Strides

So what's Strides good at? Goals that aren't just a tick.

Most habit trackers ask one question: did you do it today, yes or no. That's fine for "floss". It's useless for "save $5,000 by December".

Strides has four kinds of tracker. Habit is the yes-or-no one, and Target is a number by a date. Average is for things like "7.5 hours of sleep a night", and Project breaks a big job into milestones.

Target comes with a pace line, and we really like that. It shows where you should be by today, and the bar goes green if you're on track and red if you're behind. So you find out in March that you're slipping. Not in December.

Don't fancy building it all yourself? There are more than 150 templates, and you can set as many reminders as you want on each tracker.

It's well looked after, too. The App Store's version history shows 18 updates between late January and early October 2026.

The price list is a puzzle. The App Store shows Strides Plus at a spread of prices from $4.99 to $149.99, and doesn't say which is monthly, which is yearly and which is the lifetime one. You only find out inside the app.

Sync is paid, and that's the one that'd bug us most. Your trackers stay on one device unless you buy Plus. Backups are a Plus thing too.

It's an Apple app at heart. There's an Android version now, but it's very new, with only a few hundred downloads on Google Play. There's nothing for the web or for Windows.

Sharing is Apple-only as well. You can invite someone to watch your progress on a goal, but it runs on iCloud, so a friend with an Android phone is out.

And three free trackers isn't many. One App Store reviewer from July 2025 says they were only offered one. Strides' help page still says three, so check what you actually get before you settle in.

Start free. You get three goals or habits with reminders and charts, no ads and no time limit. If you've only a couple of things to work on, you may never pay.

Past three, it's Strides Plus. That takes the limit off and adds sync, backups, progress reports, tags, export and a privacy lock.

So what does it cost? Honestly, we can't tell you. The US App Store lists Plus purchases from $4.99 up to $149.99 without saying what each one is. Strides' help page says there's a monthly plan, a yearly plan and a one-off Lifetime plan, and gives no prices.

So open the upgrade screen and read it properly before you tap anything. You'd guess the small numbers are monthly and the big ones are lifetime, but it is a guess.

For a sense of scale, Habitify's Plus is $29.99 a year and Streaks is $5.99 once. If Strides wants a lot more than that, ask yourself whether you need the number goals.

Strides has 4.8 on the App Store from about 19,200 ratings. That's a lot of happy people for what its help page calls a small company.

What do they like? That it bends to fit them. Reviewers track brushing their teeth, reading, workouts, weight and time in the art studio, all in one list. One says every time they wished it did something, it turned out it already did.

Support gets a nod as well. One reviewer emailed a question about their subscription and says the answer came from the CEO.

And the unhappy ones? It's nearly all about money. Reviews moaning about the subscription go back to 2018, and the tune hasn't changed: they like the app, and they don't like paying every year for a tracker.

Several asked for a one-off price. Going by the help page, there is a Lifetime plan now.

Hacker News barely mentions it. Where it does come up, it's listed next to Habitify and Productive as one of the pay-for-more-habits apps.