Withings Wants $100 a Year to Tell You You’re Alive

Yesterday Your Withings Data Was Free. Today It Costs Extra.

Yesterday you could take a new Withings ScanWatch out of the box, make a Withings account, set up a free developer app on the Withings site, and paste the client ID and secret into Home Assistant. A few minutes later your heart rate, sleep and step counts were on your dashboard. The watch was the only thing you paid for.

Today is October 12, 2026, and that deal is gone. Withings has put a notice at the top of its API plans page: Withings+ "becomes required on the Start for Free API plan from October 12, 2026." Any Withings account created from today on needs a paid membership to share health data with an app on the free plan, "including apps that are already live."

Home Assistant counts as one of those apps. To set up the Withings integration, every user creates their own developer app, and that app sits on the Start for Free plan. Withings says Enterprise lifts the requirement "for specific use cases," but Enterprise is for companies shipping products. It isn't meant for someone with a weight graph on a tablet in their kitchen.

Withings+ is $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year in the iPhone app. So the person who buys a ScanWatch next week pays for the watch, then pays about another hundred dollars every year to read their own pulse in their own house.

The watch isn't the only thing affected. The requirement is tied to the account, not the device. Body scales, blood pressure cuffs and the Sleep Analyzer under your mattress all go through the same API, so they all hit the same wall.

If your account was created before today, Withings says you're unaffected. For now. If you already have one, don't delete it and start over.

Where the data actually goes

Your Withings watch never talks to Home Assistant. It syncs over Bluetooth to the Withings app on your phone, the app uploads everything to Withings servers, and then Home Assistant asks those servers for a copy. Data that came off your own wrist makes a round trip through a data center you'll never see before it lands on a computer sitting in your own house. Every step of that trip depends on Withings still being willing to hand it back.

That's the whole problem. When an API lives on a cloud server and not on the device itself, losing access is only a matter of time. Somebody pays for those servers, the storage, the bandwidth and the engineers who keep it all running, and sooner or later somebody in a meeting asks why so many people are getting it for nothing. Sometimes the answer is to switch it off, like Belkin did to WeMo at the end of January. Sometimes it's a monthly fee, like Samsung's SmartThings API this summer. Today it's Withings.

Using someone else's computer is never free. It only looks free until they send the bill.

What I look for now

I work for Shelly, so take this part knowing that. But it's also why I picked Shelly as a consumer before I ever worked there. Every Shelly device runs its own web page and its own RPC API, so Home Assistant talks straight to the device on my home network. No account, no cloud server in the middle, nothing for anyone to put a price on later.

Do you or your family use Withings products? How does this one land for you?

Before you buy anything that collects data in your home or on your body, ask where the API lives. If it's on the device, it keeps working as long as the hardware does. If it's on a server, you're renting access to your own data, and the landlord can raise the rent any morning they want.