Overview
- Strava announced Monday that it will require users to log in to view certain formerly public profiles and club pages as a way to block unauthorized scraping.
- The company introduced a flat developer API subscription reported at $11.99 per month, with the price said to vary by geography.
- Strava said it will retire select API endpoints and is giving developers a 90-day grace period to adapt to the change.
- CEO Michael Martin blamed heavy scraping and inefficient third‑party API usage for hurting site performance, accused Perplexity of routing scraping through aggregators, and said Strava has refused data licensing offers from major AI labs.
- Strava frames the moves as part of IPO preparation and a shift to controlled machine access with Model Context Protocol support, a change that could raise costs for small third‑party apps and reshape who can build on the platform.