Lift - Gym Log: Free vs Premium. What is Included and When to Upgrade

What you get without paying

Lift's free tier is a usable workout, bodyweight, and calorie tracker for the long term, not a trial. Logging is unlimited, planning is capped by a few creation limits, and Premium mainly buys automation, expanded limits, and deeper analysis.

We publish Lift, so read this as product documentation rather than an independent review. Features were checked against the current public app on 7 September 2026. Prices are the listed US App Store figures and can differ by region, platform, and promotion.

Free, with no subscription:

• Unlimited workout logging, with previous performance and your current targets visible while you log each exercise.
• Weight, reps, timed sets, RPE, notes, rest timers, and a live workout timer.
• Editing any past workout, including its date, duration, sets, reps, weight, and RPE.
• The exercise, workout, and split library, plus your own exercises, workouts, and splits within the limits below.
• Per-exercise progression settings, so a compound lift can use a different rep range and weight increment from an accessory.
• Periodization: prebuilt example cycles and reusable custom multi-week schemas.
• A starting one-rep max estimated from one challenging set.
• Personal records for weight, estimated 1RM, reps, time, and volume where they apply to the exercise.
• Two exercise goals at a time, with current and achieved goals and achievement feedback.
• Bodyweight logging, history, and a gain, loss, or maintenance target.
• Full nutrition tracking: barcode scanning, the public food database, custom foods, macros and detailed nutrients, meal-type summaries, calorie targets you set or calculate, automatic target adjustment from your weigh-ins, and a goal streak.
• Prefilling a food from a photo of its nutrition label.
• Free recipes with Cook Mode, favorites, and logging a recipe into your day.
• Friends, public profiles, shared splits and workouts, and per-item privacy settings.
• CSV export of your workout history, bodyweight entries, achieved goals, and tracked foods, including when you decide to leave.

The free app shows ads.

What Premium adds

Some chart access is included free; Premium is what opens the full set of exercise and profile charts.

Nothing in that list is required to train. Automatic progression replaces a decision you can make yourself with a manual progression rule, and the reviews summarize data the free app already records.

The free creation limits, in numbers

A split is a schedule that holds workouts across the days of the week, so two splits is not the same thing as two workouts. Importing a public split into your library also counts toward the split limit. In practice, one active split plus one alternative, built from up to five of your own workouts, covers most people running a single routine at a time.

Price, trial, and the free route to Premium

Premium is listed at $6.99 monthly or $44.99 annually on the US App Store, which works out to about $3.75 a month on the annual plan. Check the price shown in your own store before subscribing.

There is a two-week trial. Eligibility depends on your store account and any past purchase, so the app is the only reliable place to confirm whether you can start one.

There is also a referral route. Invite a friend with your referral link and you get 28 days of Premium once they complete three workouts. The current terms are shown in the app.

When Premium is worth paying for

Upgrade if one of these describes you:

• You want the plan written for you. The AI split generator is the single biggest reason to pay. If you would otherwise spend weeks second-guessing your own program, this is what you are buying.
• You do not want to decide your own loads. Automatic progression proposes the next weight and rep target per exercise from what you actually did, adjusted by the optional energy check on days you feel off.
• You run more than one routine. Two splits and five custom workouts get tight if you keep separate blocks for travel, home training, or a partner's program.
• You track several exercise goals at once. Two is enough for one or two focus lifts, not for a whole list.
• You want the numbers analyzed, not just stored. Full charts and the weekly and monthly reviews answer whether the last two months actually went anywhere.
• You are in the gym with a barbell and a warm-up you keep improvising. Warm-up sets and the plate calculator save time at the rack.
• You log food by photo. Meal-photo estimates and reusable custom meals are the difference between logging dinner in ten seconds and rebuilding it every time.
• Ads bother you.

At $44.99 a year, the honest test is whether at least two of those lines apply to how you train right now. One convenience feature is rarely worth a subscription.

When to stay on the free plan

Stay free if you already know what you are doing in the gym. If you run one routine, repeat it, choose your own weights, and just want a reliable log with previous-set history and personal records, the free tier is the product. Free periodization covers planned variation across weeks without paying, which is unusual among logging apps.

Stay free if you are new, too. Build the habit of logging every session first. Automatic targets are more useful once there is enough history behind them to work from, and the free app records exactly the same history that Premium later analyzes.

Your data stays in your account either way, so starting free and upgrading in three months costs you nothing. If you leave instead, the CSV export is free.

Compare it against other apps first

If you are still choosing an app, the honest comparison is worth more than our own feature list. See progressive overload apps compared for how Lift's progression handling lines up against Hevy, Strong, Jefit, Fitbod, Alpha Progression, and Boostcamp, or free workout tracker apps if the free tier is the deciding factor.

If you are coming from one app in particular, there is a page for it: Hevy, Strong, Jefit, Fitbod, and Alpha Progression.

See Lift's progression tools and download the app.