Fitbit Air and Garmin Cirqa undercut Whoop by dropping the $199 subscription

To see what the band recorded overnight, the owner of a Whoop 5.0 picks up a phone. Gizmodo puts it plainly: the absence of a screen means you spend more time on your smartphone to actually see the data the device collects ^[11].

The dislike of screens is real, and the clearest evidence for it concerns phones. "We have users who tell us, 'Hey, I hate smartphones. I don't want to be seen using a smartphone,'" Light co-founder Kaiwei Tang told The Verge ^[14]. Light followed the smartphone-shaped Light Phone 3 with the Flip partly because users did not want to be seen carrying anything that resembled a smartphone ^[15]. For wearables, Gizmodo offers a less flattering explanation of why people are buying bands and rings now: the screenless devices do about what a smartwatch does ^[12], and multiple analysts told the site that leaving the screen off extends battery life ^[13].

If the hardware is at parity, the difference between two bands is the code reading the same signals. "There hasn't been a significant change in sensor quality over the last few years, largely because miniaturizing new sensor types is costly and few new sensor categories have reached mass production," Jitesh Ubrani, IDC's director of worldwide device trackers, told Gizmodo ^[5]. Accelerometers and PPG sensors are already effectively miniaturized, and the algorithms running them are the biggest year-over-year improvement ^[7]. Apple's sleep apnea notifications, introduced alongside the Apple Watch Series 10, came out of that kind of work ^[8].

Whoop's subscription starts at $199 a year ^[3]. Three years at the entry tier is $597 in fees before any hardware ^[16]. The company was valued at more than $10 billion as of March 2026 ^[4]. Gizmodo did not publish hardware prices for the Fitbit Air or the Cirqa ^[17], so the full three-year comparison cannot be built from the reporting yet.

One test separates the two payment models for a buyer. Write down what the device told you in week one and what it tells you in week twelve. If it is the same sentence with different numbers, you bought a sensor, and the yearly fee is paying for work you never receive. If week twelve says something week one could not, the fee is buying interpretation, and interpretation is the part that improves.

In my view the fee-free device is the better buy for a fixed-window job, such as establishing a baseline or a few months of habit building, and the subscription is worth it only when the value depends on the software learning one particular person. The tradeoff on the free side is not small. With no recurring revenue, algorithm work has to be funded by selling the next unit, so no subscription is a bet on how much the vendor puts into firmware for people who already paid.

If you are handing these out to a team, the numbers to look at in week twelve are how many people still have the thing on and how many changed something because of what it said. Daily app opens will look respectable either way.