Why 8fit Isn't Free and That's Okay
If you’re thinking about paying for 8fit, you’re probably wondering what exactly you’re going to get out of it.
It’s a fair question. We’ve never been advocates for throwing hard-earned money at a question mark. Life isn’t a level in Super Mario Bros., no matter how amazing that’d be.
Well, to begin with, 8fit offers a variety of workouts and recipes designed by certified fitness trainers and nutrition experts that aim to meet you at your level. Whether you’re new to fitness or this isn’t your first rodeo, we have courses that fit pretty much any ability.
Aside from our signature full-body HIIT programs, our Pro offering features classes ranging from heart-pumping cardio boxing to relaxing yoga. While at-home bodyweight exercises are our bread and butter, we also offer classes for the equipment-curious, including resistance band workouts and strength training with dumbbells.
Exercise is only one piece of the fitness puzzle, so we also include nutritionist-created meal plans for your particular goals. We offer over 800 recipes, including plant-based and gluten-free options, and shopping lists so you can stay organized.
Did we mention sleep meditation, stretching, and step tracking? Yep, we have that too. We like to think we cover all the bases, but we’ll keep evolving to give you the most holistic fitness experience we can.
Why pay for a fitness app?
You’ve probably heard that you get what you pay for. Guess what? It’s true. If you don’t pay for a fitness app, you’re probably getting a very limited selection of workouts that aren’t catered to your needs. It’d be like finding a free Netflix ripoff, offering about 10 movies in horror and thriller genres when what you really need are goofball comedies and music documentaries.
A fitness app that offers the exercise equivalent of The Leprechaun film series won’t result in healthy, sustainable changes in your life. Not to get too hippy-dippy, but your body is you. You should treat yourself the way you want and deserve to be treated. Making a modest financial commitment to your health is one of the best ways to value your body. It’s literally putting money where your mouth is when you say, “I care about my wellbeing.”
That said, we know fitness, health, wellness––whatever your vocabulary preference––can be expensive. If you count things in pizzas as we sometimes do, you might view a spin class as costing nearly a week’s worth of decent pizza.
That’s partly why we got into this business. We don’t want people who value their health and wellbeing to be financially excluded. You might not be able to afford Kumail Nanjiani’s personal trainers, but that doesn’t make you any less entitled to having access to expert information that can be catered toward accomplishing your health and fitness goals.
Charging a fair price
Considering what you get with 8fit, we have no qualm in saying that $79.99 for an annual pro subscription is more than fair. Sure, you can hack your way through a free fitness journey, researching yourself and crawling YouTube channels (like ours!) for free workouts and cobble together your own plan. But who has time for that?
Besides, whatever you might be able to fashion together won’t necessarily be catered to your health and fitness needs. Because without the foundational knowledge of a health and fitness background, it’s damn-near impossible to know how to get to where you want to go.
Put simply, you can binge-watch Cupcake Wars but that doesn’t mean you can walk in the kitchen and whip up a batch of graham cracker-lined s’more cupcakes with Belgian dark chocolate cake and toasted marshmallow frosting. (Dear Lord, WANT!)
Why 8fit Pro isn’t free
We’re not a free app because there’s no such thing as a free app. Some of the people you see in our app work at 8fit and there are many more faces behind the app that you can’t see. And we believe in fairly compensating people for their work. Creating 20-30 new workouts per month, publishing 20-30 new articles per month, and all the programming that goes into the app takes a lot of work.
We wouldn’t be able to hold ourselves to our mission statement if we were strictly a free app. And in general, apps that market themselves as “free” find their money elsewhere, usually through advertising or by sharing your private information because of something you agreed to in the fine print of some user agreement form.
At the end of the day, of course we’d love to be able to giveaway our combined expertise and knowledge for free. But like you, we’re just working with the reality we’re in. Trust us, we’ve all dreamed (some more than others) about a utopia where paper money is meaningless and we can all just trade services in pizza. (We really like pizza.) Until then, we’re going to keep doing the best we can in an imperfect world.
Try 8fit for free
Okay, we just went on about why we aren’t free but we do have a freemium offering where you can sample a limited selection of 8fit workouts and recipes before committing to an 8fit Pro subscription. Download the app (iOS, Android), tell us a bit about yourself and what you want to achieve, and let’s start working together toward accomplishing your health and fitness goals.
Here's a tip! Bring up 8fit to your employer as a tool to live a healthier life and they might be willing to cover the costs and get your colleagues involved, too.
