Fitbit’s $10-a-month subscription service, Fitbit Premium, confers a handful of benefits, including detailed sleep analysis (complete with animal-themed Sleep Profiles) and Fitbit’s Daily Readiness Score that aims to quantify how prepared you are for activity each morning. Starting today, though, the free Fitbit experience is getting a little more appealing: Google’s announced that Fitbit’s Health Metrics Dashboard is now a free feature.
Historical data from the Health Metrics Dashboard, including breathing rate, resting heart rate, heart-rate variability, blood oxygen saturation, and skin temperature, will be made available to all Fitbit users this month. Users will be able to see both daily and historical views ranging seven, 30, or 90 days, which Google says will help them “see trends over longer periods of time and get at-a-glance insights about what metrics changed from their baseline.” (Note that not every Fitbit device tracks all these stats; the Google Pixel Watch, for example, doesn’t monitor skin temperature.)
Previously, much of this information was paywalled behind a Premium subscription; free users couldn’t see their historical heart rate data going back further than seven days, for example. Considering Fitbit devices gather this information whether or not you’re paying for a subscription, restricting access to the data until users pony up always seemed like an aggressive way to push Premium.
Fitbit Premium still offers perks like a Stress Management Score and access to a library of workouts and mindfulness activities, but free access to the Health Metrics Dashboard means people who don’t want to pay a recurring fee will have a better experience with Fitbit — great news, considering it offers some of the best trackers around. Google says this change is rolling out beginning today, but you might not see it on your own device until later this month.
