Here’s the Oura Ring Data You Can Access Without a Subscription
The Oura ring can give you a ton of data about your sleep, health, and fitness , but you need to pay a $5.99 per month subscription to see it all. So what happens if you get an Oura ring but don’t pay for the subscription? Here’s a full review, with screenshots of exactly what you’ll see, and a little-known way to get data the app isn’t showing you.
As I explain in my Oura 4 ring review , you’ll need to budget for both the ring and its ongoing subscription if you want the data and analysis that the Oura ring is known for. The subscription isn’t for the premium add-ons; it’s for the app’s core functionality, without which there’s little point in wearing the ring.
But! There is a way to get the data that the ring collects without going through the app. It’s downloaded as a spreadsheet, so it’s not great for everyday “how did I sleep last night?” use, but it’s fine if you really want to do some data analysis. I’ll explain how to do that below, but first, let’s see what the app looks like without the subscription.
The app only shows points and meditations (mostly)
Here’s what you’ll see in the Oura app: Not much. You’ll get a score for activity, alertness, and sleep. Each score is on a 100-point scale — higher is better — and comes with a label like “good” or “optimal.” That’s it. No heart rate, no heart rate variability, no hours of sleep, no stress graph, no Advisor chatbot , no food tracking , none of that. Just three somewhat incomprehensible numbers. Without any baseline data, I don’t find these scores useful at all . (Imagine someone asking “how did you sleep?” and you answering “82,” as if they should know what that means.)
You still get the Explore tab, which contains guided meditations and some Oura tutorials, like a one-minute video explaining what your Readiness Score should mean. Interestingly, after meditating on my non-subscribed account, I don’t see my heart rate or heart rate variability during a session, but I do see some text giving my “baseline” for each of those metrics. That’s not my final nightly reading, though. You’ll need to download the spreadsheet for that.
You can download your data from the Oura website even without a subscription.
Okay, here’s the fun part. If you’re okay with getting your data in a spreadsheet, you can download it directly from the Oura website. Head to cloud.ouraring.com . If you had a subscription, you might be able to see some cool graphs on your dashboard, but you don’t, so the page is mostly blank. Click 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 this link will work for you if you have an Oura account), is probably the most useful. Bookmark this link on your phone and you can check it instead of checking the app.
In this table, you can see your resting heart rate, heart rate variability, and pretty much everything else Oura records each night. For example, your total sleep duration is in the 21st column, and is recorded in seconds. (28,410 seconds is about 7 hours and 54 minutes, if I did my math right.) Explore the other files to see which ones contain the data you’re most interested in.
To get started, you’ll need to provide Oura with a payment card to set up your ring.
If you don’t want to have anything to do with the subscription at all, there’s an important caveat: The only way to set up an Oura ring (when it first comes out) is to sign up for a free trial, which will roll over into a regular subscription. So if you want to avoid giving Oura any payment information at all, you’re out of luck. However, you can cancel your subscription renewal immediately after signing up, and you won’t be charged.