Strava will charge developers $11.99 monthly for API access

Strava is moving to charge developers a flat $11.99 a month for API access while also locking down parts of its website that were previously public, a shift that tightens control over the fitness app’s data just as it prepares for a potential public listing.

The San Francisco company said the new fee will apply to all developers, though pricing may vary by geography. It is giving developers a 90-day grace period before the changes take effect. Strava also said it will keep supporting developers and plans to add support for Model Context Protocol, or MCP, a new standard designed to give AI assistants and apps structured access to services.

The changes go beyond pricing. Strava plans to retire some API endpoints, including ones that expose club details, and restrict certain public-facing website data so only authenticated users can view it. The company says the move is meant to curb unauthorized scraping, a growing concern as AI systems hungry for data increasingly vacuum up online material without permission.

For developers that have long built cycling, running and training tools on top of Strava’s ecosystem, the economics are changing. Strava’s platform reaches more than 180 million athletes in more than 185 countries, but its API already comes with strict limits, including 200 requests every 15 minutes and 2,000 requests per day under the default overall limit, plus 100 requests every 15 minutes and 1,000 per day for non-upload requests. The new monthly charge adds another layer of friction for smaller startups and independent developers that depend on cheap, predictable access.

Strava has already been moving in this direction. In 2024, it banned use of its data for AI training and limited third-party apps from displaying other users’ data. When it announced those rules in November 2024, it said they would affect less than 0.1% of applications and later reiterated that the overwhelming majority of existing use cases would remain allowed, including coaching platforms and tools that help users understand their own data.

The company’s developer community has still expanded quickly, from 185,000 members last year to 241,000 this year, underscoring both the demand for Strava data and the leverage the company now holds over access to it. Strava confidentially filed a draft registration statement for a proposed initial public offering on February 2, 2026, after a May 2025 funding round led by Sequoia Capital valued the company at $2.2 billion. The new API fee and the broader anti-scraping posture suggest Strava is drawing a sharper line around its data before Wall Street starts asking how that data should be monetized.