What the Ladder app costs, from the free week to the annual plan

The Ladder app is free to download and free to use for a week, and once the week is up its monthly Pro plan costs $29.99 a month. The annual plan costs $179.99 a year, which works out at $14.99 a month. What the money buys is a team, one coach's training plan that arrives new each week and that you follow with in-ear coaching and video demonstrations. Every fact about Ladder on this page was read on its own website, in its terms of service and on its App Store listing, and the sources at the foot of the page give the day each one was checked.

What Ladder costs

The app is free to download, with in-app purchases, and Ladder gives its prices in dollars. After the free week there are two plans to choose between.

Ladder's terms say a membership renews automatically for another term of the same length until you cancel. The price can change at any time, and a new price starts from the next term. To stop, you cancel at least three days before the next term starts, by logging into your account or emailing Ladder's support team, or through Apple if you pay through the App Store, and you keep the membership until the end of the term you have paid for. The terms also say fees are non-refundable, and there is no refund or credit for unused time unless the law requires one, with any other refund at Ladder's discretion.

What the free week includes

The trial is seven days free, with no card needed to start and no payment taken until the trial ends. Ladder recommends starting with a team quiz that matches you with a coach and a team from your goals and preferences, and during the week you get every team's plan to try, plan recommendations made for you, introductory welcome workouts, as many workouts as you like and all of Ladder's communities to explore.

When the week ends, the terms say you are billed from the day you choose a membership, and if you don't choose one during the trial your access may end.

What a Ladder team gives you

A team is one coach's plan. Ladder's home page lists more than 20 teams, in styles from pilates and yoga blended with strength to bodybuilding, kettlebell training and dumbbell-only strength, and the same page promises five or more new workouts each week. The Endure team, to take one example, is a dumbbell-only plan for home or the gym, with sessions averaging 30 minutes, a set split for each day of the week with Sunday as the rest day, and a new plan every week.

The monthly plan includes a weekly workout plan, in-ear coaching and video demonstrations, progress tracking in the Ladder Journal, a link to an Apple Watch and to Spotify or Apple Music, and coach tips and motivation in the team chat. It lets you follow one team at a time, which you can change twice a month. The annual plan adds every team and every workout, as many team changes as you like and unlimited saved workouts to replay.

In the app there is rep and weight tracking, alerts when you set a personal record and a place for training notes. Ladder also offers meal logging, so food and workouts are tracked in one app, and its home page promises answers to all your questions, and confidence in your workouts and your form. Its members train at home, in the gym, outside or across all three.

What TriageFit builds for you

TriageFit begins with an intake of about half an hour, which you can save partway and come back to. It asks what you want from training, what you have done before, which injuries you work around, what equipment you can reach and which days you can train, and your programme comes from those answers. The programme runs in phases of four to six weeks that our coaches wrote, and the phases keep cycling for as long as you stay. Every slot in a session is filled from a library of 382 exercises to suit your equipment, your level and any injury you told us about, with the exercises that would aggravate it left out, and each exercise comes with coaching cues, with video for the main lifts.

Food is coached alongside the training. Your answers set a calorie target matched to your metabolism, and your macros move each week with what your check-in shows.

Once a week, on the day you pick, you send a check-in. The sessions you logged are already in it, you rate your energy, recovery, motivation, sleep and stress, and you can add a note of your own. A reply comes back within seconds, and a real coach reads the check-in too. For a lift you are unsure of, you film a set and a coach looks at it and tells you what to change.

The AI coach answers at any hour. If a session will not work on the day, because you are short of time, away from home or missing a piece of equipment, you tell it what happened and it suggests a change, such as a shorter session, a different exercise or another day, which goes into your programme when you confirm it. You also train in a group with coaches in it, where questions to the coaching team get answered for everyone to see, and the group runs challenges you can join.

Trackers come in by upload. You export your data from Apple Health, Garmin, Whoop, Oura or Fitbit and upload the file, and what it shows about your recovery feeds into how much effort each session asks for.

Three free evenings and a sore shoulder

A secondary school teacher has spent four months on a Ladder team, doing dumbbell workouts in the spare room with a coach in their ear, and they like the structure. They want two more things now, a programme built around a shoulder that complains on overhead presses and their food coached alongside their training, so they join TriageFit. In the intake they put down the shoulder, the dumbbells and bench at home, and the Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings that marking and coaching the under-14s leave free.

The programme that comes back has three sessions on those evenings and leaves out the exercises that aggravate the shoulder. In the third week a parent-teacher meeting runs late on Wednesday, so they tell the AI coach how much time is left, it suggests a shorter session, and the shorter session goes in once they confirm it. They send a video of a set of split squats, and a coach replies with a note on their stance. When they check in on Saturday morning the shortened Wednesday session is already listed, and they rate their sleep low after a week of writing reports. The reply is back within seconds, and a coach reads what they sent.

What TriageFit costs

TriageFit costs €50 every 4 weeks, with VAT included, or €500 for a year. In the UK the same 4 weeks cost £45, and in the US they cost $55, against $29.99 a month for Ladder's monthly plan. The block plan has no contract, you can cancel whenever you choose, and you can pause for one to three months if you are injured or away.

Which one suits you

Ladder suits someone who wants a coach's plan to follow, likes being talked through each workout and enjoys training alongside a team that follows the same coach. Its monthly plan costs less than TriageFit, and its annual plan less again. If you would rather have the programme built from your own answers, with your food coached, a coach reading how each week went and a change ready when your week goes sideways, TriageFit does that for €50 every 4 weeks.

How to start

Choose a plan on the pricing page, create your account and pay, and the intake opens. Online strength coaching is for anyone whose main aim is getting stronger, online personal training follows a week of the coaching from start to finish, and the weekly check-in shows what you send and what you get back. What the Caliber app costs covers another strength app, and what a personal trainer costs sets TriageFit's price beside an hour in the gym with a trainer.