Is there a free period tracker for teens?

Before we built TeenCycle, we went looking for an app for our daughter. The list was short: simple, private, offline, free.

We didn’t find it. The part I never got over was the word “free.” It’s the easiest word in this category to say and the hardest to pin down.

I should say up front that we make a period tracker now, and we charge for it. I’m answering the question anyway, because it’s the one we couldn’t get a straight answer to ourselves.

The short version: yes, there are several free period trackers for teens, and one has no paid tier at all. But “free” is only half the question. It tells you what leaves your wallet. It says nothing about what leaves her phone, and that second half took me a week to work out.

Here’s what’s actually out there as of September 2026. Prices come from App Store listings, not review sites, because the review sites contradict each other.

The short answer.

Almost every period app is free to download, and most are free for basic tracking. So the real question isn’t whether you can log a period without paying. You almost always can. The question is what the free version is for.

Usually it’s one of two things. Either someone other than you is paying for the app, or the free tier is the front room of a building where everything good is upstairs, behind a subscription.

There’s a third option. It’s what we built, and I’ll get to it.

What the free tiers include.

Prices are from each app’s App Store listing. Free-tier details are from each company’s own help pages, and where those pages are old, I’ve said so. US prices, September 2026.

Figure 1 · Free tier, paid tier, US price

A word on Flo, since it’s the app parents ask about most. Flo doesn’t publish a price. Its own premium page sends you to the Help Center instead of naming one. Its US in-app purchases run from $1.99 to $59.99, and Apple’s listing doesn’t say which are weekly, monthly, or annual. I couldn’t confirm a yearly figure from a primary source, so I won’t guess at one. If you want the longer version of the Flo question, I wrote about what “safe” means for a period app separately.

The part that surprised me.

I expected one price per app. That isn’t what’s there.

Stardust has three annual prices live right now: $24.99, $29.99, and $39.99. Two of them carry the same seven-day trial, so the trial doesn’t explain the gap. Luna has a $19.99 annual and a $39.99 annual running side by side, plus a $69.99 variant. Clue has a $29.99 annual next to its $39.99 one. Flo has that $1.99-to-$59.99 spread.

None of this is hidden or improper. It’s ordinary subscription pricing, tested the way software companies test pricing, and some entries are likely old prices still honoured for long-time subscribers. But it means the honest answer to “how much does this app cost” is often it depends. Two people can download the same app on the same day and see different prices.

That’s what I couldn’t get past. Not that the apps cost money. That I couldn’t tell you what they cost.

Is there a truly free one?

There is, and it taught me the most useful thing in this piece: free and private are different questions. I’d been treating them as one.

Spot On, from Planned Parenthood Direct, is free. Not free-to-start. Its App Store listing says “Free” and nothing else, and there are no in-app purchases at all, which is rarer than you’d think.

Now scroll down that same listing to the App Privacy panel. Planned Parenthood Direct says the app may collect health and fitness data, contact information, user content, and identifiers, and that these are linked to your identity. Usage data and diagnostics are collected too, not linked.

I want to be fair here. That panel isn’t an accusation. Developers fill it in themselves, and a properly filled-in panel is a sign of a company doing disclosure right. Plenty of apps declare far more.

But it’s the plainest version of what I’d been circling all week. An app with no price still has a relationship with your daughter’s data.

Spot On also isn’t built for teenagers. It’s organised around birth control, with reminders for the pill, the patch, the ring, the implant, the shot, and IUDs. Useful for the people it’s for. Reviews of the tracking itself are mixed: 4.2 on the App Store, 3.9 on Google Play, with prediction accuracy the most common complaint.

If money is the only constraint, it’s there and it’s honest about itself. I’d just read the second panel as well as the first.

Figure 2 · Two different questions

Free and private are not the same thing

Spot On · App privacy · Free, no paid tier

Four categories linked to your identity, including health and fitness. Two more collected but not linked.

TeenCycle · App privacy · $9.99 once

One line. No accounts, no cloud, no ads, no analytics. The data lives on her phone.

Free tells you what leaves your wallet. It tells you nothing about what leaves her phone.

So why do we charge.

Because I couldn’t find a third option, and I wanted one.

I didn’t want my daughter’s first period tracker to be free in exchange for her attention, and I didn’t want it to be a subscription she’d carry into her twenties. A tracker is a small tool. It should cost a small amount, once, and then be hers.

So TeenCycle is free for 30 days, then $9.99, one time. No renewal, no second charge, no tier above it, no version she’d have to upgrade to later. The price is the same for everyone, every day, which after a week of reading App Store listings feels like a lower bar than it should be.

Do the maths over the years she’d actually use it. A $39.99 annual from thirteen to eighteen is around $200. Ours is $9.99, and then we’re done.

Figure 3 · 5 years of tracking

What she’d pay from thirteen to eighteen

Annual subscription at $39.99 a year$200

Annual subscription at $24.99 a year$125

Monthly subscription at $6.99 a month$419

TeenCycle, one time$9.99

$190 less

than a $39.99 annual subscription over the same 5 years. One charge, no renewal, no tier above it.

We can do that because there’s nothing on our end. No accounts, no cloud, no ads, no analytics. The data lives on her phone. We’re not running servers, so we don’t need your money every year to keep them on, and we have nothing to sell instead.

Our own App Privacy panel says “Data Not Collected.” That’s the version we wanted, and charging once is what pays for it.

What that costs you.

I should be straight about the trade, because it’s real and a subscription would solve it.

Since we hold nothing, we can’t recover anything. If she loses the phone, or gets a new one without exporting first, that history is gone. We can’t email it to her. We can’t look it up. There’s no account to log back into. That’s the whole design, and it cuts both ways.

Apps that keep your data on a server can offer a tidy restore. That’s worth something, and it’s part of what a subscription pays for. We decided a teenager’s cycle history wasn’t worth storing on someone else’s computer to get it. You might weigh that differently, and you should know it’s a choice before she starts logging, not after.

The export lives in the app’s settings. Worth showing her once.

Two things to check before you download anything.

Open the app’s App Store page and skip the description, which is marketing. You want the two panels further down, which are closer to accounting.

In-App Purchases. The actual products at the actual prices. If there are nine of them at seven price points, you’ve learned something the review sites won’t tell you. If the section isn’t there at all, you’ve learned something too.

Figure 4 · In-App Purchases

The first panel worth a minute

Flo · In-app purchases

Ten products, eight price points, three different prices for the same “Premium (1 Year)”. This is where the real cost lives.

TeenCycle · In-app purchases

One product, one price. Nothing renews.

App Privacy. What the developer says it collects, split into data linked to your identity and data that isn’t. Read the linked column. On a period app, the line to look for is health and fitness.

Figure 5 · App Privacy

The second panel, on the app parents ask about most

Flo · App privacy

Ten categories linked to your identity, four used to track you across other companies’ apps.

TeenCycle · App privacy

One line. No accounts, no cloud, no ads, no analytics. The data lives on her phone.

Together they take about a minute, and they answer the two questions that decide it: what this costs her, and what it knows about her. I’d have saved myself a week by starting there.

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If this is the kind of thing you’d want once a month, the journal goes out to parents with one short piece and nothing else. No tracking pixels, unsubscribe in one click.

And if you’d like to see what a tracker looks like when it isn’t trying to keep anyone logged in, TeenCycle is on iOS and Android. Free for 30 days, then $9.99, once. You can also read the full comparison of seven trackers, or the piece on which period apps are actually private.

— Lau