What fitness subscriptions cost a year, and what stops working when you stop paying

Seven fitness subscriptions, all checked on 20 August 2026, run from $0.00 a year to $199.99 a year. Nike Run Club is free and has no paid tier at all. Garmin Connect+ is the cheapest paid one at $69.99 a year; Apple Fitness+ and Strava both sit at $79.99; the Peloton App starts at $15.99 a month, which is $191.88 over twelve; WHOOP One is $199 a year and Zwift is $199.99. But the number is not what should decide this. What should decide it is what stops working when the payments stop. On six of these seven, cancelling costs you software and your watch, phone or trainer carries on regardless. On WHOOP it costs you the hardware: the band comes with the membership rather than being sold to you, and WHOOP’s own support pages say a cancelled membership cannot collect, upload or analyse data.

The brick test

This is the question we would ask before the price, and almost nobody publishes an answer to it. You are not only buying a year of a service. You are finding out how much of the equipment in your house is a licence.

Read 20 August 2026 from each vendor’s own pricing, membership and support pages. Where a row describes what a vendor states, that is what we read on that date; it is a description of documentation, not a prediction about future policy.

So the category splits in two, and the split is not where the price sorts it. Six of these are subscriptions to content or analysis, and leaving them costs you the content or the analysis. One of them is the running cost of a piece of hardware, and leaving it costs you the hardware’s function. $199 a year for WHOOP is not $199 for an app. It is the price of the band continuing to be a band, and that is a completely different purchase from $199.99 for Zwift, where the trainer under your bike does not care whether you have paid.

None of that makes WHOOP bad. It makes WHOOP a different kind of commitment, and the fact that the money buys hardware you would otherwise pay for separately is a real part of the arithmetic. It just needs to be said out loud before you sign, because a year later it is the thing people are surprised by.

What a year actually costs

Annual and monthly prices checked 20 August 2026. The twelve-month, penalty and five-year columns are our arithmetic on those prices, not quoted prices, and they assume nothing changes — which it will. Where a plan is not shown, we did not verify one on the date we checked; that is a gap in our ledger, not a statement about the vendor.

Three of these land within $45 of a thousand dollars over five years at today’s prices, which is not the impression the monthly figure gives. $19.99 sounds like a decision you can reverse. $999.95 sounds like a decision.

The monthly penalty column is worth sitting with too. Strava charges $63.89 more over a year for the privilege of paying by the month — 1.8 times the annual price for the same product, and the widest gap here. Garmin’s $13.89 is the narrowest and close to reasonable. If you are going to pay for one of these at all, and you are honest with yourself that you will still be using it in July, the annual plan is not a loyalty test. It is the price.

Where the money goes, one at a time

Nike Run Club, $0.00. No subscription, no paid tier, no meter we could find. It exists because Nike sells shoes, which is not a hidden cost but is worth knowing, and it sets the floor everything else on this page has to justify itself against.

Garmin Connect+, $69.99 a year or $6.99 a month. Cheapest paid tier here, 30-day trial, and the only one whose launch came with an explicit promise that the free app keeps everything it already had. That is a genuinely good structure for the owner of a $600 watch: the subscription is an addition, not a ransom. The caveat is in the tense. The promise covers features that existed. It does not cover where the next ones land.

Apple Fitness+, $79.99 a year or $9.99 a month. A month free for new subscribers, three months with some device purchases, then it bills — a trial, not a tier. The useful thing about it is what it does not do: it needs an iPhone 8 or later, an Apple Watch is optional rather than a key, and cancelling takes away a class library and nothing else.

Strava, $79.99 a year or $11.99 a month, prices its own pricing page dates to 1 July 2025. Real free plan underneath: record, keep your history, use the social side. The subscription is the analysis. Family is $139.99 a year and the Runna bundle $149.99, both of which are better value per person than the individual plan if you have anyone to share with.

Peloton App One, $15.99 a month, with App+ at $28.99. We found no annual plan for either, so twelve payments is what a year costs: $191.88. The 30-day trial takes a card up front, which means it converts unless you act.

WHOOP One, $199 a year, with Peak at $239 and Life at $359, band included. We did not verify a month-to-month option so we are not printing one. See the brick test above; it is the whole story of this entry.

Zwift, $199.99 a year or $19.99 a month. Dearest annual figure on the ledger, and the trial structure catches people: the 14-day free trial attaches to the monthly plan only. A first-time subscriber taking the annual plan gets no trial, and instead can cancel within 30 days for a refund. Those are not the same offer. One costs nothing up front; the other takes $199.99 and hands it back if you ask in time.

The features that moved

The renewal price is the thing this desk usually chases. In fitness subscriptions it is not where the money moves. Two other mechanisms are.

The first is the mid-relationship increase. Peloton raised App One from $12.99 to $15.99 and App+ from $24 to $28.99 with effect from 1 October 2025 for new and returning members, and applied it to existing members from their first billing cycle on or after 31 October 2025. All-Access went from $44 to $49.99 in the same move. Nobody’s renewal price was misquoted. The price simply became a different price, on notice, which is legal, normal and completely invisible to anyone comparing sticker prices.

The second is the feature that changes sides. In December 2025 Strava moved its Year in Sport recap — free to every user since 2016 — behind the subscription. Your bill did not change. What changed is what the free plan is, and there is no clause anywhere obliging a company to leave a free tier where it found it.

The verdict

On the only axis this desk measures — what it costs a year, and what you lose by stopping — Garmin Connect+ is the pick among the paid options, at $69.99 a year. It is the cheapest paid tier of the seven, it has the smallest monthly penalty at $13.89, and it is the only one launched with a stated commitment that the free app keeps what it already had. Nothing you own stops working if you walk away.

The genuine free answer is Nike Run Club at $0.00, and if all you want is to record a run and follow a plan, the rest of this page is a list of things you do not need to buy.

Zwift and WHOOP are the two where the annual figure understates the commitment, for opposite reasons. Zwift at $199.99 is the most expensive subscription here and it needs equipment you have already bought. WHOOP at $199 includes the equipment, and that is the deal — but it is also the only entry on this ledger where cancelling stops a device you are wearing from doing its job. That may still be worth it. It should not be a surprise.

Nothing here is a judgement on the training plans, the coaching or the hardware. It is a five-year range, $0.00 to $999.95, and a question worth asking before the first payment: what do I still own if I stop.