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The Oura ring can give you a ton of data on your sleep, health, and fitness, but you need to pay for a $5.99/month subscription to see all of it. So what happens if you get an Oura ring but don’t pony up for the subscription? Here’s the full rundown, with screenshots of exactly what you’ll see—and a little-known way of getting data the app doesn’t show you..
As I explain in my review of the Oura ring 4, you should budget for both the ring and its ongoing subscription if you want to get the data and analysis the Oura ring is famous for offering. The subscription isn’t for premium extras; it’s for the basic functionality of the app, without which there isn’t much point to wearing the ring.
But! There is a way to get the data the ring collects, without going through the app. It comes as a spreadsheet download, so it’s not useful for casual “how did I sleep last night?” use, but it’s fine if what you really want is to do some data analysis. I’ll explain how to get that below, but first, let’s see what the app looks like sans subscription.
The app only shows scores and meditations (mostly)
Credit: Beth Skwarecki/Oura
Here’s what you’ll see in the Oura app: not much. You’ll get a score for each of Activity, Readiness, and Sleep. Each score is out of 100—higher is better—and comes with a label like “good” or “optimal.” That’s it. No heart rate, HRV, hours of sleep, stress timeline, Advisor chatbot, meal tracking, none of that. Just three somewhat inscrutable numbers. Without raw data, I don’t consider these scores useful at all. (Imagine somebody asking “how did you sleep?” and you answer “82,” like they’re supposed to know what that means.)
You do still get an Explore tab, which contains guided meditations and a few Oura tutorials, such as a one-minute video explaining what your readiness score is supposed to mean. Interestingly, after doing a meditation on my no-subscription account, I don’t see my heart rate or HRV during the session, but I do see some text giving my “baseline” for each of those measures. That’s not my most recent night’s reading, though. For that, you need to go download a spreadsheet.
Credit: Beth Skwarecki/Oura
You can download your data from Oura’s website, even without a subscription
Alright, here’s the fun stuff. If you are OK with getting your data in spreadsheet form, you can download it directly from the Oura website. Go to cloud.ouraring.com. If you had a subscription, you’d be able to view some cool graphs on your dashboard, but you don’t, so the page is mostly blank. Tap on My Account and scroll down to Export Data. You’ll see a list of .csv and .json files. The very first one, sleep.csv (I think that link will work for you if you have an Oura account) is probably the most useful. Go ahead and bookmark that link on your phone, and you can check it in lieu of checking the app.
Credit: Beth Skwarecki
From this spreadsheet, you can see your resting heart rate, HRV, and pretty much everything else that Oura logs every night. Your total sleep duration, for example, is in the 21st column, and it’s recorded in seconds. (28,410 seconds is about 7 hours and 54 minutes, if I’m doing my math right.) Explore the other files to see which ones have the data you’re most interested in.
Credit: Beth Skwarecki/Oura
You need to give Oura a payment card to set up your ring in the first place
If you want nothing to do with the subscription at all, there’s an important caveat: The only way to set up your Oura ring (when it first arrives) is to sign up for a free trial that rolls into a regular subscription. So if you want to avoid giving Oura any payment information at all, you’re out of luck. You can cancel the subscription renewal immediately after signing up, though, which will mean you won’t be charged.
