Strava Wants Me to Pay for My Own Data

If you haven’t seen it, I’ve been recording my daily steps and activity (or lack thereof) at Mr. T’s Fitness Tracker. The step data comes from my Withings account, and the activity data comes from my Strava account. All of that gets pulled automatically into a Google Sheet using an Apps Script, which then powers the dashboard on my site.

At least, that’s how it works for now. Strava sent an email today with this key line buried in the details:

Effective June 30, 2026: A Strava subscription will be required to access the API as an existing Standard Tier developer. Extended Access Tier developers are not affected.

Strava is effectively introducing a Strava API paywall — a subscription requirement just to access data that comes from my own walks.

In other words, if I want to keep using their API to pull my own data into my own dashboard, I’ll have to start paying them. Every month.

Ai and Automation and ... Exercise?

AI can't walk for me. Nor can automation (at least not yet, although Electromyostimulation is a topic of recent interest, and interestingly enough I had some of that when I was in rehab after shoulder surgery in December of 2024). So why do I talk of AI and automation in the same breath as exercise? Because I'm automating the reporting of my exercise. You may recall from my last post (Ripples, Resolutions, and Walking Shoes) that I was reporting my exercise journey daily on Facebook all year, and even had a full results sheet available for anyone to view. Well, I'm not reporting it daily this year. Nor am I manually updating a google sheet every day. 

What I am doing, though, is kinda cool: