Strava starts charging developers $11.99 a month for API access

In short: Strava now requires developers to pay $11.99 per month to build apps that use Strava’s API.

What happened

Strava, a popular fitness tracking app, is tightening access to its API. An API is like a controlled doorway that lets one app securely request data from another app.

Strava says developers who want to build apps using Strava’s features and data will now need to pay a flat $11.99 per month subscription. Before this change, developers could apply for API access for free, and then expand their access as their apps gained users.

In a post on its developer hub, Strava blamed “zero-code AI tools” for part of the problem. These tools can help people make simple apps quickly with little or no programming, and Strava says some of those apps end up repeatedly calling Strava’s systems, which can slow things down for everyone. Strava also said developer applications are up 448 percent so far this year, and that scraping attempts have hurt platform performance.

Strava said the new restriction will not affect wearable and device connections, or users’ ability to download their own data for free.

Why it matters

If you use Strava, you might not notice a change right away. But some smaller third-party apps that rely on Strava data could become more expensive to run, or may stop offering certain features. More companies are also putting up paywalls around their data connections as they try to limit large-scale data collection, including by AI systems.

Source: The Verge AI