Sean Rhea bought a PowerTap Pro on April 20, 2006 and immediately set to figuring out how to use it from his Mac without using Virtual PC. With help from Russ Cox and David Easter, he wrote two command-line programs for downloading data from a PowerTap and interpreting that data. Sean released these two tools, `ptdl` and `ptunpk`, on May 4, 2006.

Later that year, Sean needed to learn QT for his real job, and he set about writing a graphical version of his software for practice. He released the first graphical version on September 6, 2006, changing the name to GoldenCheetah in reference to an old legend from his days as a runner.

Since then, a large community has contributed additional code and other support, including:

- Robert Carlsen
- Rainer Clasen
- Chris Cleeland
- J.T. Conklin
- Dan Connelly
- Damien Grauser
- Steve Gribble
- Dag Gruneau
- Ned Harding

- Aldy Hernandez
- Jamie Kimberley
- Justin Knotzke
- Andrew Kruse
- Mark Liversedge
- Greg Lonnon
- Tom Montgomery
- Eric Murray
- Scott Overfield

- Mark Rages
- Robb Romans
- Mitsukuni Sato
- Berend de Schouwer
- Julian Simioni
- Greg Steele
- Tom Weichmann
- Keisuke Yamaguchi