Fitness API Free Tiers Compared: What Free Actually Includes

Four different things vendors call "free"#

The word does four jobs in this market, and a comparison that does not separate them is useless. Every item below is one of these:

1. Free to call. No per-request fee documented for the developer. The vendor is not billing you; the constraint arrives as an approval, a user-side dependency, or a scope restriction instead.
2. A free tier that runs out. A real entry point into a paid product, sized so a prototype fits and production does not. Access you borrow, and the vendor can narrow or withdraw it.
3. Free code, paid service — or paid nothing, if you run it yourself. Open-source software and open models cost nothing to obtain, and everything they do not do is your engineering bill. wger and the pose models sit here.
4. Free data with licence obligations. No money changes hands, but attribution, share-alike, or copyleft terms constrain what you can ship. The invoice arrives as legal review.

Whether fitness APIs are free at all is a separate question — are fitness APIs free? works through it by category. This page assumes the answer is "some of them, conditionally," and compares those conditions side by side across the whole stack.

The 14 free-to-call items and what each one costs instead#

These figures come from this site's published survey, The State of Fitness APIs 2026, and the open dataset behind it: 14 of 25 surveyed items (56%) are free to call. The figure was 12 (48%) until the dataset's revision of October 18, 2026 moved Garmin and Strava into this group, which the corrections log records. The catch column quotes the dataset's approvalGate and userSideCost fields verbatim, so you can check every cell against fitness-apis-2026.json.

For Polar's cost terms in Polar's own words, see Polar's free-for-now API terms.

Read down that column and the shape is obvious. The free layer and the gated layer overlap heavily but are not the same set: seven of these fourteen put an approval on your critical path, six put a requirement on your end user first — a device, an account, a membership or a set of consents — and two swap money for licence obligations. Only four — USDA and the three pose models — are free in the flat, unqualified sense, and every one of those four is a dataset or a model rather than a live personal-data feed. Not a coincidence: every item here that returns a specific person's health data carries an approval gate, a user-side requirement or both.

Strava sat in the free-tier list below until the October 18, 2026 revision. Its API Agreement, effective June 1, 2026, says access is currently provided at no charge, and the subscription its getting-started guide calls a prerequisite for creating an app now sits in the gate column above. The harder limit is architectural: its API Policy lets an app show Strava data only to the athlete who provided it, even when that data is public on Strava, and forbids using Strava data in connection with the development, training, evaluation or operation of any AI application. A free API that forbids your core feature is not a pricing question.

The four free tiers, and where each one stops#

The dataset classes four items as free-tier-then-paid: a genuine free entry point that ends somewhere. Where it ends is the only thing worth comparing, stated only as our own verified pages state it.

• Nutritionix — freemium into tiered paid plans with an enterprise contact-sales top tier and annual billing on larger commitments. Higher tiers are gated through a Syndigo sales contact rather than a self-serve checkout. Reports conflict on whether the open free tier still exists at all, so verify before designing around it.
• Edamam — a self-serve free Developer tier for low volume, then paid Enterprise tiers priced per product line. Two catches beyond volume: lower plans carry attribution requirements, and the terms reportedly restrict calls to end-user-driven requests and prohibit scraping or bulk saving. That rules out pre-fetching a catalogue — an architecture decision, not a budget line.
• ExerciseDB (AscendAPI) — two free entry points, as AscendAPI's documentation described them on October 22, 2026: ExerciseDB V1 serves 1,500 exercises with 180p GIFs with no API key, and ExerciseDB V2's Basic plan on RapidAPI gives 2,000 requests a month and 200 exercises, with watermarked media. The full catalogs, higher resolutions and clean media are on paid RapidAPI plans whose prices we could not read, and its terms of use were out of reach too, so whether the free tiers allow commercial use is unverified. Our July version of this bullet called the free tier often non-commercial, from the older RapidAPI listing, which we could not re-read.
• QuickPose — the one motion SDK you can start on today without a sales call: a fully-featured self-serve free tier with no watermark, moving to paid above a monthly-active-device threshold. Its public repos publish no tiers, so confirm the threshold directly.

Notice how differently these four run out: Edamam on request provenance and volume, ExerciseDB on library size, a request cap and watermarked media, Nutritionix at a sales conversation, QuickPose on a device count. Only two end mainly at a request quota, so "what is the limit?" is the wrong first question to ask a vendor here.

Why there are no dollar figures anywhere on this page#

Because the dataset behind it has none, by design. Its methodology note puts the reason plainly: prices are volatile; structures are stable. A vendor can reprice twice a year without changing the fact that its API sits behind a partner review, or that its data only exists for users who bought hardware.

There is a second, less principled reason. Serious tiers here are contact-sales, and many of the figures circulating in posts about fitness APIs are third-party guesses that were stale on publication. Printing one would make this page look more useful and be less true.

So the comparison is structural: who bills you, who gates you, who has to be paying someone else before your feature works, and what the licence makes you do. Those four columns survive a repricing. To turn structure into a number, the fitness API cost planner walks the same dataset item by item.

The rule that makes this comparison usable#

Rank the four meanings by how durable they are rather than by what they cost today, because that ordering is stable and prices are not.

Free data under a permissive licence is the most durable: public domain and CC0 sources cannot be withdrawn, repriced, or gated, and USDA FoodData Central is the clearest example here. Open models come next — Apache-2.0 weights you have already downloaded do not stop working. Free-to-call APIs are durable in price but not in access, since the approval gate and the user-side membership are outside your control and both have tightened recently. A vendor free tier is the least durable: it is a business decision the vendor can reverse, and Nutritionix reportedly narrowing its open free tier is the worked example.

Copyleft and share-alike sit awkwardly across that ranking. AGPL and ODbL data is as durable as public domain — nobody can take it back — but it constrains what you ship, and that constraint does not soften as you grow. Treat it as a permanent architectural fact, not a cost you can pay off later.

For the roundup of the open-source options themselves, with licence detail on each, see free and open-source fitness APIs. This page does not reproduce it.

Watch the fine print#

Every gate, threshold, and restriction above is quoted from pages verified during 2026, and vendors change all of them. The dataset records what could be verified and leaves a null where it could not, so a blank cell means "not documented on our pages," never "no catch exists." Re-open each provider's live terms before you commit, and treat the free-tier four as the most volatile rows here — a free tier is the first thing a vendor tightens.