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Questions about Rate Limits, Athlete Limits, and Partner Process for Large Corporate Running Events

  • January 8, 2026
  • 2 replies
  • 124 views
H
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Hello Strava team and community,

I’m currently developing an internal running event platform for my company and would really appreciate some guidance regarding Strava API limits and the partner process.

1. Project overview

Our project focuses on organizing internal running challenges and races for a large corporation with approximately 40,000 employees.

  • Expected participants per event: 10,000+ athletes

  • Number of events: 5–10 running events per year, potentially more if our IT team can scale the solution

  • Strava will be used to authenticate users and retrieve activity data (with user consent) for ranking, tracking, and reporting purposes

This platform is non-commercial, used only within the corporation for employee wellness and engagement.

2. Rate limits & athlete limits

Based on the current documentation, I understand that the default API limits are:

  • 200 requests per 15 minutes

  • 2,000 requests per day

With the expected scale of our product, these limits will not be sufficient. I have a few questions:

  • What is the process and typical timeline to request:

    • Increased API rate limits

    • Higher Number of athletes allowed to connect

    • Higher Number of athletes currently connected

  • With an expected user base of 10,000+ athletes, would a daily rate limit of ~100,000 requests/day be considered reasonable or acceptable?

  • From reading several community posts, it seems that becoming a Strava Partner may be required.

    • Could you please clarify if the Partner Program is the correct path for this type of internal corporate platform?

3. Multiple applications for different environments

For development and operational safety, we plan to separate environments as follows:

  • UAT Application

    • ~100 test users

  • Production Application

    • ~10,000+ real users

Is it acceptable (and recommended) to:

  • Create two separate Strava Applications, one for UAT and one for Production?

  • Apply different limits or configurations for each application?

Thank you very much for your time and support.
Any guidance, shared experiences, or official recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Best answer by ActivityFix

What is the process and typical timeline...

Rate limit increases are detailed here - https://developers.strava.com/docs/rate-limits/#adjustment

It doesn’t appear that there is a typical timeline. If you browse the developer hub here you’ll find several posts of people saying they filled out the form and haven’t heard back for weeks, while others have gotten an increase within a week. If I were working for a large IT department with your expected usage, I would try to get in touch with Strava directly since your first rate increase probably won’t be enough anyway. Otherwise I would budget for at least 3-4 weeks for a rate limit increase just to be safe.

With an expected user base of 10,000+ athletes, would a daily rate limit of ~100,000 requests/day be considered reasonable or acceptable?

That would be up to Strava. I don’t think the user base is unreasonable, there are several apps out there with 10k+ users. Budgeting 10 requests per user per day seems like it may be a bit much, you would typically only need 1-3 API calls per activity (one to retrieve the activity data, possibly a second for activity streams, and possibly a third if you’re writing data back to update the activity), so I would question your ratio of users to requests. You said you just wanted to read activity data for ranking and tracking, so I would expect 1 request/user/activity and an average user might have 1-2 activities/day.

Could you please clarify if the Partner Program is the correct path for this type of internal corporate platform?

You’ll need to contact Strava directtly for this one. Given the smaller scale of your application and internal-only use, I would guess that you don’t need to be part of the partner program. 

Create two separate Strava Applications, one for UAT and one for Production?

Apply different limits or configurations for each application?

In various posts here, Strava has recommended creating separate applications if you have a need to do so for multiple applications. You can only have one API key per account, so if you want a separate application you will need to create a second Strava account and go through the application process to get a rate limit increase with that one as well. Each would have its own rate limit by definition, since it is 2 separate accounts.

For your use case you could probably get away with one if you wanted to, but it would be more work on your end to serve a different application depending on the user, and would be more difficult if those ~100 test users were also part of the real user pool.

2 replies

ActivityFix
Superuser
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  • ActivityFix
  • Superuser
  • Answer
  • January 8, 2026

What is the process and typical timeline...

Rate limit increases are detailed here - https://developers.strava.com/docs/rate-limits/#adjustment

It doesn’t appear that there is a typical timeline. If you browse the developer hub here you’ll find several posts of people saying they filled out the form and haven’t heard back for weeks, while others have gotten an increase within a week. If I were working for a large IT department with your expected usage, I would try to get in touch with Strava directly since your first rate increase probably won’t be enough anyway. Otherwise I would budget for at least 3-4 weeks for a rate limit increase just to be safe.

With an expected user base of 10,000+ athletes, would a daily rate limit of ~100,000 requests/day be considered reasonable or acceptable?

That would be up to Strava. I don’t think the user base is unreasonable, there are several apps out there with 10k+ users. Budgeting 10 requests per user per day seems like it may be a bit much, you would typically only need 1-3 API calls per activity (one to retrieve the activity data, possibly a second for activity streams, and possibly a third if you’re writing data back to update the activity), so I would question your ratio of users to requests. You said you just wanted to read activity data for ranking and tracking, so I would expect 1 request/user/activity and an average user might have 1-2 activities/day.

Could you please clarify if the Partner Program is the correct path for this type of internal corporate platform?

You’ll need to contact Strava directtly for this one. Given the smaller scale of your application and internal-only use, I would guess that you don’t need to be part of the partner program. 

Create two separate Strava Applications, one for UAT and one for Production?

Apply different limits or configurations for each application?

In various posts here, Strava has recommended creating separate applications if you have a need to do so for multiple applications. You can only have one API key per account, so if you want a separate application you will need to create a second Strava account and go through the application process to get a rate limit increase with that one as well. Each would have its own rate limit by definition, since it is 2 separate accounts.

For your use case you could probably get away with one if you wanted to, but it would be more work on your end to serve a different application depending on the user, and would be more difficult if those ~100 test users were also part of the real user pool.

    H
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    • hainguyendev
    • Author
    • Hub Rookie
    • January 10, 2026

     

    What is the process and typical timeline...

    Rate limit increases are detailed here - https://developers.strava.com/docs/rate-limits/#adjustment

    It doesn’t appear that there is a typical timeline. If you browse the developer hub here you’ll find several posts of people saying they filled out the form and haven’t heard back for weeks, while others have gotten an increase within a week. If I were working for a large IT department with your expected usage, I would try to get in touch with Strava directly since your first rate increase probably won’t be enough anyway. Otherwise I would budget for at least 3-4 weeks for a rate limit increase just to be safe.

    With an expected user base of 10,000+ athletes, would a daily rate limit of ~100,000 requests/day be considered reasonable or acceptable?

    That would be up to Strava. I don’t think the user base is unreasonable, there are several apps out there with 10k+ users. Budgeting 10 requests per user per day seems like it may be a bit much, you would typically only need 1-3 API calls per activity (one to retrieve the activity data, possibly a second for activity streams, and possibly a third if you’re writing data back to update the activity), so I would question your ratio of users to requests. You said you just wanted to read activity data for ranking and tracking, so I would expect 1 request/user/activity and an average user might have 1-2 activities/day.

    Could you please clarify if the Partner Program is the correct path for this type of internal corporate platform?

    You’ll need to contact Strava directtly for this one. Given the smaller scale of your application and internal-only use, I would guess that you don’t need to be part of the partner program. 

    Create two separate Strava Applications, one for UAT and one for Production?

    Apply different limits or configurations for each application?

    In various posts here, Strava has recommended creating separate applications if you have a need to do so for multiple applications. You can only have one API key per account, so if you want a separate application you will need to create a second Strava account and go through the application process to get a rate limit increase with that one as well. Each would have its own rate limit by definition, since it is 2 separate accounts.

    For your use case you could probably get away with one if you wanted to, but it would be more work on your end to serve a different application depending on the user, and would be more difficult if those ~100 test users were also part of the real user pool.

    Thank you very much for the detailed explanation — this is extremely helpful.

    After reviewing your feedback, I agree that ~100,000 requests/day may be higher than necessary, especially given that our use case is read-only activity data for ranking and tracking purposes.

    Based on your suggestion:

    • We would typically need 1 request per activity, and possibly 1–2 activities per user per day on average

    • That puts us closer to 20,000–40,000 requests/day for ~10,000 active users, with some buffer for peak event days

    With that in mind, I’d like to ask a follow-up question:

    Rate limit planning

    Would it be more reasonable to:

    • Initially request a daily rate limit of 30,000 or 60,000 requests/day,
      rather than jumping straight to 100,000/day?

    Our goal is to start with a realistic baseline and scale responsibly as usage patterns become clearer.

    Thanks again for the guidance.

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