Open-source YourOwnWeigh syncs Withings scale data to other apps without paid plan

Withings will require new users to pay for a Withings Plus subscription before health data collected by the company's devices can sync with third-party apps. According to The Verge, one developer's response is YourOwnWeigh, an open-source project that redirects measurements from Withings scales into apps and services of the user's choosing, without the paid plan.

The project's creator, Tom Anthony, told The Verge they had already grown tired of the Withings mobile app, which they called a "bloated mess." When the subscription requirement surfaced earlier in October, that frustration turned into motivation to find a way around the company's cloud.

How the project works

YourOwnWeigh is documented on GitHub, including guides for getting started. The Verge describes it as primarily a web app that runs on a server the user picks — and Anthony notes that because the data volumes involved are tiny, a free Cloudflare account is enough to host the whole thing for anyone who does not already run their own server.

The app's central job is firmware replacement. Over Bluetooth, it installs modified firmware on a Withings scale so that readings upload to a non-Withings server the user has configured. Rather than bundling Withings' firmware with the project, it fetches the official firmware and patches it when needed. The web app also pulls in the scale's existing settings and user profiles, and retrieves the health data produced by everyday weigh-ins.

Getting the data into Apple Health

Moving the numbers into Apple Health required a second step. Anthony built a scheduled automation with Apple Shortcuts that pulls weigh-in records from the alternate server and writes them into Apple's health app. Support for other destinations, Google Health among them, is something they hope the wider community will build out.

Only older scales for now

There is a catch: YourOwnWeigh currently works with just two older Withings scale models. The Verge reports that if the firmware on newer models can be patched in a similar way, extending compatibility should be possible — but that work has not been done yet.

Why it matters

The story is a concrete example of what happens when a hardware maker moves a long-standing capability behind a recurring charge. People who bought Withings scales could once sync their measurements wherever they liked; the new policy means new users must pay for that privilege, shrinking what the hardware does out of the box.

YourOwnWeigh offers a technical counterargument: with open tooling and a small amount of self-hosting, users can reclaim the interoperability they believed they had purchased. The approach is also notable as a template other communities could copy — patching official firmware on demand rather than redistributing it, and leaning on free hosting tiers to keep the barrier to entry low.

Whether the project reaches current-generation scales will determine how useful it is to buyers of new hardware. For now it serves as both a working workaround for owners of the supported models and a signal to device makers that walling off basic access to a user's own health data tends to provoke a response from the people it affects.