The new Oura Ring 5 is out, and its slim profile is turning heads among current Oura users and prospective ones, myself included. However, in addition to the $50 price increase over the Oura Ring 4, there are other costs to consider: Oura Membership.
Oura membership is not required to use the Oura ring, but the functionality of the accompanying app will be limited without it. The $5.99 membership brings tons of features to the app and unlocks tons of capabilities you wouldn’t otherwise have access to.
If you don’t register, you won’t get all the information that comes with it. You open the Oura app and see only three things: your readiness score, sleep score, and activity score.
For some people, this may be enough. I don’t take full advantage of all membership benefits, and the additional information and features that come with Oura membership may not cost more than the one-time hardware cost. That said, there are still great reasons why I stay subscribed to Oura.
What you get for membership
For $5.99 per month, Oura membership offers many features and additional information that you won’t get without it. Features include the following, according to Oura:
- Detailed sleep analysis
- 24/7 Heart Rate Tracking (Day Time, Night Time, Activity)
- Integration with third-party health and wellness apps like Strava
- Advanced temperature monitoring
- Blood Oxygen Sensing (SpO2)
- Daytime Stress
- Powerful job goals with automatic job discovery
- Heart Health (Heart Age, Heart Power (VO2 Max))
- Metabolic Health (Glucose Tracking, Diet)
- Oura Labs
- Strength
- Weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual, and annual reports
- Women’s Health (Cycle Insights, Pregnancy Insights)
1. Make the most of your ring
It’s silly to expect every Oura Ring owner to use all the features included in the membership, and I don’t. For example, none of the Women’s Health features are useful to me, but I use a number of other features almost every day.
As someone who absolutely loathes wearing smartwatches to sleep, 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, the subscription provides an in-depth view of my sleep, including my sleep efficiency, restlessness, and how long it took me to fall asleep. As someone who has trouble sleeping, I find this information very helpful in showing ways I can improve.
But beyond just sleep, the combination of these factors gives you a broader view of your overall health and well-being. Oura Ring is so easy to use throughout the day that it makes it easy to measure heart rate throughout the day, automatically track activities, and monitor symptoms that may indicate illness or stress in your body.
In addition, you get to try out features that are being tested by Oura before they are fully baked into Oura’s implementation. The AI advisor was another feature I tested before it was released, and it has become a core part of the Oura app.
2. Automatic job discovery is actually pretty cool
Automatic task detection is perhaps one of my favorite features of the Oura Ring and one of the most impressive. While I like to track workouts physically, the Oura ring is actually great for tracking a variety of activities, both in and out of the gym.
As a member, you will be able to use the ring to discover and analyze various activities, such as exercise and walking. The more you track workouts, the more accurate the Oura Ring gets, until it’s even better at seeing when I’m doing HIIT or Pilates.
Even better, the Oura ring can detect most daily activities and even random things like dancing and yard work — something my other wearables, like my Garmin Venu 4 (my favorite wearable), can’t do. Every time I go out, I’m always surprised to see how long the Oura Ring detects how long I’ve been dancing.
In addition, when the ring detects activity, it can include heart rate data and calorie counts, making automatic tracking an important asset for your daily activity and health checks.
2. Login to Oura Advisor
Almost every tech company is getting into AI in some way or shape, and before Google launched its Personal Health Coach, Oura launched a mentor. With Oura Advisor, you can talk to 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 you regularly, based on your daily activity and other metrics, to make sure you’re on the right track. And you can even change the frequency of the Advisor’s login so that it calls you weekly, daily, or somewhere in between. In addition, you can choose the tone of the Advisor, which can be direct or more conversational.
Oura highlights that the Mentor is supported by a modern large language model (LLM) and has recently been developed with a new proprietary LLM designed for women’s health. This gives Oura extensive knowledge of medical standards, research, and more, ensuring that it is uniquely positioned to answer questions about your health and provide recommendations, especially with the added context of your in-app data.
Of course, you should always take anything Oura Advisor says with a grain of salt, as it is not a medical product designed to diagnose or cure you, but I have found that it provides great advice in an easy to understand way.
4. Sync with third-party applications
Oura is good, but the ring doesn’t always get all the information. Plus, not everyone likes to wear a ring while lifting weights, and I often track my workouts with a smart watch. This is where third-party app integration comes in.
By connecting with Health Connect, the Oura app can pull workout data from my smartwatches and even weight data from my Wings scale to give me a complete overview of my day. The timeline feature helps me see my day at different times, including when I wake up, exercise, and go to bed.
Oura is basically a one-stop shop where you can get a holistic view of your daily life and well-being, and it all contributes to your long-term health outlook.
And if I’m tracking activities using the ring, the Oura app can send the workout to the Strava app, 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 fair price to pay, especially since Oura is still a new and small company. We’ve consistently asked why Oura has kept its subscription model when other smart speaker companies haven’t, and the answer is always the same: Oura uses membership to help improve the product.
There is a reason why Oura continues to produce the best smart rings on the market, as the competition heats up with new players and developments. Even Samsung felt compelled to enter the smart ring market, but seemed to fall short on Oura, despite not charging a subscription fee.
“We really feel pressure from our members to continue to research and innovate what a smart ring can be and reinvest that into our product,” Oura told us after launching the Oura Ring 4.
After seeing the growth from Oura Ring Gen 3 to Oura Ring 5, it’s clear to me that Oura is doing just that, increasing the value of each model continuously by adding new features throughout its life cycle. To me, that seems worth $6 a month.
Another way to pay for Oura membership
If you are hesitant to purchase both an Oura Ring and a membership, it may help to know that you can purchase both using your FSA or HSA. For many, that money is just sitting there, unused, so this can give you a reason to dip into those funds.