How to Create a Fitness App: Cost Features, Monetization

We wouldn't be talking about how to build a workout app if this niche weren't successful and promising, right? So, we’ve decided to gather some optimistic predictions and statistics to further support your decision to create your own fitness app.

According to a Statista report, fitness segment apps worldwide have reached revenue of 5,273.5 million in 2024. Furthermore, research by Vantage Market Research predicts that the global fitness app market size is expected to reach $15.2 billion by 2028.

Here are more interesting business insights:

• Revenue potential and monetization. According to Business of Apps, fitness apps downloaded ~850 million times in 2024, generating billions in revenue (USD 3.98 billion in 2024 for fitness apps alone). Besides, Apps with subscription/in-app purchase models can benefit from recurring revenue and higher ARPU.
• Market growth. Mordor Intelligence states that the global fitness app market size reached USD 13.59 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of ~12.7% (2025–2030)
• Innovative approach. Statista claims that by the end of 2025, 50% of fitness app users are projected to integrate wearables like smartwatches and fitness trackers into their fitness routines

It may seem that fitness apps just show how to work out. In reality, these applications offer much more. The demand for fitness apps is so high that there’s a separate app type for almost every kind of activity. That’s why there are several fitness app types on the market to fulfill all users’ needs:

• Smart coaches
• Diet and nutrition
• Workout logging apps
• Activity tracking

Let’s discover each of them in detail.

How to build a fitness app with smart coach features? Here are the main features:

• Workout identifying algorithms
• Workout levels
• Workout screens

Personal coaches charge a considerable fee for their services, and people don’t always have time to attend gyms. In addition, a person who decided to try working out would hesitate to pay four times the gym pass cost for coach services.

That’s why companies create workout apps with a smart fitness coach inside. These apps create a personalized workout plan for each user based on their physical characteristics and objectives. Physical activities increase as the user progresses. Even though these apps can’t correct your physical mistakes while exercising, they become a great digital companion during your workout.

Examples of smart coach fitness apps: Nike Training Club, FitBit, Peloton

Without a balanced diet, all physical activities are almost pointless. So, it’d be good to keep track of the calorie intake and nutritional value of food. Diet apps are designed to simplify this process. They let users log the food consumed during the day and see what microelements it contains.

Here’s the list of features to create your own fitness app with nutrition tracking:

• Large food database
• Adding custom food
• Recommended recipes
• Seamless navigation

Examples of diet-focused fitness apps: MyFitnessPal, Lifesum, FatSecret.

As it comes clear from the name, these apps keep track of users’ activity. They all have a step tracker to analyze users’ mobility during the day. Besides, users can activate the app during the running or cycling training to make it remember the route.

Here are the features required to build your own fitness app that tracks activity:

• Geolocation
• Accelerometer

Examples of activity-tracking fitness apps: Runtastic, Nike Run Club, Samsung Health

This one is the simplest option to create a fitness app. With these apps, users keep track of their workouts. They don’t provide personalized training sessions. Instead, users can find more information about every exercise they perform. The number of calories burned, affected muscle groups, and overall health impact. With third-party smart devices, apps can track even more data. For example, users can monitor muscle-to-fat ratio with smart scales.

How do you make your own fitness app that logs workouts? Here’s the list of basic features:

• Adding workout notes
• Integration with third parties
• Workout database

Examples of workout logging apps: Fitbod, JEFIT, Strong

Below, we've compiled a table to represent key distinctive features of each fitness app type:

To make your own fitness app, you need to think about its features. When building digital products from scratch, it makes sense to build an MVP first. MVP stands for a minimum viable product. Its features will help you understand whether your product is useful for clients and how you can improve it in the future.

In this section, we’ll go through all MVP features for a fitness app.

Registration is an essential process for the majority of apps. It may be non-obligatory if your app is a simple step tracker. However, if you provide unique training or meal plans, then users should always register. Registration lets you get more user data and provide personalization.

How to create a fitness app with a personalized approach? First of all, let users manage their personal physical information. Data like height, weight, age, and other parameters help to create personal workouts and achieve results faster. Besides, you can reward users with interactive badges for their achievements. They can find rewards in their profiles.

The main purpose of fitness apps is to track physical activity, so workout screens are obligatory. Menus can differ depending on the app type, but the idea remains the same. For example, smart fitness coach apps will have a menu with workout options and a video explaining how to perform the exercise. The activity tracking app displays the time spent on the training and statistics of the session.

When developing a fitness app, take care of a minimalistic and intuitive menu. Users should be able to find the exercises they’ve performed during their workout easily.

Detailed statistics help users understand their progress when they can’t notice visual changes. There are two types of statistics:

• Global. It displays global progress for a chosen period of time (week, month, year). These stats are useful to track user weight, muscle mass, and training intensity changes.
• Local. It’s a short-term statistic that lets you create your own fitness app that helps users track their progress from one training session to another. Local stats show running pace, cadence, travel distance, heart rate, and so on.

Build a fitness app representing stats in the form of charts and diagrams rather than in a pure text form. Visualization makes post-training analytics more engaging.

A single fitness and health app with MVP features can’t be a jack-of-all-trades in terms of health and wellness. To truly stand out in fitness and wellness, you need to extend your app's abilities by syncing it with other fitness and health applications and devices. For example, your app might calculate the calories burned after a workout, while a third-party diet app provides data about meals consumed, enabling your app to analyze the lack or surplus of daily calories.

Synchronization with platforms like Apple Health and Google Fit allows for seamless integration with devices like smartwatches and fitness trackers, enhancing the user experience. Similarly, nutrition apps, coupled with smart sugar-measuring devices, can aid in creating personalized diet plans. Leveraging these connections ensures your app aligns with the latest trends in health and fitness application development while supporting diverse monetization strategies for fitness apps.

Devices like fitness trackers, smartwatches, heart rate monitors, smart scales, and others give even more statistical data for your app. On top of that, you can make a fitness app for wearable platforms in the future. Thus, users can leave their cell phones at home and get the same app features on their smartwatches, which make their overall interation with your app more convinient.

Without regard to the app type, it should have a large fitness-related database. If you’re building a diet app, give users a choice of products to add to their ration. If they can’t find particular meals in your app, they’ll probably abandon it and start looking for alternatives.

The same thing concerns workout app development. The apps should deliver a wide choice of exercises, explain their influence on the body, and make clear how many calories users will burn during the workout. A large exercise database is obligatory so that users can work on different muscle groups and create diverse training plans. If your app doesn’t have enough content, it’ll be hard to retain users.

Above, we've listed only the key fitness app functionalities that usually are included within Minimal Viable Product (MVP). However, you may want to refine your fitness app by adding the following advanced functionalities:

• AI-driven personal trainers. These features use AI and machine learning to analyze user data, such as workout history, to create and adjust personalized workout plans in real time.
• Real-time activity tracking. This functionality uses a device's built-in sensors (like accelerometers and GPS) and algorithms to track and display a user's activity metrics, such as steps, distance, speed, and calories burned, as they are being performed.
• Wearable device integration. This allows the app to connect with smartwatches and fitness trackers to sync data like heart rate, sleep quality, and activity levels. This provides a more comprehensive overview of the user's health and wellness.
• Progress tracking with advanced analytics. This feature uses data visualization tools like to show users a detailed history of performance over time. It can track metrics like weight, reps, and personal bests, helping users visualize achievements.
• Gamification and challenges. This involves incorporating game-like elements into the app to boost user motivation and engagement. Features include earning points, badges, and rewards for completing workouts or competing against friends on a leaderboard.

There’s a range of steps that you should follow while developing a fitness app. The development roadmap usually include the following stages:

• Step 1. Conduct the market research
• Step 2. Cooperate with a trusted IT vendor
• Step 3. Create your fitness app prototype
• Step 4. Define your fitness app tech stack
• Step 5. Build and test your fitness app
• Step 6. Release and maintain your fitness app

Let’s overview each step you must go through to create a reliable and functional fitness solution.

Before fitness mobile app development begins, you must thoroughly research the market. This phase involves identifying your target audience, understanding their needs, and analyzing what your competitors are doing well, or not so well. The goal is to define a unique value proposition (UVP) for your app, which is something that’ll make your solution stand out. By studying what features are missing from existing apps and what users are complaining about in reviews, you can pinpoint a niche and build a product that truly solves a problem for your audience.

Planning to make your own fitness app, you can form an in-house team or cooperate with remote experts. The in-house cooperation may seem more convenient in terms of workflow tracking and communication. But, working with a remote team may appear cheaper and more advanced, as it gives you access to a wider pool of international expertise that aligns with your requirements and budget.

Working with a reliable IT partner may ensure the high quality of your fitness solution. Here are key factors you should consider before selecting a software development company:

• Domain experience. Check if the company of your choice has significant experience in delivering similar solutions and solid expertise in fitness app development.
• Customer feedback. The reviews of past clients will give you the image of the vendor: their working approaches, the capability of dealing with complications, alignment with deadlines, communication strategies, work quality, etc.
• Portfolio. Examine the previous projects delivered by the vendor to see their technical abilities, accuracy, and approaches to meet customers' requirements
• Compliance. Ensure that the potential partner’s professional activity aligns with regulations and legal compliance. Check how they care about data safety and whether they sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA).

For example, we at Cleveroad have extensive experience in delivering health, wellness, and fitness solutions. We’d like to share with you our recent interesting case - RowNation.

Australian Rowing Association partnered with Cleveroad to build a mobile app for athletes. The association needed a hands-on tech partner to create a new platform from scratch.

The partnership started with a detailed planning phase where our engineers identified the project's key needs. The team then chose a cost-effective solution using Flutter, which allowed them to build a single app for both iOS and Android. This choice saved time and money while ensuring the app would work smoothly for all users. Besides, to monitor the app’s performance in real time, we installed a rowing machine in our office to truly understand the user experience.

As a result, the client received a custom, scalable app that helps rowers with training, tracks their performance, and lets them manage their progress within a unified solution.

Here’s what Georgia Beattie, director at the Australian Rowing Association, says about collaboration:

Prototyping is the process of building a visual, interactive model of your app to test its user experience (UX) and design before writing any code. This stage moves beyond simple sketches to create a clickable demo that simulates the app's user flow. By testing the prototype with potential users, you can identify any usability issues, refine the navigation, and ensure the app is intuitive and easy to use. This saves significant time and money by preventing costly design changes later in the development cycle.

The tech stack needed to create a fitness app is the combination of programming languages, frameworks, and tools used to build your app. The choice of tech stack is influenced by factors such as the app's features, and target platforms (iOS, Android, or both). For a fitness mobile app development, your tech partner will choose the tech stack that is capable of handling all tasks you need, like processing real-time data from wearables, integrating with health APIs (like Apple HealthKit and Google Fit), and scaling to accommodate a growing user base and new functionality requirements.

For example, here is what tech stack Cleveroad specialists use to deliver fitness solutions:

​​This is the most labor-intensive stage, where the fitness mobile app development team writes the code for the app's front end (what the user sees) and back end (the server and database).

At Cleveroad, we follow the Agile software development life cycle, which lets us break the development into short sprints, with constant testing and feedback loops. In our development process, each sprint focuses on delivering a specific part of the functionality until the entire fitness solution is complete. After each sprint, our engineers perform thorough testing to ensure the quality and functionality of the delivered outcomes. During Quality assurance, our experts conduct both manual and automated testing to ensure the app is bug-free, secure, and performs as expected on all devices.

During the final active stage, the development team works on preparing the app for launch and submitting it to app stores like the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. This includes optimizing the app's listing with a compelling description and high-quality screenshots to attract users.

After launch, the work is not over. Ongoing maintenance is crucial for the app's long-term success, including bug fixes, security updates, and regular feature additions based on user feedback to keep the app relevant and competitive.

As your features are ready, it’s time to think about your profit. How to make a fitness app that generates revenue? Let’s discover the most popular monetization models.

With this model, users pay to install the app. This revenue model gets you an instant profit, but you won’t get a lot of revenue in perspective. Considering the fact that you have to maintain a group of developers to develop new updates and fix bugs, the app price should be high enough to cover these expenses. In this case, users might not buy the unknown app, which costs a fortune.

The only reasonable use case for this strategy is when you have a simple fitness app without serious plans for the future. You can set an affordable price to cover the development expenses and attract an audience. Later you can integrate other revenue models into this project.

For example, a healthy recipe app Oh She Glows is available on iOS for $1,99 with in-app purchases and $2,49 on Android.

According to this strategy, you create a fitness app and distribute it for free. The free app version provides users with basic features that are more than enough to get a seamless experience. However, the app also has some additional features for an additional fee. Users aren’t obliged to buy them, but in most cases, if users really like the idea of your app, they will buy features that extend its basic functionalities.

Almost every fitness app has in-app purchases. Apps like MyFitnessPal and LifeSum provide an optional subscription that provides users with additional features.

If you choose this strategy, you will display your partners’ ads inside the app. There are different types of ads. You can integrate ads that promote products in the app's different menus. Another option is to use video ads that appear after particular actions (after a successful workout, for example). It’s crucial not to overuse advertisements because users don’t like them. Think beforehand about the ad layout during workout app development.

In-app ads are popular among the major players on the fitness market. For example, Adidas Runtastic displays ads to users.

You can combine several models to achieve the highest revenue. For example, if your app displays ads, users can remove them with a paid subscription. Thus, you’ll get profit from both unsubscribed users and premium ones.

It’s hard to find an app that doesn’t use the combined model. The main benefit of the subscription is that users get rid of ads. Almost every company understands it and uses it in its favor.

It’s definitely hard to provide an accurate number on the fitness mobile app development price, as each case has its unique requirements. In general, the cost to develop a fitness application ranges between $20,000-$100,000+ and may vary heavily depending on included functionality, solution complexity, and even the location of your development team.

Below is the brief breakdown of fitness mobile app development cost by complexity:

Basic fitness solutions usually cost anywhere between $25,000 $80,000. A basic app serves as a simple activity or workout tracker. It includes essential functionalities like user registration, a simple profile, a step counter or basic activity logging, and push notifications.

Development for a basic app typically takes 3 to 6 months.

Medium complexity fitness apps pricing starts from $80,000 to $150,000. This tier adds more complexity with features like a video workout library, personalized plans, progress tracking with charts, and basic social sharing capabilities. It often includes integration with popular wearable devices.

The development process for a moderately complex app can take 6 to 9 months.

The cost of advanced and feature-rich fitness apps ranges roughly from $150,000 to $300,000+. Advanced apps are highly sophisticated, incorporating features like AI-driven personal trainers, live-streamed workout sessions, gamification elements, and real-time user-to-user interaction. They often include advanced analytics and complex payment systems.

Due to the complexity of the features and backend infrastructure, development for an advanced app can take 9 to 12 months or more.

We’d like to give an example of how we estimate the project price in Cleveroad. There are two types of estimates: Rough and Detailed.

A rough estimate is an estimate that is provided by our specialists at the initial stages. It’s made to guide you about the financial resources required as well as define the development stages. Rough estimation can also be divided into two types: solution design and discovery phase rough estimate.

• Discovery phase rough estimate: A very early, broad cost guess based on initial talks. It checks if the project is financially viable.
• Solution stage rough estimate: A more precise estimate given after a full planning phase. It's based on detailed plans, making it much more accurate.

The Solution Workshop provides a high-level rough estimate based on project goals, risks, and non-functional requirements, offering options to balance features and budget. At the same time, the Discovery Phase refines this with detailed analysis of processes, features, and architecture for clearer, more accurate planning.

A detailed estimate is a precise calculation of a project’s cost with nearly 100% accuracy. Engaged developers, solution architects, and project managers lean on the discovery phase requirements and use them as a foundation to provide you with the most accurate numbers. The specialists include:

• Project specifications
• Functional and non-functional requirements
• Rates and the amount of hours spent on project development

Cleveroad is a high-tier custom software development company based in the heart of European IT outsourcing - Estonia. We help startups and well-established businesses to bring their concepts into life by providing our expertise in development of reliable software solutions.

Cleveroad in numbers:

• 13+ years on the market
• 280+ in-house engineers
• 200+ successful projects
• 8+ expertise industries

Here’s what benefits you’ll receive by cooperating with us:

• Cooperation with certified IT partner including ISO/IEC 27001:2013 for security management and ISO 9001:2015 for quality management
• On-demand IT services: custom software development, UI/UX design, Discovery Phase, IT consulting, legacy software modernization, etc.
• Free Solution Workshop stage that’ll help you align your project vision with developers’ efforts and establish efficient fitness app development planning
• Numerous R&D centers located in Estonia, Poland, and Ukraine. and representative offices in the US (Claymont), and Norway (Oslo) that provide flexibility of cooperation

To represent our expertise in fitness and health app development, we’d like to show you our vibrant case – a health habit tracking app with gamification elements.

A healthcare startup collaborated with us to build a mobile app designed to help children develop healthy habits through gamification. The main goal was to quickly deliver a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to the market to gain a competitive advantage and a strong return on investment.

Cleveroad experts built a bespoke, cross-platform app for iOS and Android. Our team focused on a rich, gamified experience, incorporating unique features like leaderboards, achievement badges, and animated avatars to engage children and set the app apart from competitors.

In addition, Cleveroad built a robust web-based admin panel. This gave the client full control over user accounts and in-app content, such as exercises and rewards, ensuring the business could manage the platform efficiently and make informed decisions for future growth.

As a result, our client received a custom, habit-forming app with unique gamification functionalities. The solution is now available on both the App Store and Google Play, attracting new users and building brand loyalty. The robust web admin panel allows the customer to efficiently manage all activities and content within the app.

• Learn about this solution in more detail or examine other successful cases in our portfolio.