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Strava just killed its free API, will require a subscription if you want to build on top of it
(communityhub.strava.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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Because of investor pressure to generate actual meaningful revenue, Strava is going to rapidly enshittify leading up to their IPO and after it. The unfortunate thing is that they’ll largely get away with it, because there’s really no alternative for users to move to.
Hell, Runkeeper was a thing with a social network before strava and still exists.
It even gives cadence which strava doesn't do (at least not the free tier), but the Apple cult picked up Strava and it became the runner's status symbol as Apple devices are yoany people in America/Sweden/etc... and then that spread over the rest of the world.
The alternative is stop using. Like every other platform that enshitified, once you know you can live outside the ecosystem, you can live free.
There are lots of alternatives. Apple has one Garmin has one. Google has one. etc.
There are many alternatives for tracking and analyzing performance data, but I’d posit that that’s not what most Strava users do there. For most of them, it’s a social network, and that’s it’s focus as it goes public. There’s no alternative “athlete focused” social network that allows planning and organizing group activities, has tight integration of activity info (e.g. tracking that the group bike ride averaged 20mph over this route, or that person X and I competed in the same park run, and here’s the finishing time for each of us, along with a few photos and some performance data like pace and heart rate).
All of those I listed have social features
Social features do not make a social network. Maybe it’s just where I cycle (Northeast and Northwest USA) but approximately 100% of the people that I ride with post their rides to Strava. That is what makes it a social network.
Further, all of the alternatives that you listed have limitations that prevent them from being viable alternatives to Strava even if people were interested in migrating. Mainly these are related to device integration.
Garmin requires Garmin devices to be if any real use. Same probably goes for apple. The reason strava is popular is everyone can use it, no matter their phone/device.
I think Strava is just popular due to cultural inertia more than anything. Garmin, Coros, Fitbit, Apple, even phone apps. Not really hard to export data and move. 90% of what I saw on Strava before closing the account was Zwift garbage anyway.
Strava has the unique position that it is the de facto provider nearly everything does sync to. Even some chinese bicycle computer will sync to Strava, your obscure fitness tracker will too and that nice little app will also grab your data and display it. This nice ecosystem will end with these changes.