Withings just showed every software vendor how to charge rent on your own data

If you open a Withings account on or after 13 October 2026, your new scale will no longer write your weight into Apple Health or Google's Health Connect by itself unless you pay for Withings+. Android Authority puts the US price at $99.50 a year or $9.95 a month, and Cult of Mac says $9.99 a month. Anyone who signed up on or before 12 October keeps automatic sync free, on every Withings device they buy from now on.

I expected a consumer squabble about a greedy subscription. What caught my attention was the plumbing. According to Gadgets & Wearables, the change arrived through Withings' developer API terms, which make Withings+ a requirement on the Start for Free API plan from 12 October. New users need a membership to share data with free-plan apps, including apps already live, and Withings says they cannot get round it by routing data through Apple Health or Health Connect.

So Withings is charging at the pipe, and the bill lands on both ends. A developer who built an app on the free tier now has new users who cannot connect unless they pay Withings roughly a hundred dollars a year. I think the business logic is easy to read. Hardware is a one-off sale; a subscription is recurring revenue that investors value more highly. Withings+ already came with exclusive health scores, physician ECG reviews and an AI connector, and I suspect too few people paid for those, so the company tied the subscription to the feature people already relied on. Grandfathering the existing base was the clever part. The most loyal customers, who know what the product used to do for free, are protected, and the people who pay are buyers who have never seen the free version.

Withings' defence is that nothing is locked in. Every user can export their full history as CSV or PDF, free, whenever they like, and the company says the subscription "funds the services" around the data. All of that is accurate, and I think it is exactly why B2B buyers should be nervous. A CSV dump is what you take with you when you leave, whereas automatic sync is what you use every day to run the business, and vendors have worked out that customers and regulators inspect the first far more closely than the second. Slack ran this play last year. From 29 May 2025, commercial apps outside its Marketplace were limited to one request per minute and 15 objects per request on its message-history endpoints, while apps customers built for themselves were exempt. Your messages stayed yours. Any outside tool that needed to read them at volume now had to go through Slack's store or crawl along at a pace I would call useless.

European buyers may assume the law has this covered. The EU Data Act's core obligations took effect on 12 September 2025, and switching charges disappear entirely from 12 January 2027, with a notice period capped at two months, a transition of no more than 30 days and at least 30 further days to retrieve data. Every one of those protections is about leaving. The Swedish firm Lindahl points out that the Act still allows penalty fees for early termination, and exempts services tailored to one customer that are not offered at large commercial scale. I expect vendors who lose switching fees in January 2027 to go looking for the money in integration access, the part of the relationship the switching rules do not reach.

The fix is to put API access in the contract before the vendor puts a price on it in the developer terms. Withings changed its deal through an API policy that no consumer signed and plenty of app developers never read. Your enterprise vendors keep the same kind of document, usually linked from the order form as a URL they can edit at will. At renewal, ask for API access to your own data at named rate limits for the full term, at no extra charge, with the right to connect any third-party tool you choose, and with any change to those limits treated as an amendment that needs your signature. This week, pull the order forms for your five largest software vendors and search for the words acceptable use and rate limit. If either one points to a web page instead of a schedule inside the contract, your integrations cost whatever that vendor decides they cost next year.

Prompted by Unacceptable: Apple Health Sync is now behind a $99/year paywall for new accounts, support.withings.com.