Choosing one
How to choose a free workout app.
Nearly every workout app in the App Store is listed as free. Almost none of them mean it. Here are the six questions that separate the ones that are free from the ones that are free until Thursday, and FitBoost’s answer to each, so you can check them against the app yourself.
Ask six things: is there an account, a subscription, a trial countdown, ads, a paywall on the good half, and does it work offline. FitBoost answers no, no, no, no, no and yes.
The six questions
Install the app and check these before you invest a week of training in it. Any of them can be answered in the first two minutes.
- Does it require an account before you can see anything?
- Is there a subscription, and does the free tier still include a plan?
- Does a trial start counting down the moment you open it?
- Are there ads between exercises?
- Is the part you actually came for behind a paywall?
- Does it work without a connection?
FitBoost’s answers, so you can check them
These are stated plainly on purpose. If any of them turns out to be untrue when you install it, that is a reason not to trust the rest of this site.
- Account required: no. There is no sign-up form and no email field.
- Subscription: none. There are no in-app purchases of any kind.
- Trial countdown: none. Nothing expires.
- Ads: none, anywhere in the app.
- Paywall: none. Every workout, running plan and challenge is available from install.
- Offline: yes. Saved workouts, the exercise instructions and the timer all work with no connection.
- Platform: iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, iOS 17 or later. There is no Android version.
- Languages: English and Spanish, including the exercise library.
What “free” usually costs instead
When an app is genuinely free and has no ads: it is fair to ask what pays for it. Usually the answer is your data, your attention, or a subscription arriving in three days.
For FitBoost the answer is that it costs almost nothing to run: your plan is built on your phone rather than on a server, and there is no account infrastructure behind it. That is also why it works offline, the same decision produces both.
What to be suspicious of
Two patterns are worth noticing while you test. The first is an onboarding quiz that asks fifteen questions and then shows a price, the questions were the investment that makes the price feel earned.
The second is a free tier that keeps the exercise library and removes the plan. Browsing exercises is not the hard part. Knowing what to do today is.
Questions
Which workout apps are actually free?+
Test any of them with the six questions above. An app is only free in the sense that matters if it has no subscription, no trial countdown, no ads, and gives you a plan rather than just an exercise library. FitBoost meets all four.
Is there a free workout app that does not require an account?+
Yes. FitBoost has no sign-up form, no email field and no password. You install it and start.
What is the catch with FitBoost?+
No cloud backup and no sync to a second phone, because there is no account holding your data. It is iPhone only, and there is no Android version.
Do free workout apps work offline?+
Most do not, because they ask a server what your next workout should be, or stream video. FitBoost builds your plan on the device, so saved workouts and the timer work with no connection.
Get FitBoost
Free on the App Store. No account, no ads, and today’s session ready when you open it.