA that keeps getting more accurate. Subscriptions can be cancelled at any time and stop at the end of the billing period; subscribing for the race season and stopping in the off-season works too, and your data stays.

Who is it for? Anyone racing three or more times a year, or who wants CdA as a training metric and is serious about testing equipment.

4. Coach: one person, a whole squad

The Coach plan is US$39 a month, or US$390 a year. Everything in CdA Pro, plus the things organised per athlete: athlete profiles (store parameters, load them into a plan in one click), athlete CdA management (drag batches of FIT files into an athlete's profile, write the converged value in one click, loaded into plans automatically), post-race comparison that re-estimates CdA and writes it back to the athlete profile in one click, and plan history filed by athlete for loading and recalculating. Every course, planned with each athlete's own measured CdA, as often as you like.

I coach more than thirty athletes on TrainingPeaks, and in race season a single weekend can have four or five of them racing on different courses. Everyone's CdA is different and everyone's race-day weather is different. The Coach plan keeps "each person's own numbers" in that person's profile, loads them when you build a plan and updates them after the race. What eats a coach's time is usually keeping everyone's details in the right place; that job goes to the system.

Who is it for? Coaches and teams with several athletes.

5. A few things to be clear about

• Payment runs through Stripe; card numbers never touch our servers. Prices are shown in the currency of the language you are browsing in.
• Subscriptions can be upgraded, downgraded or cancelled at any time (Manage subscription, in the console); after cancelling, access ends at the end of the billing period. The plans and raw CdA files you have built are kept, and resubscribing picks up where you left off.
• A Race Pass is a one-off purchase: it is that course in that year, and there is nothing to cancel. Check the course and the race date before buying.
• Plans built on a free account do not disappear. Upgrade to any plan later, recalculate the same plan, and it fills in the weather, tire pressure and export files.

The whole thing in one table

So, count this year's races first. One race: buy a pass. Want to know whether that equipment change actually did anything: subscribe to Pro. Coaching people: the Coach plan. Strip it down and the plans differ in one thing only: how well you want the engine to know you.