Hello Strava Team & Riders,
For several years I've run a small personal app on the Strava API. It syncs only my own activities to my own tools: it builds a statistics site, nothing else. It makes a few requests a week and has one user, me. This week it stopped working with "Application" / "Status" / "Inactive", and the API settings page now says API access is subscriber-only.
I'd like to share why I think this change is a mistake, for developers and for Strava.
1. It goes against what we were told in 2024. When the API agreement was updated in November 2024, Strava said users "will continue to have access to their personal Strava data across apps connected to the platform," and that fewer than 0.1% of applications would be affected. Personal, single-user apps were exactly the case we were told would keep working. A year later, they are the ones being cut off.
2. It does nothing against AI scrapers. The 2024 rule that data may only be shown to the athlete it belongs to already makes the API useless for large-scale scraping. An app limited to its owner's data is not a scraping vector. A paywall doesn't block bad actors with budgets. It blocks hobbyists building tools for themselves.
3. It removes Strava's role as the hub. For years Strava has been where athletes' activities collect and then flow on to other tools: mapping, analysis, journaling, backups. For anyone without a subscription, that role is effectively gone. The value of being the hub came from being open to your own data.
4. It pushes everyone to something worse. Under GDPR, Strava still has to provide a full export of each user's data. Personal apps won't disappear. They'll switch to automating the bulk archive export. That means heavier, less structured downloads of everything instead of small, incremental, rate-limited API calls. It costs Strava more and gives it less visibility and control than the API ever did.
I understand Strava needs to protect its platform and fund its development. But a free tier limited to the authenticated athlete's own data, with strict rate limits, would address every concern raised so far while keeping the ecosystem that made Strava the default place to upload activities.
I'd ask you to reconsider and restore free API access for single-athlete personal apps.
Overall this is a sad turn for a platform many of us have supported and built around for years.