- Whoop bands require an annual payment plan
- Older models still offer a year’s free subscription
- Some users are making big savings via the loophole
There’s no doubt that Whoop makes some of the best fitness trackers around, but they also come with a mandatory subscription cost – starting at £169 / $199 / AU$299 per year. Now it seems some enterprising Whoop users have found a way around that annual fee.
As per Reddit (via Lifehacker), the key to the trick is that when you buy a Whoop band, you get a year’s subscription for free. With the older Whoop 4.0 band now available at a discount at some retailers, there are potentially some big savings to be had.
In the case of this Redditor (and several others), they were able to pick up four Whoop 4.0 bands for $39 each at T.J. Maxx. When these trackers paired with a user account already linked to a Whoop 5.0 band, a 12-month subscription gets added to the account.
Not only that, but the extra year that’s added is for the Peak subscription plan, normally £229 / $239 / AU$419 per year (back when the Whoop 4.0 launched in 2021, there was only one subscription tier to choose from).
Buyer beware
In theory, this is a substantial saving for Whoop users – it’s a year’s subscription for a fraction of the price. However, the fun might already be over, as it seems unlikely that Whoop will keep allowing users to do this indefinitely.
This isn’t going to work with a Whoop band bought second-hand or given to you by someone else either: it needs a tracker in a new, unopened box, and one that comes with a year’s free subscription that hasn’t been claimed.
It’s also worth considering the e-waste this workaround can cause: Whoop bands being picked up for their subscription and then presumably gathering dust in a drawer and eventually being thrown away. Those bands could have gone to people who would actually have used them instead.
If you can find an older Whoop band at a discount and you’ve already registered one of the newer models, it’s a trick you can try to extend your subscription – though there’s no guarantees it will work, even if Reddit posters have found success with it.
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