Fitbit won't make you pay for your own weekly health data anymore

One of our biggest complaints about Fitbit products for years is the fact that you'll need to pay the $10 monthly fee to see your historical data. For example, you could only see up to seven days' worth of your breathing rate, resting heart rate and heart rate variation, and just 90 days of everything else if you didn't shell out. It was one of the biggest drawbacks of devices like the Pixel Watch, especially when you consider that competing products from Apple and Samsung don't lock your own data behind a paywall. Today, Google announced that it's making "more of the insightful data from Fitbit's Health Metrics Dashboard available without a subscription to all of its users."

This includes breathing rate, heart rate variability, skin temperature, oxygen saturation and resting heart rate. "Now, even without a Premium subscription, users will now be able to see 30-day and 90-day views of their data to track trends over time," the company said in a statement. To be clear, more-basic metrics like step count, miles traveled, calories burned and heart rate have always been free, while the information listed above were presented in the Health Metrics dashboard as daily, weekly, monthly or 90-day summaries. 

While there is still a 90-day limit to how far back you can see your historical activity for those metrics, this at least brings Fitbit products closer to the competition. The company does have industry-leading health and sleep-tracking features, including the ability to see how much time you spend in zones like REM, deep and light sleep throughout the night. As of now, information like those sleep stages are not locked behind Premium, although Sleep Profile, Guided Sleep Programs, Snore Detect and additional insights around what's impacting your Sleep Score are. 

It's good that Fitbit no longer paywalls your Sleep Stages, since Apple recently added the same feature to watchOS, while Samsung has offered it for years. And both competitors grant this, along with other sleep metrics and guidance, to their users without charging extra.

Update (at 4pm ET): This article was updated to confirm that Sleep Stages is not a Premium feature, while spelling out which sleep-related features are.