Ember FastingEmber's free tier includes the full fasting timer, all five protocols (16:8, 18:6, 20:4, OMAD, and custom up to 168 hours), all six fasting zones, streak tracking, fast complete and daily reminder notifications, dark and light mode, one interactive widget and two Lock Screen widgets.
There is no time limit. No trial. No "free for seven days, then $79.99 a year."
Free is free, permanently.
What Pro adds: history beyond the last seven days, advanced statistics, the medium, large and StandBy widget styles, 10 curated themes, a custom accent colour, 8 alternate app icons, additional zone notifications, and the V1.1 features (Apple Watch, HealthKit, iCloud sync, CSV export).
Ember Fasting draws the freemium line at depth, not at use. This post is about why.
The category default is hostile
Most fasting apps put the timer itself behind a paywall, a trial, or a forced account. The person who downloads a fasting app in order to use a fasting timer is asked to pay for the privilege of using a fasting timer.
The free tier, in that model, exists to demonstrate that the paid tier is necessary. It is not designed to be useful. It is designed to be insufficient, which is a different engineering goal, and you can feel the difference within about ninety seconds of opening the app.
This works, in the sense that conversion numbers look good in a board deck. It fails more slowly, by alienating exactly the people who would otherwise recommend you.
The line at depth, not at use
The line we drew:
Free gets every feature you need to fast well. Timer, protocols, zones, streaks, notifications, and the interactive widget for one tap start and stop. Fast every day for the next decade on the free tier and the app will keep working exactly as it does today.
Pro gets depth, breadth and craft. Long term history, because some people want to look at a year of their fasting. Advanced charts, because some people enjoy them. Every widget style in every size, because some people want their home screen to be Ember. Themes and icons, because when you have shipped ten carefully made themes, design is a legitimate paid feature.
The test we hold ourselves to: can someone who never pays a penny get full daily value from this app? With Ember, yes. With most of the category, no.
Why this is not charity
Four reasons it works as a business.
The free product is the marketing. Word of mouth in fasting is unusually strong, because the practice is social. People fast together, talk about it at work, recommend apps to each other. A free tier that is actually good is a better acquisition channel than a paid tier that is merely gated.
Pro is genuinely worth buying for the people who buy it. Long history, advanced statistics, every widget style, the design library. Real features that real people want. Not artificial scarcity.
Lifetime pricing changes the arithmetic. $29.99 once is low enough that the economics do not depend on retention. We do not need to trap you in a subscription that decays in value. We sell you a thing, you own it, you tell a friend.
And it is the right thing. A fasting app that paywalls fasting is a bad fasting app. We would rather be the one that does not.
The seven day history limit, specifically
This is the single place a free user meets a wall. After seven days, scrolling past the weekly view shows a blurred preview of older fasts and an upgrade prompt.
It is the only place in the app where a Pro feature interrupts a free user. It interrupts something most casual users rarely do, at a natural visual endpoint, and it interrupts nothing about fasting itself.
It is a deliberate trigger, and it is the kind of trigger you can only build when the rest of the app is genuinely free. If we had gated the timer, an upgrade prompt would feel like extortion. Gating a year of history feels like an offer.
What it costs us
Conversion rate, on day one. Someone who can fast free forever converts more slowly than someone locked out of the timer.
We chose to optimise for the version of conversion that depends on your relationship with the app rather than your irritation with it. At $29.99 lifetime, the arithmetic only has to work across years, not weeks.
It is a slower path to the same revenue. It is also the path where the person who pays does so because they decided to.
The full Ember timer, five protocols, six zones, streaks, interactive widget, Lock Screen widgets, fast complete notifications, dark and light mode, is free forever. Pro is $14.99 a year or $29.99 once, and adds depth on top of a complete free product. No time limit, no trial trap, no forced account.