A workout tracker with no subscription
"No subscription" turned into something you have to check, because a tracker that was free when you picked it three years ago may not be free now, and the history you put into it may not be yours to read anymore. Fair question to ask up front. This page answers it for Badger, including the parts that are not flattering, and says how the trackers people usually weigh up against it charge.
What Badger costs
Nothing. It is free on Google Play, with an iOS beta open in TestFlight. There is no paid tier to graduate to, and free here means all of the following, not just the first one.
- No account needed. No sign-up, no login, no email address. You install it and start logging.
- No subscription and no in-app purchase. There is no Pro version, no trial running down, and nothing in the app that asks you to upgrade.
- No ads and no data collection. The app ships with no analytics and sends nothing off your phone. This website runs no trackers and sets no cookies either, which is also why it cannot tell how many people read this page.
- No caps. Unlimited routines, unlimited history, unlimited custom exercises. Your tenth routine and your fourth year of training are not a paid feature.
- Export is not behind a paywall. Every set exports to CSV, the whole database backs up to a single file you keep wherever you like, and routines and gym setups share as plain files. Getting your numbers out is not something you pay to unlock.
Those five are written up properly, in the form you can hold us to, on the Badger promise.
Why there is nothing to charge for
Not principle so much as arithmetic. Badger has no servers. No account means no user database, no sync engine, no storage bill, and no monthly cost that has to be recovered from you. Your training sits in a local database on your phone, which is why the app is free and also why it does not sync between your devices. The same decision produces both, and it would be dishonest to sell you the first without mentioning the second.
Beyond that: Badger is one person's project, with no investors, no growth target, and nothing to pay back. That is a real answer to "what is the catch", and it is also the reason the promise page can commit to not taking a feature away and selling it back to you later.
The catch
Everything has one. Here is Badger's, in full, so you can decide against it now rather than after you have imported four years of history.
- No sync between devices. One phone at a time. There is an optional backup to a private folder in your own Google Drive, and a plain database file you can move yourself, but two devices do not stay in step. See moving to a new phone.
- No web app and no desktop version. The phone is the whole product.
- No Apple Watch or Wear OS app. You cannot log a set from your wrist.
- iOS is a TestFlight beta today, not an App Store release. Android is the mature, most-tested platform.
- No social feed, no followers, no leaderboards, no streak badges nagging you back in. Some people want those.
- No AI coach inside the app. What Badger does instead is hand you your own data in formats you can give to whichever assistant you already pay for, with prompts to start from: use your own AI.
- Support is one person and an email address. Not a team, and not a guaranteed reply time.
How the other trackers charge
An honest roundup, not a takedown. These are good apps that made different decisions about money, and for a lot of people the right pick is one of them.
| Tracker | What the free version gets you |
|---|---|
| FitNotes | Genuinely free, no subscription, no ads, Android only. Development runs at roughly a release a year, so it is a stable simple log rather than a growing app. If you are on Android and it already does what you want, it does what you want. |
| Hevy | A well-made app with a generous free tier that is nonetheless capped: a limited number of saved routines, limits on custom exercises, and older measurement history held behind Hevy Pro, which is a subscription. Plenty of people happily pay for it. |
| Strong | The long-established one. The free tier is limited to a small number of routine templates, and the rest sits behind Strong Pro. It also requires an account to use. |
| StrongLifts 5x5 | The program's own app. Now subscription-first: its store listing states the app requires a subscription to use. |
Checked July 2026. Free tiers and prices change often, sometimes sharply, so treat this as a starting point and read the app's own store listing before you decide anything. No prices are quoted here on purpose: a stale number about somebody else's product is worse than none.
The difference worth understanding is not the monthly figure. It is what happens to your training history the day you stop paying. Where the history lives on a company's servers, that is their decision to make. With Badger there is nothing to decide, because it was never anywhere but your phone, and there is no plan to take something you already use and put a price on it.
If you are coming from one of them
Bring the history with you. Badger imports from FitNotes, Strong, Hevy, and StrongLifts, straight from the export file each of them produces, and the import runs on your phone without sending anything anywhere. Your PRs and graphs are recalculated from what arrives, so they start out full.
- Switching from another app walks through the first five minutes.
- Importing from another app has the per-app export instructions.
- StrongLifts 5x5 in Badger covers that migration in particular, including what the CSV does not carry.
If free makes you suspicious
It should. A free app usually means the product is you, and asking where the money comes from is the right instinct. In this case there is no advertising business, no analytics being collected, no data to sell because none of it is held anywhere to sell, and no venture money waiting for a return. If any of that ever changes, the promise is the thing to hold it against. It is written down for exactly that reason.