Your Fitness Tracker Has a Hidden Monthly Fee — Does Your Family Know?

Most people treat a fitness tracker as a one-off purchase. You pay £299 for a Garmin, or £349 for an Oura Ring, and you assume that's it. The surprise comes later — sometimes a month after unboxing, sometimes a year — when you realise the device is the cheap part.

Fitness wearables have quietly built some of the most persistent subscription businesses in tech. And for families where two parents and a teenager all wear different devices, those monthly fees compound into something worth knowing about.

The Devices That Require a Subscription to Function

This is the part most product pages don't headline.

Whoop is the starkest example. The band itself is "free" — but you must hold an active Whoop membership to receive any health data at all. Without a paid plan, the device is a rubber wristband. Membership starts at around €16/month (billed at €199/year), rising to €30/month for the top tier that includes features like blood pressure tracking and on-demand ECG. There is no free tier, no grace period.

Oura Ring works the same way. You buy the ring for €349 or more, then pay €5.99/month (or €69.99/year) for the membership that unlocks your sleep scores, readiness data, and activity insights. The ring will display some basic metrics without a subscription, but the data it's built around is paywalled.

Both companies defend this by pointing to the ongoing AI analysis and algorithm updates their servers power. That may be fair. But if you're buying one of these for a family member, factor in the ongoing cost before you hand it over.

The Devices With Optional (But Aggressively Marketed) Subscriptions

Garmin launched Garmin Connect+ in 2025, adding a €6.99/month tier on top of devices that already cost hundreds of euros. Connect+ unlocks AI-powered workout suggestions, advanced nutrition tracking, and some coaching features. Everything Garmin offered before Connect+ — the GPS mapping, the performance metrics, the sleep data — remains free. It's optional, but Garmin's app pushes it regularly.

Apple Watch pairs with Apple Fitness+, which costs €9.99/month individually or €12.99/month on a Family Sharing plan (covering up to six people). Fitness+ is entirely optional — Apple Watch works fine without it, and the Health app captures plenty of data for free. But if you're paying for Fitness+ per person across a household, you're almost certainly overpaying. The family plan covers everyone for €3 more than an individual subscription.

Strava sits slightly outside the wearable category but connects to almost all of them. A Strava Premium subscription costs €7.99/month or €59.99/year, unlocking segment comparisons, training plans, and route tools. Like Garmin Connect+, it's optional — but it's easy to sign up when motivated in January and forget by June.

What a Family of Four Might Be Paying

Here's the maths when you add it up across a household:

Total: €49.96/month — nearly €600/year.

That's on top of the hardware that already cost several hundred euros per device. The subscriptions alone exceed the cost of most streaming services most households carefully audit.

The individual charges are small enough to feel inconsequential. Across a household with multiple devices, the picture changes.

The Tricky Bit: Renewals You'll Miss

Annual plans are the norm for most wearable subscriptions. Oura, Whoop, and Garmin Connect+ all offer annual billing at a discount — and all of them will silently renew unless you cancel.

The problem is timing. You might sign up when you buy the device (say, October, after someone gets a Whoop as a birthday gift), and the renewal lands the following October without any fanfare. By then you've stopped thinking about it as a new subscription and started thinking of it as just another background charge.

This is exactly where SubManager helps. Adding your wearable subscriptions — alongside your streaming and software services — means the renewal alerts go out 14 days before each billing date. You make the decision deliberately rather than getting charged first and noticing the following week.

The spending breakdown also makes the household total visible in one place. A £49.96/month wearable subscription line tends to prompt a different conversation than five separate charges you're each barely aware of.

Questions Worth Asking Before the Next Renewal

Before you renew any wearable subscription — or let it renew automatically — a few things are worth checking:

Are you actually using the premium features? Whoop's membership is mandatory, but Garmin Connect+ and Strava's premium tiers are not. If you're using the free features of your Garmin just fine, the premium tier is probably going unnoticed.

Has the person using the device changed their habits? Fitness trackers often peak in usage during the first 90 days. If the device itself is being worn less, the premium subscription is even harder to justify.

Is there overlap? Apple Fitness+ and Strava serve different purposes, but Garmin Connect+ and Strava Premium overlap significantly for runners. If you're paying for both, one is probably redundant.

Are you on the right plan tier? For Whoop especially, the top-tier membership includes features most people never use. The base tier covers the fundamentals for the majority of subscribers.

The One-Time Purchase That Isn't

Fitness trackers have become lifestyle devices — genuinely useful, worn daily, part of how a lot of families think about their health. The subscriptions attached to them aren't going away.

That's not necessarily a problem, but it's worth knowing the real cost before you buy — and worth tracking clearly once you do. A €349 ring plus a €69.99/year membership is actually a €419 first-year investment. A household with two of these devices is over €800 in year one, and nearly €140 ongoing every year after that.

None of that makes them bad value if your family actually uses them. But "actually using them" is exactly the question worth revisiting each summer, before the year renews.