Free vs Paid Health Apps: What's the Difference

Free health apps are tempting. Why pay for something you can get at no cost?

But with health data — some of the most sensitive information about you — "free" often has hidden costs. Here's what you're actually trading when you choose a free health app over a paid one.

How Free Apps Make Money

If an app is free and the company behind it has employees, servers, and development costs, the money comes from somewhere. For free health apps, it typically comes from:

Advertising

The app shows you ads. Advertisers pay to reach you. The app needs to collect data about you to target ads effectively.

For a health app, this means your health-related data may inform what ads you see — not just in the app, but potentially across the advertising ecosystem. Searched for diabetes information? Expect to see related ads following you around the internet.

Data Monetization

Your health data itself has value. De-identified (supposedly anonymized) health data is sold to:

• Pharmaceutical companies researching treatment patterns
• Insurance companies assessing population health
• Research organizations studying health trends
• Data brokers who aggregate and resell data

"De-identified" is less protective than it sounds. Health data combined with other data points can often be re-identified. And even if your name isn't attached, do you want your health patterns sold to companies you've never heard of?

Upselling and Premium Features

Some free apps use a freemium model — basic features are free, but useful features require payment. This can be legitimate, but often the free version is deliberately limited to push you toward paying.

Being Acquired

Some free apps operate at a loss, hoping to be acquired by a larger company. When that acquisition happens, your data often transfers to the new owner under different terms than you originally agreed to.

What You Get With Paid Apps

Paying for an app changes the business model. When you're the paying customer, you're not the product.

Aligned Incentives

A paid app's interests align with yours: keep you happy, keep you paying. They don't need to find other ways to monetize your presence.

This doesn't guarantee good practices, but it removes the pressure to extract value from your data in other ways.

No Ads

Paid apps don't need advertising revenue. Your experience isn't interrupted by ads, and your data doesn't need to be shared with advertising networks.

Clearer Data Practices

Paid apps can afford to keep your data private because they have a revenue source. They can invest in security, EU data storage, encryption, and other protections that cost money to implement.

Sustainable Development

A paid app has ongoing revenue to fund continued development, maintenance, and support. Free apps may be abandoned when the company can't figure out how to monetize, leaving you with an unsupported app and potentially inaccessible data.

The Hidden Costs of Free

"Free" health apps have real costs, even if you don't pay money:

Privacy cost. Your health data is shared more broadly than you'd probably prefer.

Attention cost. Ads interrupt your experience and waste your time.

Quality cost. Free apps often have fewer features, less polish, and worse support.

Risk cost. If the company pivots or shuts down, your data may be at risk.

Control cost. Terms of service for free apps often grant broader rights to use your data.

Evaluating the Tradeoff

Ask yourself:

How sensitive is this data? Fitness tracking might not matter much. Complete medical records with lab values, diagnoses, and medications? That's different.

What's the realistic risk? Having your health data sold to pharmaceutical companies might feel abstract. But data breaches, insurance implications, and unknown future uses are real concerns.

What's the cost of the paid alternative? Often it's a few euros per month. Is that worth it for better privacy and features?

Do you actually get value? A paid app that saves you time, provides insights, and protects your data delivers tangible benefits that justify the cost.

Questions to Ask Free Apps

If you're considering a free health app, look for:

How does the company make money? If it's not clear, be suspicious.

What does the privacy policy say about data sharing? Read beyond the marketing claims to the actual terms.

Who are their "partners"? Often listed in privacy policies, this reveals who receives your data.

Where is data stored? US servers? EU? Somewhere else?

What happens to your data if you delete your account? Is it actually deleted or just "anonymized" and retained?

The Healthbase Approach

Healthbase is a paid service. We charge a subscription because:

We don't sell your data. Our revenue comes from you, not from monetizing your health information.

We can afford real privacy. EU data storage, proper security, no advertising networks — these things cost money.

Your interests are our interests. We succeed when you're happy with the service, not when we extract maximum data value.

Sustainable development. Ongoing subscription revenue funds ongoing development and support.

The cost of a good health app is small compared to the value of protecting sensitive health data and actually having a tool that helps you understand your health over time.

Free isn't always a good deal. For health data, it rarely is.