Cheapest HRV tracker: a chest strap, no subscription

Prices from the makers’ US stores on 21 October 2026, and Google’s Fitbit Air on 22 October 2026; they change and differ by country. This page has no affiliate links.

How much does HRV tracking cost?

The table counts what you must pay to see an HRV number: the device, plus any subscription the maker requires for HRV. It leaves out sales tax, shipping, replacement batteries and straps, and the phone or computer every option needs.

Device price plus the required subscription, from each maker’s US page (see Sources), read on 21 October 2026 and the Fitbit Air’s on 22 October 2026. Apple Watch needs an iPhone 11 or later. The WHOOP figure is the One plan; Peak is $239 a year.

A one-off device costs the same after three years as on the first day. WHOOP’s band comes with the membership, so three years of WHOOP One cost 3 × $199 = $597. That is $597 − $104.95 = $492.05 more than a Polar H10, and $597 − $69.90 = $527.10 more than a Polar H9.

What HRV tracking costs over three years

US prices, 21 – 22 October 2026

• ECG chest strap, no subscription
• Optical band or watch, no subscription for HRV
• Device included in a yearly membership

Each price, and the page it was read on, is in the table.

A step chart of the money spent on HRV tracking from the first day to the end of year 3, one line per option. A device bought outright is a flat line; a yearly membership steps up at the start of each year. Polar H9: $69.90 on the first day, $69.90 by the end of year 3. Garmin HRM 200: $79.99 on the first day, $79.99 by the end of year 3. Google Fitbit Air: $99.99 on the first day, $99.99 by the end of year 3. Polar H10: $104.95 on the first day, $104.95 by the end of year 3. Garmin Index Sleep Monitor: $169.99 on the first day, $169.99 by the end of year 3. Garmin CIRQA Smart Band: $199.99 on the first day, $199.99 by the end of year 3. Garmin Forerunner 70: $249.99 on the first day, $249.99 by the end of year 3. Apple Watch Series 12: $399 on the first day, $399 by the end of year 3. WHOOP One membership: $199 on the first day, $597 by the end of year 3.

What each maker says about subscriptions:

• Chest straps need none. They send their data to whatever app you pair them with.
• Garmin: CIRQA tracks its features “without the need for a subscription”, Garmin says (Garmin Newsroom). Garmin Connect is free, and the Garmin Connect+ features Garmin lists do not include HRV Status (CIRQA owner’s manual, Connect+). Garmin’s pages for the Index Sleep Monitor, a band you wear only to sleep, and the Forerunner 70 list HRV Status. The Forerunner 70 and the Instinct E, both $249.99, were the cheapest Garmin watches listing it.
• Apple: in its Series 12 announcement, Apple names a subscription only for Apple Fitness+ and Apple Music, and none for HRV, vitals or readiness (Apple Newsroom). Series 12 and Ultra 4 show Recovery HRV on the watch (Apple Support), and the Series 12’s Vitals app includes HRV (Apple, Series 12 specifications). Apple’s store comparison lists HRV for the cheaper SE 3 too, but not in its Vitals app (Apple, SE 3 store page).
• Google: the Google Store lists “heart rate, HRV” and “readiness” among the Google Health app’s features with a Fitbit or Pixel Watch, and lists the coach, fitness plans and advanced Health Guardian features under Google Health Premium (Google Store, Fitbit Air). We found no Google page that puts HRV behind Premium. Premium costs $9.99 a month or $99 a year, and a new Fitbit Air comes with three months free (Google, Google Health announcement).
• WHOOP sells its device only as part of a membership. Each plan includes a device and a charger (the WHOOP 5.0 on One and Peak, the WHOOP MG on Life) and Recovery (WHOOP, membership).
• Oura sells the ring separately. Without an active membership, its support page says, you see only the three daily scores (Readiness, Activity and Sleep), the ring’s battery, basic profile information, settings and Explore content, a list that does not include the nightly HRV number. The membership costs $5.99 a month or $69.99 a year in the US, after one free month (Oura Member Care, membership), so three years add 3 × $69.99 = $209.97 to the ring’s price. Oura’s store showed us prices for another country, so the ring itself is not in the table.

How to track HRV for free with a chest strap

The cheapest accurate setup has four parts, and only the first costs money.

1. 1 ECG chest strap Bought once. Times each R peak from the heart’s electrical signal.
2. 2 RR intervals over Bluetooth Sent in the standard heart rate message. RR is optional there, so check that the strap sends it.
3. 3 Free app or web tool Works out RMSSD from the intervals, with no subscription.
4. 4 Your own baseline Same time and position each morning; each reading is compared with your usual range.

Four steps joined by arrows. One: an ECG chest strap worn just below the chest muscles. Two: Bluetooth, carrying the beat-to-beat (RR) intervals. Three: a phone or computer running a free app or web tool that works out RMSSD. Four: a chart of daily readings with a shaded band for your usual range.

The strap talks to your phone or computer through the standard Bluetooth heart rate service. Each message holds the heart rate and, optionally, the RR intervals RR intervals RR interval The time from one heartbeat to the next, measured in milliseconds between the R peaks of an ECG. HRV is calculated from a series of these intervals. More about RR interval , in steps of 1/1024 of a second (Bluetooth SIG). Heart rate alone is not enough for HRV, so the strap has to send the RR intervals and the app has to record them. The chest-strap guide explains the format and what goes wrong.

Two free tools on this site work with those intervals:

• The chest-strap test runs in Chrome or Edge on a computer or an Android phone. It waits 15 seconds for the signal to settle, records for 1, 2 or 5 minutes, removes intervals that look like missed or extra beats, and shows RMSSD RMSSD RMSSD Root mean square of successive differences: an HRV metric built from how much each heartbeat interval differs from the next, in milliseconds. It mainly reflects vagal activity. More about RMSSD , a standard measure of short-term HRV (Task Force, 1996). It does not keep a history, so note each reading or download the intervals. Safari, and every browser on iPhone and iPad, cannot connect to a strap.
• The HRV Analyzer opens recordings from a strap, watch or app, one or many at a time, including files up to 50,000 intervals, about 12 hours.

hrv.expert also makes its own app, HRV Expert. It is free, for Android, and in closed testing on Google Play, so you request access before you can install it; an iPhone version is not available yet. It gives a two-minute morning check, compares it with your own normal range once about two weeks of checks are in, and records overnight. We make it, so treat this as a disclosure, not a recommendation: any app that records RR intervals from a strap does the same basic job.

Is the Polar H10 accurate for HRV?

At rest, yes. The H10 reads the heart’s electrical signal: its two electrodes and the pod form a one-lead ECG. The pod finds each R peak, a sharp spike that is easy to time, and sends the gaps between peaks to your phone.

1. Two electrode pads, wetted, pick up the heart’s electrical signal through the skin
2. The pod amplifies the signal and finds each R peak
3. R peaks: the gap from one to the next is the RR interval
4. The phone receives the RR intervals over Bluetooth, in steps of 1/1024 of a second

Three panels joined by arrows. First, the front of a torso with a strap around the chest just below the chest muscles; two rectangular electrode pads sit on the inside of the strap on either side of a small pod at its centre. Second, an ECG strip with four sharp spikes, the R peaks, with the gaps between them labelled 812 ms, 845 ms, 799 ms. Third, a phone whose screen lists the same three RR intervals in milliseconds.

Most strap studies we found test the Polar H10:

• 43 healthy adults aged 18 to 39, lying and standing, plus a deep-breathing test: the H10’s time-domain HRV and reflex-test results were within 1% of a laboratory ECG on average, with 95% limits of agreement no wider than −1.5 to 1.7 ms (Blalock and colleagues, 2026).
• 37 trained athletes, reclined for 60-second readings: RMSSD from the H10 was 2.16% from a three-lead ECG on average, and a phone camera app measured at the same time was 17.49% off. The authors found both acceptable and the strap more accurate (Johansson and colleagues, 2026).
• 5 healthy adults, 148 seated trials: the H10 with one app was 4.10% from a lab ECG and with another 7.66%, and a second ECG strap, Firstbeat’s, 11.27%. The strap and the app’s processing both count (Stone and colleagues, 2021).
• During exercise, in 10 healthy adults across five activities from low to high intensity, the H10 detected 99.6% of beats correctly against the raw ECG, and 99.4% at high intensity (Gilgen-Ammann and colleagues, 2019).

Strap studies also serve as the yardstick for wearables. In the 2025 home study by Dial and colleagues, the reference for every ring, watch and band was a Polar H10, and their overnight RMSSD errors ran from 5.96% (Oura Gen 4) to 16.32% (Polar Grit X Pro).

How far each sensor’s RMSSD was from the reference

Validation tracker

• ECG chest strap
• Ring or wrist (optical)
• Phone camera (optical)

Average error in RMSSD (MAPE)

The overnight rows’ reference was itself a chest strap, the Polar H10. The phone camera and one Polar H10 row come from the same 37 athletes, measured at the same time. In the five-person 2021 study, the H10 read by a second app was 7.66% off, a Firstbeat ECG strap 11.27%, and three camera apps 8.71%, 9.43% and 112.36%.

Sources: Blalock and colleagues, 2026, Johansson and colleagues, 2026, Stone and colleagues, 2021, Dial and colleagues, 2025. Every study we have checked, with its numbers, is in the device validation tracker.

A dot chart with one row per device and study, from the device validation tracker, smallest error first. ECG chest straps are drawn in one colour, ring and wrist sensors in a second and the phone camera in a third. Polar H10 (At rest, lab ECG; Blalock and colleagues, 2026): average error <1%. Polar H10 (At rest, lab ECG; Johansson and colleagues, 2026): average error 2.16%. Polar H10 with an app (At rest, lab ECG; Stone and colleagues, 2021): average error 4.10%. Oura Ring Gen 4 (Overnight, H10 strap; Dial and colleagues, 2025): average error 5.96%. Oura Ring Gen 2 (At rest, lab ECG; Stone and colleagues, 2021): average error 6.84%. WHOOP 4.0 (Overnight, H10 strap; Dial and colleagues, 2025): average error 8.17%. Garmin Fenix 6 (Overnight, H10 strap; Dial and colleagues, 2025): average error 10.52%. Polar Grit X Pro (Overnight, H10 strap; Dial and colleagues, 2025): average error 16.32%. Phone camera app (At rest, lab ECG; Johansson and colleagues, 2026): average error 17.49%. The overnight rows’ reference was itself a chest strap, the Polar H10. The phone camera and one Polar H10 row come from the same 37 athletes, measured at the same time. In the five-person 2021 study, the H10 read by a second app was 7.66% off, a Firstbeat ECG strap 11.27%, and three camera apps 8.71%, 9.43% and 112.36%.

The evidence has limits. Nearly all of it is about one strap, in healthy, mostly young people. A sports strap is not a medical device. It records extra beats as they happen, and the app or you must clean them out before working out HRV. Is wrist HRV as accurate as a chest strap? compares the two sensors directly.

Which cheap chest straps work for HRV?

A strap you buy for HRV has to send RR intervals over standard Bluetooth, and the makers document that to different degrees.

• Polar H10, $104.95. Polar’s developer documentation lists heart rate and RR intervals in milliseconds. It is the strap most studies use. Polar’s documentation says its built-in recording supports heart rate at one-second intervals, and lists no RR intervals for it.
• Polar H9, $69.90. Polar’s developer documentation lists the same heart rate and RR intervals. We found no published study of its HRV.
• Garmin HRM 200, $79.99. Garmin says it sends heart rate and HRV data to compatible Garmin watches, Edge bike computers and the Tacx Training app (Garmin Newsroom). Its manual recommends the “open” connection type for pairing with third-party Bluetooth devices. Garmin does not state that RR intervals go out in the standard Bluetooth message, and we found no published HRV study.
• Cheaper straps from smaller brands cost less still. The makers’ pages we checked did not document RR intervals over the standard heart rate service, and we found no validation. If you already own one, connect it to the chest-strap test: if you see heart rate but no RR intervals, it does not send them.

The Polar Verity Sense costs the same as the H10 but is an optical armband. Polar’s developer documentation describes pulse-to-pulse intervals from its light sensor through Polar’s own software kit, so an app has to support that kit. In a 2025 study of 31 adults, Polar’s earlier OH1 armband agreed well with an H10 lying down (intraclass correlation 0.955) and less well sitting (0.834) in 5-minute readings, with the armband reading RMSSD 3.21 and 8.05 ms higher on average (Coste and colleagues, 2025). For the same money, the H10 measures the electrical signal itself.

How continuous can cheap HRV tracking be?

“Continuous” can mean a strap reading each morning, a strap worn overnight, or a wearable that measures every night. Most of the price difference in the table pays for the third.

A morning reading is the practical use of a strap. Take it at the same time and in the same position each day, soon after waking and before coffee or exercise. How to take a good HRV reading gives the full routine.

Overnight with a strap works, at a cost in comfort and effort. The strap stays on your chest all night, and because Polar documents the H10’s built-in recording for heart rate, not RR intervals, a phone or other device has to stay connected and recording until morning. A lost connection leaves gaps. The HRV Expert app records overnight on Android, and the HRV Analyzer opens a night’s file afterwards. The site’s chest-strap test records 5 minutes at most.

A watch, ring or band takes HRV every night with no effort, and you do not have to sleep in a strap. Each maker reads a different part of the night and filters it its own way, so compare each device only with itself. An overnight average and a morning reading are two different series; overnight vs morning HRV explains why not to mix them.

Can you track HRV for free with a phone camera?

Yes, at rest, if you already have a phone. A camera app films the pulse in your fingertip. In the athlete study above, a camera app’s RMSSD was 17.49% from the ECG while the strap’s was 2.16% (Johansson and colleagues, 2026). In the five-person study, two camera apps were 8.71% and 9.43% off and a third was 112.36% off (Stone and colleagues, 2021), so the result depends on the app. Can a phone camera measure HRV? covers the evidence, and the camera test on this site takes a one- or two-minute reading in your browser.

Which cheap HRV setup should you choose?

• Lowest cost with ECG timing: a Polar H9 ($69.90) or Garmin HRM 200 ($79.99), with a free app or web tool, for a morning reading.
• The most studied strap: the Polar H10 ($104.95), for $25 to $35 more.
• Nightly HRV without effort or a subscription: Google’s Fitbit Air ($99.99) is the cheapest, a little under a Polar H10. It is optical, and no published study has tested its HRV; for a validated morning reading, an ECG strap from $69.90 still costs less. Next come a Garmin Index Sleep Monitor ($169.99) or CIRQA ($199.99), a Garmin watch with HRV Status such as the Forerunner 70 ($249.99), or, if you already use an iPhone, an Apple Watch Series 12 ($399). Apple lists HRV for the SE 3 ($249) too, without the Series 12’s Recovery HRV or HRV in the Vitals app.
• WHOOP or Oura: when you want their scores and features, not because HRV needs them. Count the membership: $199 a year for WHOOP One, $69.99 a year for Oura on top of the ring.

Whatever you choose, keep one device and one method, and build your own baseline baseline Baseline Your own usual HRV level and range, built from weeks of readings taken the same way. Comparing a reading with your baseline says more than comparing it with other people. More about Baseline before reading much into a single number. HRV by device explains what each brand reports, and normal HRV what published values can and cannot tell you.

When to talk to a doctor

No sports strap, watch, ring or app diagnoses a heart condition, and a cheap setup is no different. Talk to a doctor if your readings show frequent extra beats, or if you notice palpitations, dizziness, fainting, chest pain or shortness of breath, whatever the number says.