Health & wellness
Liftkeeper
A gym log for lifters who won't rent their own workout history: unlimited routines, custom exercises and full progress history, no subscription.
In plain English
- What category is this?
- Clinics, coaches, and consumers buy for care, fitness, or wellbeing workflows. Here the focus is consumer health & fitness.
- The idea, briefly
Build one purchase, no meter: unlimited routines and custom exercises, full graph history and CSV import/export, with no account required and the core logging loop fully offline across phone and watch. The only paid unlock is a single one-time purchase. Caveat: Hevy's listing is contradictory about routines (its FEATURES list advertises unlimited routines free while its Pro block lists them as paid) and Hevy already sells a $74.99 lifetime option, so 'unlimited + one-time' is partly occupied; the verified differentiators are removing the custom-exercise cap and the graph-history gate.
More ▾- What buyers expect
People comparing tools like Hevy, Strong, Fitbod expect the basics to work without surprise fees or missing pieces. The loud complaints are: Free tiers cap the core job. Strong's own App Store text states the free version 'can save unlimited workouts, but is limited to 3 custom routines,' and a Hevy App Store review says the buyer upgraded because they 'needed to create more than 5 custom exercises.' Hevy's listing is internally inconsistent about routines (its FEATURES list advertises 'Create an unlimited amount of routines' while the HEVY PRO block lists 'Create unlimited routines' and 'Get unlimited access to graph history' as paid), so the clearest verified caps are Strong's 3 custom routines and Hevy's custom exercises plus graph history. The market tracker counts 'Limits & caps' as the top complaint theme: 15 of 16 apps at 2.3% of reviews versus 1.6% for Health & Fitness generally; and buyers describe the incumbents as paywalling nearly everything.
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- Sources
- 14
- Checked
- 14
- Competitors
- 4
- Gaps
- 5
- Page checked
- 14 · 100%
- Snippet only
- 0 · 0%
- Documented
- 8 · 73%
- Interpreted
- 3 · 27%
- market5
- pricing4
- complaint3
- revenue1
- playbook1
Competitors
4Parsed from public pricing blurbs (entry paid tier when available). Max in set: $4.99/mo.
| Competitor | From | Free tier | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hevy | Free | Yes | apps.apple.com✓ |
| Strong | $4.99/mo | Yes | apps.apple.com✓ |
| Fitbod | Free | Yes | apps.apple.com✓ |
| JEFIT | Free | Yes | apps.apple.com✓ |
What customers complain about
5| Gap | Src |
|---|---|
Free tiers cap the core job. Strong's own App Store text states the free version 'can save unlimited workouts, | |
Buyers describe the incumbents as paywalling nearly everything. | |
Subscriptions are the most resented cost in the category. | |
Subscription pricing is resented by individual buyers even though it is NOT an elevated aggregate complaint, so it must not be sold as the core gap. | |
Apple Watch sync and mid-workout UX are recurring frustrations. The tracker's own counting finds UX complaints run 9.6% in fitness-tracking apps versus 4.7% for Health & Fitness g… |
Documented Interpreted
How competitors find customers
3| Tactic | Src |
|---|---|
| Hevy: launch on Product Hunt (its about page displays a #1 Product badge and a Golden Kitty Award) and grow through an in-app social feed where users copy one another's routines, | hevyapp.com✓ |
| Stronk: post a free, open-source alternative on Show HN positioned explicitly against paying for Strong or Hevy; the post drew 65 points and 30 comments, | news.ycombinator.com✓ |
| Kilo: launch the same way on Show HN as a local-first, no-account tracker, then ship the APK through GitHub Releases and Obtainium to skip app-store fees and review cycles. | news.ycombinator.com✓ |
Your angle & pricing wedge
| Piece | Claim | Src |
|---|---|---|
| Angle | One purchase, no meter: unlimited routines and custom exercises, full graph history and CSV import/export, | |
| Wedge | Mechanism: charge once, not monthly, and remove the free-tier caps competitors use to force upgrades. |
How others got traction
3| Move | Why | Src |
|---|---|---|
| Hevy started in 2019 as a workout tracker built around friends and now reports 17+ million users. | Company-attributed origin on the opened about page: the team was 'not satisfied with the existing workout trackers on the market, | hevyapp.com✓ |
| The free, open-source app Stronk launched on Show HN directly against paying for Strong or Hevy and… | Builder-attributed on the opened Show HN post: they 'didn't want to pay for Strong or Hevy so I started building my own lifts journal app. | news.ycombinator.com✓ |
| The open-source app Kilo launched on Show HN as a local-first, no-account alternative to 'heavily p… | Builder-attributed on the opened Show HN post: the incumbents 'are heavily paywalled and basically every useable feature is something you h… | news.ycombinator.com✓ |
Market heat
Hevy reports 17+ million users and was a #1 Product Hunt product with a Golden Kitty Award (company-reported).
The workout-tracker market holds 165.6M Google Play installs across the 11 of 17 apps the tracker could match; the tracker credits Hevy with 8.27M installs and lists Hevy at 95K App Store ratings in its 2026-09-28 snapshot, while Hevy's own App Store listing shows 96K ratings at 4.9.
More ▾RevenueCat data shows fitness has the highest install-LTV of any category ($1.21) and 68% of subscriptions sold are annual, while annual renewal is just 25% and the refund rate is 4.71%.
More ▾Health and fitness apps lose a median of roughly 70% of users within 100 days and retain only 3-4% at day 30, so any entrant fights baseline category churn, not only competitors.
More ▾Hacker News shows a small but recurring set of free, no-subscription workout-tracker launches positioned against Strong and Hevy (an Algolia 'workout tracker subscription' search returned 4 stories, including Streakout's 'no signup, no clutter, no subscription' and a one-time-purchase Personal Trainer build), indicating an active unserved segment but also free alternatives.
More ▾An unattributed public GitHub gist titled 'Health App Pain Points' (no named author credentials, 0 stars; low provenance, treat as weak) lists subscription fatigue, with users stacking $700-1,200/year of health subscriptions and MyFitnessPal's 2022 paywall still cited as a cautionary example.
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Revenue signals
4| Signal | Src |
|---|---|
Hevy: 17+ million users (self-reported on its About page; not independently audited). | hevyapp.com✓ |
Category list pricing spans $2.99/month to $95.99/year across Hevy, Strong, Fitbod and JEFIT (documented on opened App Store listings). | apps.apple.com✓ |
RevenueCat (cited by the market tracker): fitness is the highest install-LTV category at $1.21, 68% of subscriptions sold are annual, annual renewal is 25%, | appimp.app✓ |
A one-time $29.99 price with unlimited free usage is an inference from the offline cost structure, not a sourced willingness-to-pay figure; |
Should you build this?
The pain is real: Strong's opened listing says the free version is 'limited to 3 custom routines', a Hevy reviewer upgraded because he 'needed to create more than 5 custom exercises', buyers call these apps 'heavily paywalled', 'limits & caps' is the top counted complaint theme (15 of 16 apps at 2.3% vs a 1.6% norm), and developers keep building free or one-time alternatives because they 'didn't want to pay for Strong or Hevy'. Gym-goers pay for this to log lifts and watch their progress without renting access to their own history. It is also a crowded, unforgiving market - 17 apps, a genuinely generous free floor, pre-2020 apps holding 69% of subscription revenue, 25% annual renewal and a 4.71% refund rate - and the one aggregate metric often cited for price resentment (billing complaint share) actually runs below the category norm, so price alone is not a proven wedge. This is not guaranteed.
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All sources
14| Source | Kind | Status | Accessed |
|---|---|---|---|
| market | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
| market | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
| pricing | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
| pricing | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
| pricing | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
| pricing | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
| revenue | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
| complaint | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
| complaint | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
| playbook | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
| market | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
| market | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
| market | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
| complaint | page checked | 2026-10-04 |