--- title: "Fitness API Free Tiers Compared: What Free Actually Includes" canonical: "https://aifitnessapi.com/pricing/fitness-api-free-tiers-compared" cluster: "Pricing" primary_query: "fitness api free tier comparison" last_reviewed: "2026-08-12" description: "Free means four different things across fitness APIs. Compare the 12 free-to-call items and the 5 free tiers, with the catch on each. Structure, no prices." publisher: "AIFitnessAPI — independent, not sponsored" cite_as: "\"Fitness API Free Tiers Compared: What Free Actually Includes\", AIFitnessAPI, https://aifitnessapi.com/pricing/fitness-api-free-tiers-compared" --- # Fitness API Free Tiers Compared: What Free Actually Includes > Across the 25 items in this site's own State of Fitness APIs 2026 dataset, free means four different things: free to call with no per-request fee (12 items), a free tier that runs out (5 items), free open-source code or models where your engineering time is the bill, and free data whose licence obligations constrain what you can ship. Those categories behave completely differently over time, so comparing them as one thing is the mistake that wrecks a budget. Of the 12 free-to-call items only five carry no approval gate and no user-side cost, and every one of those five is a dataset or a model rather than a live personal-data feed. This page carries no dollar figures on purpose: prices are volatile, structures are stable, and the structure is what you design against. - Canonical: https://aifitnessapi.com/pricing/fitness-api-free-tiers-compared - Last reviewed: 2026-08-12 - Publisher: AIFitnessAPI (https://aifitnessapi.com) — independent, not sponsored - Cite as: "Fitness API Free Tiers Compared: What Free Actually Includes", AIFitnessAPI, https://aifitnessapi.com/pricing/fitness-api-free-tiers-compared --- ## 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?](/pricing/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 12 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](/state-of-fitness-apis-2026), and the open dataset behind it: 12 of 25 surveyed items (48%) are free to call. The catch column quotes the dataset's `approvalGate` and `userSideCost` fields verbatim, so you can check every cell against [fitness-apis-2026.json](/datasets/fitness-apis-2026.json). | Item | Layer | What "free to call" does not cover (verbatim from the dataset) | |---|---|---| | Fitbit Web API (Google) | Wearable direct | Approval gate: "Developer app registration; access to other users' intraday data is case-by-case (verify)." User-side cost: "Each user must own a Fitbit device and account." | | Oura Cloud API | Wearable direct | Approval gate: "A fresh app connects only a small number of users (reported around 10) until Oura's review — the 'Oura for Organizations' partner path." User-side cost: "User must own an Oura Ring; Gen3 users reportedly need an active Oura Membership (verify)." | | WHOOP Developer Platform | Wearable direct | Approval gate: "Hard 10-member cap until production approval, and WHOOP requires developers to hold a membership." User-side cost: "Every end user needs an active WHOOP membership for their data to flow." | | Polar Open AccessLink | Wearable direct | Both fields null: no gate, no user-side cost documented | | Apple HealthKit | Platform store | Approval gate: "App Store review checks that your health usage-description strings match what you actually do." No user-side cost | | Google Health Connect | Platform store | Approval gate: "Play Console health-data declaration and review before you can publish." No user-side cost | | USDA FoodData Central | Nutrition | Both fields null; licence is public domain (CC0), so no obligation either | | Open Food Facts | Nutrition | Both fields null; the catch is the licence: ODbL share-alike can require opening a derived database | | wger (self-hosted) | Exercise content | Both fields null; the catch is the licence: AGPL-3.0 code, Creative Commons data | | MediaPipe Pose Landmarker | Pose model | Both fields null; Apache-2.0, ungated | | TensorFlow MoveNet | Pose model | Both fields null; Apache-2.0, ungated | | Apple Vision body pose | Pose model | Both fields null; bundled with the Apple SDK, ungated | Read down that column and the shape is obvious. The free layer and the gated layer overlap heavily but are not the same set: five of these twelve put an approval on your critical path, three make your end user pay someone else first, and two swap money for licence obligations. Only five — Polar, USDA, and the three pose models — are free in the flat, unqualified sense, and every one of those five is a dataset or a model rather than a live personal-data feed. Not a coincidence: the moment an API returns a specific human's health history, somebody wants to review your app first. ## The five free tiers, and where each one stops The dataset classes five 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. - **Strava** — no per-call developer fee, but Standard-tier developers reportedly must hold a paid Strava subscription (2026, verify). The harder limit is architectural: an athlete's data may generally only be displayed back to that athlete, and using it to train AI or ML models is prohibited. A free tier that forbids your core feature is not a pricing question. - **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 (via RapidAPI)** — a hard-capped free tier, then paid tiers metered by request volume with overage above quota. The free tier is often non-commercial, which is the part that catches people. Do not assume a specific quota; reported numbers vary and marketplace listings change without notice. - **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 five run out: Strava on permitted use, Edamam on request provenance and volume, ExerciseDB on commercial use and a hard cap, 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](/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](/fitness-apis/free-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 five as the most volatile rows here — a free tier is the first thing a vendor tightens. ## FAQ ### What are the four different things vendors mean by free? Free to call: no per-request fee documented, with the constraint arriving as an approval, a user-side dependency, or a scope restriction. A free tier that runs out: a real entry point into a paid product, which the vendor can narrow or withdraw. Free code or open models: nothing to obtain, but everything they do not do becomes your engineering bill. Free data with licence obligations: no money changes hands, but attribution, share-alike, or copyleft terms constrain what you can ship. Only the first two look alike on a pricing page. [Permalink](https://aifitnessapi.com/pricing/fitness-api-free-tiers-compared#faq-1) ### Which free-to-call fitness APIs carry no approval gate and no user-side cost? Five of the twelve free-to-call items in the 2026 dataset have both fields null: Polar Open AccessLink, USDA FoodData Central, MediaPipe Pose Landmarker, TensorFlow MoveNet, and Apple Vision body pose. Note what they have in common — each is a dataset, a model, or a self-serve feed rather than an API returning a named person's health history. Open Food Facts and wger also record no gate, but both carry licence obligations instead. A null field means not documented on our pages, never proof that no catch exists. [Permalink](https://aifitnessapi.com/pricing/fitness-api-free-tiers-compared#faq-2) ### Where does each fitness API free tier stop? In five different places, and only two of them are a request quota. Strava stops on permitted use, since athlete data may generally only be shown back to that athlete and AI or ML training is prohibited. Edamam stops on request provenance, with terms reportedly restricting calls to end-user-driven requests. ExerciseDB stops on commercial use plus a hard request cap. Nutritionix stops at a Syndigo sales conversation. QuickPose stops above a monthly-active-device threshold. Verify each against the provider's live terms. [Permalink](https://aifitnessapi.com/pricing/fitness-api-free-tiers-compared#faq-3) ### Which free-tier fitness APIs restrict commercial use or how you use the data? Three of the five, in different ways. The ExerciseDB free tier on RapidAPI is often non-commercial outright. Edamam requires attribution on lower plans and reportedly restricts calls to end-user-driven requests while prohibiting scraping or bulk saving, which rules out pre-fetching a catalogue. Strava permits commercial products but restricts what you may display and prohibits using athlete data to train AI or ML models. Among the free-to-call items, Open Food Facts allows commercial use under ODbL share-alike, and wger's code is AGPL-3.0 copyleft. [Permalink](https://aifitnessapi.com/pricing/fitness-api-free-tiers-compared#faq-4) ### Why does this comparison list no dollar figures? Because the dataset behind it has none by design, and its methodology states why: 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 people who already bought hardware. There is a practical reason too — serious tiers in this market are contact-sales, and most figures circulating in third-party posts were stale on publication. Structure is what you design against; price is what you negotiate later. [Permalink](https://aifitnessapi.com/pricing/fitness-api-free-tiers-compared#faq-5)