LiftLog ships. You pick the price.

LiftLog is on the App Store today.

The one thing to know about it: there is no subscription. You get seven days free with no card on file. After that, you choose a one-time tier between $9.99 and $39.99 and you own the app. Nothing auto-renews, there’s no trial trap, and a lapsed subscription can never lock you out of your training history.

The rest of this post covers why I built LiftLog this way and what I’m trying to learn from it.

Subscription pricing is a tax on training history

Strength training is a long-term practice. You keep showing up, week after week, year after year, and the data you build up (the weights you’ve moved, the personal records you’ve broken, the volume you’ve put your body through) gets more valuable the longer you train.

Most workout-tracker apps charge a monthly subscription. Stop paying and you lose the app, and often access to your own history. I find this morally awkward. The user generated the data, and the user’s effort produced the personal records. Charging rent on someone’s own training journal is the wrong arrangement.

I know the economics. Subscriptions smooth revenue, fund support, and pay for ongoing development. Services like Strong, Hevy, and Fitbod have good reasons to use them, and I don’t think those teams are doing anything wrong. I wanted to find out whether another model would work for a one-person studio shipping a single, finished product.

So LiftLog is one-time. You pay once, you own it.

What does “you pick the price” mean here?

After the seven-day free trial, the app shows you four tiers:

• Fair, $9.99. The entry tier. If this is the most you can justify for the app, pick it, with no guilt and no asterisk.
• Good, $19.99. The middle. If LiftLog has earned a serious share of your training time and you expect to keep using it, this is where I think most users will land.
• Generous, $29.99. A step up for users who want to support the work, or who have benefited from indie software in the past and want to give back.
• Patron, $39.99. The top tier. Same app, no extra unlocks. It exists so people who want to back the studio can do that openly, without a hidden option or a tip jar.

All four tiers unlock the same product. Nothing is locked behind a higher number. You choose what LiftLog is worth to you; the features are the same either way.

Why four tiers and not a slider

A slider would be more flexible, but the research I’ve read on charitable giving and pay-what-you-want pricing points the same way: give people too many options and they freeze, and when they freeze, the median amount paid drops. Four tiers give people a real choice without overload.

Four also creates anchoring. If the only options were $9.99 and $19.99, almost everyone would pick $9.99. With $29.99 and $39.99 visible, $19.99 reads as moderate instead of top-end, and some users will choose to pay above the median. That’s the bet.

The labels matter too. Naming the tiers Fair / Good / Generous / Patron (and not Basic / Standard / Plus / Pro) makes clear that more money doesn’t buy more app. It buys the studio more runway, and I want the labels to say so plainly.

What this is not

A few clarifications, because two friends have already asked:

• It’s not freeware. The seven-day trial is generous, needs no card and doesn’t nag, but after that the app does ask you to choose a tier. I’m not Strava-ing my way into a freemium grind. The trial is real and so is the purchase.
• It’s not a stunt. This isn’t a one-week marketing experiment. Choosing your own price is the app’s pricing model. If it doesn’t work, I’ll learn from that and write about it openly. If it does work, it stays.
• It doesn’t scale to everyone. It works for a one-person studio shipping a finished, focused product. It almost certainly does not work for a SaaS company with ongoing infrastructure costs and a 50-person team. I’m only arguing that it has a place where it fits, and subscriptions can keep the rest.

Why LiftLog and GymLogger X

Lagerland Apps already has a strength training app: GymLogger X. It has a free Apple Watch app for logging sets from the wrist, ready-made and generated programs, and, with Pro, plateau signals from your own logs. Logging is free, and Pro is a subscription or $39.99 once. People who want a fast logger they can use from Apple Watch should choose GymLogger X; it’s the better tool for that job.

LiftLog is a different bet:

• iPhone-first. A docked keypad that never covers the set you’re on, each set filled in from your last session, a rest timer that starts on its own, and programs you build yourself, with supersets and giant sets. It’s for lifters who care how their tools feel as well as what they do.
• A pricing experiment. GymLogger X is the conventional answer (a subscription, with a lifetime option). LiftLog is the contrarian one (you pick the price, once). I want both in the catalogue so I can learn from both.

If you can’t decide, it comes down to this. To log from Apple Watch, get GymLogger X. If you live on iPhone and want to pay once, get LiftLog. To support an indie studio’s pricing experiment, get LiftLog at the Patron tier. Any of these is a fine choice.

What I’ll be watching

I honestly don’t know how this will turn out. The questions I want answered:

• What’s the median tier choice? I expect $19.99 (Good). If it’s $9.99 (Fair) by a wide margin, the anchoring isn’t working and I need to rethink the labels or the tier ladder.
• What’s the conversion rate from trial to paid tier? Dropping the card requirement reduces friction, but it also drops the auto-renew lock-in behind a lot of “subscription” revenue.
• Do Patrons cluster geographically or demographically? I don’t track users individually, but the App Store gives me country-level rollups and tier-level revenue. If a lot of Patron purchases come from regions where $39.99 is a serious amount of money, that changes how I think about the model.
• Do reviews mention the pricing? This is the qualitative signal I care about most. If users find the tier ladder respectful and unusual, the model is working. If it feels gimmicky or guilt-trippy, it isn’t, and I’ll write a follow-up explaining what I changed.

Try it free

If you train, download LiftLog. You get seven days of full access with no card. After that, pick a tier or don’t, and if you don’t, we part on good terms.

If choosing your own price isn’t for you, GymLogger X is free to start, with Pro as a subscription or $39.99 once. It comes from the same studio with the same privacy principles and a different pricing model.

Either way, there is no account to make and no third-party tracking or advertising SDK, and your training history stays with you: on your iPhone with LiftLog, and on your devices and in your own iCloud with GymLogger X. The app is small, the studio is one person, and those principles stay.

LiftLog is available on the App Store. It’s free for seven days with no card required. After the trial you choose a one-time price: $9.99, $19.99, $29.99, or $39.99.