The Simple Answer is NO! Let Me Explain…

I’ve been using the Google Pixel Watch for a while now and as a Pixel Watch user, one of the most common questions I get asked is whether I need to pay for FitBit premium. I decided to explain in the form of a blog article. 

At the time of writing this article, Fitbit Premium is very pricey in my opinion. Here in the UK, it costs £7.99 per month or £79.99 annually. However, the good news is that you get a free 6-month trial with your Pixel Watch and selected Fitbit devices. 

But is it really necessary? Let me explain…

What Do You Use Your Pixel Watch For?

First of all, you need to ask yourself the question, did you buy the Pixel Watch to exclusively track your fitness? If your answer is yes, then maybe Fitbit Premium is a suitable option for you, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be.

If you purchased your watch to be more of an allrounder, then unless you want to I wouldn’t necessarily recommend purchasing the premium plan.

In my view, Fitbits and smartwatches such as the Pixel Watch have always been devices aimed at general use and a small amount of fitness, such as tracking your run, cycling trip or gym activities, they never really stood out to me as watched that athletes would use to track their fitness.

Garmin watches already do that extremely well, and I think it’s fair to say that they work better than the majority of standard all-purpose smartwatches out there.

Fitbit Free vs Fitbit Premium On The Pixel Watch

The good news is that Google does offer a free Fitbit tier, but unfortunately it is limited. I mean they have to make money somehow, so it’s understandable.

But with that in mind, I definitely think that they need to lower their prices for the premium tier or add more features to justify the cost.

Fitbit Free Tier

The free tier can still provide a lot of useful information and to be truthfully honest, it’s more than enough in most use cases.  

The free tier still provides you with your health and fitness stats including your activities which you track using the watch and the watch still syncs them into the Fitbit app, which is something I had a lot of questions about. 

You also get access to basic insights which provide you with information about your health including your steps, floors climbed and how many miles you’ve walked. 

It will also show you your heart rate as well as basic sleep insights, something else I get a lot of questions about. But bear in mind that the premium subscription will offer more sleep features including the sleep score breakdown.

Fitbit Premium

Moving on to Fitbit Premium, the plan I’m currently on – what can I say, a 6-month trial is a 6-month trial!

The premium plan is definitely worth it if you want to get the most out of your health data. For starters, it gives you a breakdown of your last 90 days, instead of the one week offered by the free tier. It will also show you your health trends which will help you get a better insight into your overall health.

Sleep statistics are also improved as they get broken down into sleep scores which will help you better understand your sleep. Moving on, Fitbit premium also offers stress management which allows you to track your stress.

Another useful feature you have with the premium plan is your Daily Readiness Score, which combines all data that it recorded the previous day and combines it to give you a score that in return tells you how well you’re physically and mentally prepared for the day. As someone with a busy lifestyle, I find this feature incredibly useful as it helps me plan out the day.

If my Daily Readiness Score is low, I will aim to complete all of the ugliest and most important tasks first, that way, knowing that I completed the horrible, and big tasks first, I know that I only have the small tasks to complete. This is a tactic I learned from a very good book called Eat That Frog! By Brian Tracy. Only the horrible tasks are known as frogs.

Let’s get back to the matter at hand and talk about another useful feature called your Wellness Report which converts your health data into quarterly reports that can be downloaded as PDFs. These include your stats and trends. 

Last but not least, Fitbit Premium also provides you with a wide variety of workouts and mindfulness exercises, which as someone who works from home, I find extremely useful as it means I can do mini workouts that I know help during my break so that I’m not sitting at my desk all the time.

A full comparison between the two tiers can be found on the Fitbit website.

The Verdict

I think it’s still early days since I started the Fitbit trial that came with my Google Pixel Watch, but saying that even as an active person who likes tracking his fitness, the free plan which I’ve been using first still offers a lot. I mean I would love for Google to drop the prices of the subscription as it will be more affordable for people.

But at the same time, I can see why they are charging for the features, I’m just not sure if there’s any point in paying, especially as I sync my GPS activities with Strava which I already pay a subscription to.