Why Sestava Pro is a one-time purchase

Every app is paid for somehow. The three usual ways are advertising, a subscription and a purchase. Sestava uses the oldest of them: the app is free to train with, and Sestava Pro is a single in-app purchase. This post explains why, and what exactly you get on each side.

What is free

Everything you need to train, with no time limit and no account:

• the timer, with voice cues, countdown beeps and haptics;
• importing a plan from a file (a .sestava plan or a CSV), a link or a QR code;
• “Describe a workout”, which turns a sentence into a plan with Apple Intelligence, on an iPhone that has it;
• saving each finished workout to Apple Health, if you allow it;
• the week view of your history;
• up to three plans of your own.

The limit of three counts plans you import from files and plans you describe. Plans that reach you through a shared link or a QR code, from your coach for example, never count towards it. If your coach sends you a new workout every week, the free app is enough; you train with the iPhone alone, and Apple Watch comes with Pro.

What Pro adds

Sestava Pro removes the limit, so you can keep as many plans and multi-week programs as you like. It adds Apple Watch, and it unlocks the month view of your history, with its statistics. It costs $5.99 once. That is the price in US dollars; in the Czech App Store it is 149 Kč, and elsewhere the App Store charges the equivalent in your own currency. These are launch prices until 31 December 2026; then Pro costs $7.99, or 199 Kč in the Czech App Store.

We will keep adding to Sestava, and what comes later will be part of Pro too.

Why not ads

A workout app knows a lot about you: when you train, how hard, and, if you let it, your heart rate. That is exactly the kind of data advertising wants, and in Your workouts are not our business model we collected what regulators and researchers found when health apps went down that road.

Sestava has no ads and no advertising or tracking code from third parties. It reads heart rate and resting heart rate from Apple Health only with the permission you give it in iOS, processes them on your iPhone and never sends them to us. Apple’s rules already forbid using health data for advertising, but a business that lived on ads would be pulling against those rules all the time. We would rather not be that business.

Why not a subscription

A subscription makes sense when every user costs the maker something every month: servers that store your data, sync it and compute on it. Sestava was built not to need any of that. Your plans are stored on your iPhone and your workouts in Apple Health. A shared plan travels inside its link, so there is no plan server to run. The website and Sestava Studio are static pages that do their work in your browser. There is no Sestava account, so there is no account database either.

So a new user costs us almost nothing month after month. Charging every month anyway would mean asking you to pay again and again for something that costs us nothing more each month. For a timer that is a lot to ask, and many people, reasonably, no longer take on another subscription for every small app.

A one-time price has to cover the work up front, and it does not grow with our ambitions. That is the trade we chose.

What buying once means in practice

Sestava Pro is a single non-consumable purchase in App Store terms: you buy it once and it does not expire. The app checks the App Store’s record of your purchases, through Apple’s own purchase framework, and listens for changes while it runs. There is no licence server of ours in between.

• Family Sharing is on. Buy Pro once and the members of your Family Sharing group get it too, with no seats to manage.
• A new iPhone is not a new purchase. Restore Purchase, on the Pro screen, asks the App Store again and unlocks Pro on any iPhone signed in to the same Apple Account.
• A refund ends it. If the App Store refunds or revokes the purchase, the app stops unlocking Pro. Apple’s documentation puts it plainly: refunded or revoked products “don’t appear in the current entitlements”.

Limits

• The prices on this page are the US and the Czech store prices. The App Store sets the price in your country and currency, so what you see in the app may differ.
• Pro is bought in the iPhone app. Sestava Studio has no paid tier at all, and there is no Sestava for Android.

If anything about Pro does not behave the way this post says, write to [email protected].

Cover photo by Vanna Phon on Unsplash.