Is Forest free?

Yes. Forest is free, with no trial clock and no credit card, and rather more is included than the store badges imply — the app blocker is in the free tier, which is not where most apps of this kind put it. Two things are worth knowing before you install, and neither is on a store listing. The one-time purchase Forest was famous for has been withdrawn, and the subscription that replaced it is not priced on any surface we could find.

What the free tier actually includes

Forest answers this in more detail than most, and the answer is generous, so it goes first. Its plans view carries a two-column summary and then a full comparison table: 22 feature rows in five groups, with the free column showing a plain check on nine of them, a reduced allowance on two, and a dash on eleven.

• Free outright — the focus timer, ambient sounds, Deep Focus mode (the app blocker), focus tracking, the Focus Challenge, Plant Together group rooms, friends and the leaderboard, earning coins from focus, and the classic tree species and land styles.
• Free but smaller — Time Guard covers 1 app/site against Multiple apps/sites, and Mindful Space gives 1 soundscape against All soundscapes.
• Plus only — pausing a session, auto-focus after a break, the custom app allowlist, Focus Analytics, custom focus tags, the exclusive, seasonal and early-access tree species, the seasonal event VIP tier, the 3× coin boost, and planting real trees with coins.

The app blocker being free is the genuinely unusual part and deserves saying plainly: on a great many focus apps that is the paywall. Forest’s page for the free tier reads “Free for core focus — no credit card, no expiration”, and as far as we can check, it means it.

One row is missing from all 22, and it is the difference you would notice within a minute of opening the app. There is no row about advertising. Forest’s own FAQ elsewhere on the same site says the free tier “shows occasional ads (never during active focus sessions) that can also earn in-app rewards” and that Plus is an optional subscription “for advanced features and an ad-free experience”. Google Play carries a Contains ads badge. The table built to show you what money buys leaves out the thing money most obviously buys. The words ad-free do appear once in the plans view — in the list of what legacy Pro holders keep.

Five surfaces, and none of them prices Forest Plus

We went looking for the price on every official surface we could reach on 16 September 2026. There are five. None of them names a figure.

• Forest’s plans page, at forestapp.cc/#plans, is headed “Forest app plans — Free vs Plus, features and pricing” and contains no currency symbol anywhere in it. Its own FAQ answers the question directly: “How much does Plus cost? Plus pricing varies by region and platform. Please check the App Store or Google Play for your current local price.”
• The App Store listing shows Free · In-App Purchases at the top and an Information row reading In-App Purchases: Yes. There is no promoted in-app purchase section above the App Privacy panel — the optional slot a developer fills in from App Store Connect. The description’s Forest Plus block lists four benefits and ends “Start your free trial today, cancel anytime”, with no length and no price.
• The Google Play listing shows an In-app purchases badge and has no items-and-offers section, checked under both headings it uses — In-app items and offers on an app and In-game items and offers on a game. That slot is where Duolingo’s $83.99 and Finch’s $69.99 were found. Forest has not filled it in.
• The two terms documents — both of them, and there are two — contain no dollar figure, no renewal terms and, between them, one mention of subscriptions. More on that below.

So the pricing page tells you to check the stores, and the stores do not print a number. That is a closed loop, and it is the cleanest example this format has found of the thing it keeps finding: neither store requires a price, so an app can be sold on both without one appearing anywhere a reader can compare. The figure is on the upgrade screen inside the app, which Forest is entitled to do. What it costs the reader is the ability to decide before installing.

The one figure Google ships and does not show

There is an exception, and it is a strange one worth recording because we have not seen it on the seven cost pages before this. The Google Play listing page carries a price range in the data it serves to the browser and never renders it. Search the page source for the words per item and Forest’s entry reads “$0.99 - $59.99 per item”. Nothing on the visible page says it.

The field is populated systematically rather than by accident: the same page carries $1.99 per item for SleepTown, $0.99 - $14.99 per item for WaterDo and $5.99 - $144.99 per item for Vibe Reader, the three other Seekrtech apps in its carousels.

Two cautions, and they matter more than the number. A range is not a price list: it does not say which item is which, and $59.99 is not necessarily what Forest Plus costs — it is the most expensive thing in the catalog, whatever that is. And a figure that is in a page but not on it is not published in any sense a reader benefits from. We are printing it because it is checkable and because the absence everywhere else is the finding; we are not presenting it as the price of anything.

Forest Pro is gone, and the App Store still carries its price

For most of its life Forest was the app you bought once. That is over, and Forest says so itself rather than letting people find out at the till. From the Plans & Pricing section of its FAQ: “Can I still buy Forest Pro as a one-time purchase? No. Forest Pro is no longer available for purchase on any platform.”

The handling of everyone who already paid is the good case, and this page is going to say so before it says anything else. The same answer continues: “If you previously unlocked Pro, your Pro status does not expire and no action is required.” The plans view carries a block headed “Already have Pro? Your Pro status is here to stay”, lists the seven benefits Pro holders keep — the custom allowlist, Focus Analytics, custom tags, pauses, an ad-free experience, auto-focus after a break, and planting real trees with coins — and adds an exclusive Pro gift of a Cotton Puddles land style and a Bald Cypress tree. A company that honors a one-time purchase after moving to a subscription is doing the right thing, and it is rare enough to name.

Two qualifications sit on top of that promise, both published. The plans view says “Available Pro features may vary by app version, platform, and system support”, and the subscription terms say legacy users “will retain access to features available at the time of their purchase” while “certain newly introduced features or content may require a subscription”. So Pro is frozen, not grandfathered forward. That is the honest reading and it is stated in writing, which is more than Strava’s equivalent clause offers.

The stale half is on Apple. The only dollar figure on the entire App Store page is “$2”, and it is inside a customer review dated 05/12/2019 that reads, in part, “This app is well worth the $2.” Seven years old, describing a product that cannot be bought. The Todoist page found the same shape — a four-year-old price in a review next to a current one — and drew the same conclusion: never take a figure from a review. Here there is nothing else on the page to take it from.

Two sets of terms, and Android subscribers are pointed at the older one

Forest has two terms documents, on two domains, and which one you are shown depends on where you came from.

• forestapp.cc/terms/ is the one the website’s own footer links, and it is last updated 25 April 2018. The words subscription, refund, renew and Plus do not appear in it in any form, and there is no dollar figure. Its Purchases section asks for “your credit card number, the expiration date of your credit card, your billing address, and your shipping information” — boilerplate, on a focus timer sold entirely through Apple and Google, which never ask Forest for any of it.
• forest-subscription.seekrtech.com/terms/ is last updated 20 December 2024, is headed “Purchases and Legacy Access” where the older one says just “Purchases”, and carries the legacy-user clause quoted above. It still contains no price, no trial length and no auto-renewal paragraph — the words trial and renew are absent from it too.

The second document is linked from exactly one place we could find: the Terms of Use line at the bottom of the App Store description. It is not in the website’s sitemap, which lists six URLs in total, and the string forest-subscription does not appear anywhere in the website’s HTML. Google Play’s listing links the website and the privacy policy and no terms at all.

Follow that through and it means an Android subscriber has no route from any Forest surface to the terms that cover their subscription. They reach the 2018 document, which does not mention subscriptions. We have no reason to think that is deliberate — it looks like a website that was rebuilt and a footer link that was not — and it is worth fixing either way.

The price that is itemized

Every page in this format ends up here. The money is unpublished on five surfaces and the data is itemized on two, in public, by the company, because both stores make that part compulsory.

Apple’s App Privacy panel names Contact Info and Usage Data under Data Used to Track You — explicitly, “across apps and websites owned by other companies”. Linked to your identity: Purchases, Contact Info, User Content, Identifiers, Usage Data and Diagnostics. Google Play’s data safety page declares one shared type, Personal info — Email address, and collects device IDs, purchase history, crash and performance data, app activity, personal info, photos and approximate location, encrypted in transit, with deletion on request.

The two forms disagree in one place, and the third document settles it against Apple rather than for it. Play declares approximate location collected; Apple’s panel names no location category at all. Forest’s privacy policy is the tiebreaker and it sides with Google: the types of data it lists include geographic position, and the US notice-at-collection section names Geolocation data outright. That is the second time this format has had to read a third document to settle a location disagreement, after MyFitnessPal, where it did not settle.

The detail worth the reader’s time is further down the same policy. Under Remarketing and behavioral targeting, Forest names the services it uses to advertise itself, and two of them are TikTok Remarketing (TikTok Inc.) and Twitter Remarketing (X Corp.), alongside Facebook Custom Audience, Facebook Remarketing and four Google ones. The TikTok entry says it “connects the activity of Forest (iOS version) with the TikTok advertising network” and processes device information, trackers, advertising identifiers and usage data.

Be precise about what that is and is not. It is Forest buying ads for itself on those networks and telling them who has used the app; it is not Forest handing over your focus sessions. It is also disclosed, in a policy anyone can read, which is the version of this we always say we prefer. But it sits oddly next to a Google Play description that offers to block “Instagram, TikTok, X, Reddit, YouTube” — the app that helps you leave those feeds reaches you through two of them.

What Forest does better than anything we make

Almost all of it, and the scale is not close. Forest has been on the App Store since 25 August 2014, holds 4.8 from 49,000 ratings there and 4.3 from 813,000 reviews on Google Play against 10 million-plus downloads, and carries Google Play Editors’ Choice. Our whole catalog is four reward apps and three small games; Taco Rain has one App Store rating.

Four things it does that we would be pleased to have done. It puts the app blocker in the free tier rather than behind the paywall, which is the single most valuable feature in the app. It publishes cancellation instructions as numbered steps through Apple’s and Google’s own screens, and states that canceling costs you nothing you built: “All past sessions, trees, and focus history are preserved.” It honored a one-time purchase it had every commercial reason to quietly retire. And the trees are real and specific — the homepage counter read 2,102,946 on 16 September 2026, planted through Trees for the Future across Kenya, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda and Cameroon under its Forest Garden Program, with Forest covering the cost from app revenue.

The honest asterisk on that last one is in the earlier section, and it is a criticism of the marketing rather than of the program: the homepage says “free to start your digital detox” in one screen and “your focus contributes to a real forest on Earth” in another, and the FAQ that reconciles them says it is Pro and Plus users who can spend coins on a real tree. Free users grow the virtual forest. The real one is funded by the people who pay, which is fair, and which nobody has quite written down on the page doing the persuading.

How to check any of this yourself

Three habits, and this app rewards all three. First, search a pricing page for a currency symbol instead of reading it — Forest’s is headed “features and pricing” and has no currency symbol in it, which you will not notice by skimming. Second, check both optional store slots: just above App Privacy on Apple, and below the description on Google Play under In-app items and offers on an app or In-game items and offers on a game. An absence in either is evidence of nothing on its own; two absences plus a pricing page that points at them is a finding.

Third, and it is the one that paid off here: check whether a company has more than one of the same document. Forest has two sets of terms, eight years apart, on different domains, and the one its website links is the one that has never heard of the product being sold. The way to find that is to compare what the website links against what each store listing links, which takes about a minute and is the same habit that turned up Todoist’s two file-size limits and Finch’s two free trials.