Welltory Alternative: The Same Camera
Reading, Without the $99 Year

Yes, and that is the honest starting point. Both use photoplethysmography through the iPhone camera and flash: you rest a fingertip over the lens and the app reads the periodic colour change caused by blood volume. Neither needs a chest strap, a wrist band or any external sensor. Any difference in the numbers you see comes from the analysis layer and how each app handles a noisy reading, not from a different kind of sensor.

Welltory publishes two plans on welltory.com/plans: $99 billed once a year, and a $599 one-time lifetime payment for full access forever. New users get three days free to try premium. A monthly option is referenced but its price is not shown on that page, so treat any monthly figure you see quoted elsewhere as unverified. Over three years the annual plan comes to roughly $297, which is the number worth comparing against — the lifetime price only pays off if you are still using it in year six.

Per Welltory’s own plan comparison: basic heartbeat analytics limited to the stress, energy and productivity scores, a basic blood-pressure interpretation without the extra metrics, daily heart reports, and manual weight and blood-pressure logging. What premium adds is the depth — the 21-metric heartbeat breakdown, ten more blood-pressure metrics, shareable reports for a doctor, lifelogging with geotracking, the validated mental-health assessments, and the advanced charts drawn from other health apps. If the three scores are all you wanted, the free tier is genuinely usable.

Blood pressure, and it is not close. Welltory interprets a blood-pressure reading and layers ten additional metrics on top of it, then packages that into a report you can hand to a doctor. Pulse Rate does not do that: it logs blood pressure that you type in yourself and charts the trend over time, and it never measures or interprets blood pressure at all. If a structured blood-pressure workup is the reason you are installing something, install Welltory. The same applies to its clinically validated mental-health assessments, which Pulse Rate has no equivalent for.

When the thing you want daily is a heart-rate and HRV reading that does not run out. Pulse Rate keeps the instant camera measurement free with no trial expiry, computes RMSSD, calculates TRIMP training load, and syncs both ways with Apple Health — so camera readings sit alongside whatever an Apple Watch or another Health source has already recorded, and VO₂ max and heart-rate recovery come through from there. The subscription covers comprehensive sync, AI summaries and deeper trend analysis rather than the measurement itself.

Three things, stated plainly. It is iOS only — there is no Android build, so if you are switching to an Android phone this is the wrong answer. It measures on demand rather than continuously; there is no background monitoring through the night. And it is not a medical device: no ECG, no blood-oxygen reading, and blood pressure is manual logging only. Those limits are the same shape as Welltory’s camera-based readings, but it is better to read them here than to discover them after installing.