New Oura Ring 5 is out and its little profile is certainly turning heads among current Oura users and prospective users, myself included. Along with this, a price increase of over $50 Oura Ring 4there’s another cost to consider: Oura Membership.
An Oura Membership is not required to use the Oura Ring, but without it the functionality of the add-on will be quite limited. A $5.99 membership brings a number of features to the app and opens up many opportunities you wouldn’t otherwise have access to.
If you don’t subscribe, you won’t get all the information that comes with it. You open the Oura app and you only see three things: your fitness score, your sleep score, and your activity score.
For some people, this may be adequate. I don’t take full advantage of the membership, and the extra insights and features that come with an Oura membership aren’t worth the extra cost on top of the one-time hardware costs. However, there are still some key reasons why I subscribe to Oura.
What you get with membership
For $5.99 per month, Oura membership offers many features and additional information you can’t get without. Features include, According to our:
- Detailed sleep analysis
- 24/7 heart rate tracking (Day, Night, Activity)
- Integration with third-party health and wellness apps like Strava
- Advanced temperature monitoring
- Blood Oxygen Sensor (SpO2)
- Daytime Stress
- Dynamic action goals with Automatic Action Detection
- Heart Health (Cardiovascular Age, Cardiac Capacity (VO2 Max))
- Metabolic Health (Glucose Tracking, Nutrition)
- Oura Laboratories
- Endurance
- Weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual and anniversary reports
- Women’s Health (Menstruation Insights, Pregnancy Insights)
1. Take advantage of all the advantages of the ring
It’s silly to expect every Oura Ring owner to use every feature included in the membership, and I certainly don’t. For example, none of the Women’s Health features are useful to me, but I use a number of other features on a daily basis.
As someone who absolutely hates wearing a smartwatch to bed, I’ve found the Oura Ring to be an essential part of my sleep routine. While you can get your sleep score without a membership, a subscription provides a more in-depth look at my sleep, including sleep efficiency, my anxiety, and how long it takes me to fall asleep. As someone who struggles with sleep, I find this information very helpful in identifying ways I can improve.
But beyond just sleep, the combination of these features gives you a comprehensive view of your overall health and well-being. The Oura Ring is so easy to wear throughout the day that it makes it easy to measure heart rate throughout the day, automatically track activities, and track potential symptoms of illness or stress in your body.
Plus, you’ll get to test features that Oura is testing before they’re fully integrated into the Oura experience. The AI Advisor was one of the features I tested before rollout, and it became a core part of the Oura app.
2. Automatic activity detection is actually pretty great
Automatic activity detection perhaps one of my favorite Oura Ring features, and one of the most impressive. While I prefer to track workouts manually, the Oura Ring is very good at detecting different activities, both in and out of exercise.
As a member, you will be able to use the ring to detect and analyze various activities such as workouts and walks. The more you manually track the workouts, the more accurate the Oura Ring becomes, and it’s good enough to recognize if I’m doing HIIT or Pilates.
Even better, the Oura Ring can detect more everyday activities and even random things like dancing and yard work—my other wearables, like my Garmin Venu 4 (my preferred sportswear), I can’t. Every time I go out, I’m always surprised to see that Oura Ring detects when and how much I’ve been dancing.
In addition, when the ring detects activity, it can include heart rate data and calorie counts, making automatic tracking a valuable asset for assessing your daily activity and health.
2. Oura Advisor check-ins
Almost every tech company is getting into AI in some shape or form, and before Google introduced it Personal Health CoachLaunched Oura Advisor. With Oura Advisor, you can chat with the AI about your health and goals, and the AI will take into account what it knows about you.
What I like is that the Advisor checks in with you frequently based on your daily activity and other metrics to make sure you’re on track. And you can even change the Advisor’s check-in frequency so that it pings you weekly, daily, or in between. Additionally, you can choose the Advisor’s tone, which can be more direct or more conversational.
Oura emphasizes The consultant is equipped with a state-of-the-art broad language model (LLM) and has recently been upgraded with a new proprietary LLM dedicated to women’s health, he said. This gives Oura extensive knowledge of medical standards, research, and more, and makes it uniquely positioned to answer questions and make recommendations about your health, especially by providing additional context to your in-app data.
Of course, you should always take anything Oura Advisor says with a grain of salt, as it’s not a medical product designed to diagnose or treat you, but I’ve found it to offer pretty sound advice in an easy-to-understand way.
4. Synchronize with third-party applications
Oura is great, but the ring doesn’t always get all the information. Also, not everyone likes to wear a ring while lifting weights, and I often track my workouts on a smartwatch. This is where third-party software integrations come in.
By linking to Health Connect, the Oura app can pull exercise data from my smartwatch and even weight data from my Withings scale to give a complete overview of my day. The timeline feature helps me see my day in moments, including when I wake up, when I exercise and when I go to sleep.
Oura is basically a one-stop shop where you can get a fairly comprehensive view of your day-to-day health and wellness, all while contributing to your long-term health outlook.
When I track activities using the ring, the Oura app can send workouts to Strava, including location data (from the phone).
5. Oura puts its money where its products are
Considering the benefits, I think $5.99 per month is a pretty reasonable price to pay, especially since Oura is still a relatively new and small company. We’ve continually asked why Oura maintains a subscription model when other smart ring companies have gone subscription-free, and the answer is always the same: Oura uses membership to improve the product.
Even as the competition heats up with new players and advancements, there’s a reason Oura continues to make the best smart rings on the market. Even Samsung was forced to enter the smart ring market, despite not charging subscription fees.
“We really feel pressure from our members to continually research and be at the forefront of what a smart ring can be and reinvest in our product,” Oura told us after introducing the Ring 4.
After seeing the growth coming Oura Ring Gen 3 When it comes to the Oura Ring 5, it’s clear to me that Oura is doing exactly that, expanding the value of each model by continually adding new features throughout its life. To me, it’s worth $6 a month.
Alternative way to pay for Oura Membership
If you are hesitant to purchase both an Oura Ring and a membership, it may help to know if you can purchase using both an FSA and an HSA. For many, that money is just sitting there, unused, so this may give you a reason to tap into those funds.
