I canceled my Strava premium membership today. It kept getting more expensive, and the new features mostly didn’t seem worth it.

The route creation is very good, and I’ll miss that, but other features felt like clawing for value that didn’t deliver. The recent “Athlete Intelligence” feature? Useless, and if it really is using “AI” to generate, it’s also wasteful.

The final straw was the recent API Agreement changes. I don’t mind the part prohibiting third parties from using Strava data to train AI models, but that’s because I’m bearish on the AI hype. I have a big problem with prohibiting third-party apps from showing athlete’s Strava data to others and prohibiting from processing data for analyses.

This feels a lot like when Twitter made API changes that effectively killed the third-party ecosystem. Twitter was built on an open API and a huge third-party ecosystem. They finally built their own client and pressured out the third-party clients.

I have an application that calculates your Eddington number from your Strava activities. That’s processing data. And users have the option to make these numbers public so they can share their URL. That’s showing athlete data to others.

I don’t understand the point of a third-party app that doesn’t process data, and I think it’s completely reasonable for a user to have different privacy settings on one app versus Strava. I’ve always appreciated Strava’s privacy features, and, on the Eddington app, I’ve put privacy first. Users’ numbers are private by default with a clear message about how to make them public. When the numbers are public, there’s a clear statement saying it’s public, the URL is shareable, and a note on how to make it private. Users can delete their data and/or disconnect from Strava at a click of a single button. But none of that matters according to the current API Agreement.

I also have long wanted to integrate my running data from Strava to my website and have it here, public. That also reads as against the new API Agreement.

I’m not going to do anything with the Eddington App. Strava claims the new terms won’t affect most users, so they can tell me if it’s in violation (or shut down my API access).

I will put zero additional effort into pulling my data into this website from Strava. They have made it clear that they don’t consider my data my data. I’ll look for a way to host my data on my website without Strava.

Technically, I still have premium until July, at which point it will not auto-renew. But I don’t know what Strava could do to lure me back as a paying customer.