This Open-Source Oura Ring App Promises No Subscription Fees, But There's A Catch

Fitness trackers are hugely popular at the moment, whether they're standalone hardware or software integrated into your smartphone, smartwatch, or another wearable. However, they can also be prohibitively expensive, particularly in cases where dedicated hardware meets subscription software. One app is aiming to solve that problem, at least in the case of the Oura Ring—the smart ring that silently tracks more than 50 of your health metrics.

The new app, dubbed Cracked Oura, will let you skip paying for the Oura Membership without sacrificing the tracking benefits and AI analysis. An Oura Ring, while nearly as impressive as a smartwatch, is a pricey proposition. The 5th generation starts at $399 for just the ring, and a charging case will cost you another $99. As we noted amongst the five things you need to know before buying an Oura Ring, a membership is almost mandatory, which will cost you a recurring fee of $5.99 a month or $69.99 a year, meaning the real price can inflate by hundreds more over its lifetime.

Cracked Oura looks to make owning an Oura ring less financially onerous by eliminating that ongoing cost. It does so by exporting your data and storing it in the form of an SQLite database, a lightweight archive that keeps all your data locally in a single file. You don't need to run a separate server program to use it. Cracked Oura reads all that data and then builds graphs and charts that the creator promises are "at least as good as the official Oura dashboard." While there is some setup required for the app, its GitHub page provides easy-to-follow instructions so that anyone can follow along. If you'd prefer to avoid the process, there are smart rings that don't require a subscription that you could pick instead.

Once set up, Cracked Oura breaks down your scores by their contributing factors and shows you trends over time, as well as info about how long you spent in each phase of sleep. There's also an option to create custom widgets of your own to keep an eye on specific data points or intersections that aren't explicitly broken out in the app by default. There's even some AI functionality built in, though the app description warns that it's under development and may not work as intended. When it is working, it lets users access local LLMs in a chatbot-style interface to ask questions about their data. 

On the surface, an app that lets you access features that normally require a subscription fee feels illicit. The reality is that Cracked Oura is perfectly legal, due in part to Oura's policies, and in part to laws in various territories where the ring is sold.

Oura allows users to download and view their data in a number of forms as part of what it says is a commitment to user privacy. All users can access their data as a CSV file—a plain-text file that can be opened by any spreadsheet program, like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. However, only users with a paid membership get access to Shareable Reports, which come in the form of a more digestible PDF, and their Trends data.

The unspoken part of Oura's transparency is that it's required by law to provide access to users' data in many territories. It's guaranteed under statutes like Article 20 of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which established the "right to data portability." It guarantees the right to download your data in a format that you can use, and transfer it to another service provider if you so choose. There are also related privacy laws in many states in the U.S., such as the Colorado Privacy Act, which guarantees data portability alongside other provisions.