Free, free tier, or free trial in running apps

Free is not one thing.

In running apps it is at least four separate arrangements, and which one you picked decides whether the way you train survives the day the trial ends or the tier moves. The word on the install button tells you nothing useful. The sentence underneath it usually does.

Four meanings of free, and the fifth nobody prints

Sort every app into one of five categories. It takes about a minute per app, and it is the sorting that tells you what happens to you later.

1. Free outright. There is no tier above the one you are using and no purchase inside the app. The Nike Run Club listing shows its price line as Free, with no in-app purchases section on the listing (App Store listing, checked 2 August 2026).
2. A free tier of a subscription product. The product is a subscription, and recording runs is the part you are allowed to do without paying. The comparison table on Strava's subscription page ticks three rows in its Free column, which are Record your activities, Join a supportive community and Use safety features for peace of mind, and ticks the remaining ten only under Subscription (Strava subscription page, checked 2 August 2026).
3. A free trial that ends. You get the whole product for a fixed window, then it stops. Runna prints a Free 7-day Trial and Cancel anytime alongside its plan prices (Runna pricing, checked 2 August 2026).
4. Free only if you own the hardware. The software costs nothing. The device it runs on does not. Garmin describes Garmin Coach as free training plans for runners and cyclists and names the compatible watches and cycling computers by model (Garmin newsroom, checked 2 August 2026).
5. Charging nothing, with nothing published about later. No price, no tier, no announced plan.

The fifth category never appears on a pricing page, because there is nothing to put on one. An app charges nothing and has not decided what it will do later. That is not dishonest by itself. It becomes dishonest the moment it is dressed up as a promise covering the entire life of the product, and the honest version of category five says so out loud and tells you what would have to be published before anything changed.

How to read a pricing page in two minutes

Read five things, in this order. Then stop. Everything else on a pricing page is persuasion, and reading it will not change your decision.

1. Find the noun after the word freeFree trial, free tier, free plan and free app are four different products sharing one adjective. If the noun is trial, the length and the renewal price should be in the same block of the page. If they are not in the same block, that is the finding.
2. Read the free column, not the paid columnComparison tables are laid out to sell the paid column. Cover it and read only what is left. If something you use on most runs is missing from the free column, treat it as locked, whatever the headline says.
3. Open the store listing, not the marketing pageThe App Store and Google Play listings carry a price field and an in-app purchases field that a vendor cannot phrase its way around. That is the fastest way to separate a free app from the free tier of a paid one.
4. Find the sentence about price changesStrava's pricing page states that subscribers will get an email from Strava 30 days prior to their renewal date with the updated price (Strava pricing, checked 2 August 2026). An app that has written down how it will tell you about a change has at least thought about the change.
5. Ask what happens to your history when you stop payingMost pricing pages are silent here, and silence is an answer. Before you commit a training block to an app, find out whether your runs come back out in a format something else can read.

What each app locks, feature by named feature

Every cell came from the vendor's own page. The feature names are the vendor's own words, not a summary. Rows that could not be sourced from a vendor page were left out instead of being estimated. Where a vendor prints a free column, read it as closely as the paid one: Runkeeper's Basic column ticks exactly two rows, Track and log activities and Basic stats, and leaves the other six unticked (Runkeeper Go, checked 2 August 2026).

Two rows were dropped.

The adidas Running premium membership page states that it is no longer possible to purchase a Premium membership via the website and sends you to the app instead, so it publishes neither a price nor a feature list (adidas Running premium membership, checked 2 August 2026). The MapMyRun premium and subscription pages redirect to a sign-in wall, and the MVP page renders no price at all without JavaScript. Both absences tell you something. When the price exists only inside the app or behind a login, you cannot compare it against anything before you install. Count that against the app.

Free only with the hardware

This category is the one that fools careful readers. The software genuinely is free. Garmin Coach is the clean example: the plans cost nothing, and the page that announces them lists the smartwatches and cycling computers they run on (Garmin newsroom, checked 2 August 2026). Nothing about that is misleading. It only misleads when a comparison article drops it into a list of free running apps next to a phone app and lets the reader assume the two are interchangeable.

Price the arrangement, not the app.

The correction is arithmetic. A plan that costs nothing but needs a watch you do not own costs the price of the watch, paid once and up front. A subscription you cancel after one month costs one month. Those are different shapes of spending, and only one of them can be stopped after you have tried it. If you are working out which side of that line you are on, which running apps actually need a watch separates the apps that require a device from the ones that merely connect to one.

Watch syncing on a phone app is a different thing again. Runna, for instance, lists syncing with Apple Watch, Garmin, Fitbit and Coros among the things a plan includes (Runna pricing, checked 2 August 2026), which is an integration rather than a requirement. Read the verb. Requires and syncs with are not the same claim.

Where Runflake sits, and what is not decided

Category five, said plainly. Runflake is free at launch. If paid features are introduced later, the price and terms are stated before anyone is charged. There is no paid tier today.

Every feature is available today.

While payments are switched off, the server feature check returns true for every feature and every user. There is no in-app purchase or subscription SDK in the app. The app is built and is not yet published to the App Store or Google Play.

What is not decided is everything after launch. There is no published price to quote and no published list of what a later paid version would contain; anyone who tells you what an unreleased app will charge is inferring, and the inference should be read as the guess it is. What the app does is a separate question from what it costs, and what the app actually does on a run is the plainer read if that is what you came for.

What changes when a free tier moves

Free tiers move. That is not cynicism. It is the ordinary lifecycle of a subscription product, and the useful question is what you lose and how you find out. Strava's pricing page describes the notice mechanism for its own price changes: subscribers will get an email from Strava 30 days prior to their renewal date with the updated price (Strava pricing, checked 2 August 2026). A documented notice period is worth more than a warm sentence about the community.

Four things reduce your exposure, and none of them require you to predict anything.

• Find the export function before you need it.
• Run it once, so you know what the file looks like. Then check whether your history is readable outside the app: a format another tool can open is the difference between switching and starting over.
• Keep the one capability you rely on most available in the free column of at least two products.
• If a feature is valuable enough that you would pay to keep it, treat it as already paid for and budget accordingly instead of hoping.

Exporting also forces a second question that pricing pages never raise, which is what the app sent off your phone in the first place. What leaves your phone on a run covers that side, and it is worth reading before you decide which app gets a whole training block of your data.

How this table is verified and when it was last checked

Every figure and feature name above was fetched on 2 August 2026 from the vendor's own page, or from the store listing where that is the field of record. No aggregator, no review site, no remembered number.

• Prices and trial length came from the vendor pricing pages linked in each cell, read on 2 August 2026.
• Locked feature names came from the vendor's own comparison wording, not from a paraphrase. For Strava and Runkeeper that means reading which rows are ticked in the free column and which are ticked only in the paid one. The marketing headline above the table is not the source.
• The Nike Run Club price line came from the store listing, not the marketing site, because the listing carries the standard price and purchases fields.
• Two rows were dropped, not estimated, as noted above.

Re-check any row before you act on it. A price on a vendor page is only true for the moment it was read, which is why every cell carries a date rather than a vague claim of currency, and if you find a row that has moved, the vendor page linked in that cell is the thing to trust, not this one.

Prices are displayed in local currency.

Strava pricing page, read 2 August 2026

That line shows how little a headline price transfers. The number you saw quoted in an article written elsewhere may not be the number your store charges you, and the only figure that binds anyone is the one your own store shows at the moment you confirm.