Is Forest free?

Yes. Forest is free, with no trial clock and no credit card, and the app blocker is in the free tier, which is not where most focus apps put it. The one-time purchase Forest was famous for has been withdrawn, and Forest itself prices the subscription that replaced it nowhere; only Apple’s store listing does.

What the free tier includes

Forest’s plans view has a full comparison table, with 22 feature rows in five groups. The free column shows a check on nine, a reduced allowance on two, and a dash on eleven.

• Free outright — the focus timer, ambient sounds and Deep Focus mode (the app blocker). Also 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 and custom focus tags. Also the exclusive, seasonal and early-access tree species, the seasonal event VIP tier, the 3× coin boost, and planting real trees with coins.

The free tier’s page reads “Free for core focus — no credit card, no expiration”. None of the 22 rows mentions advertising. Forest’s FAQ says the free tier “shows occasional ads (never during active focus sessions) that can also earn in-app rewards”, and that Plus is optional “for advanced features and an ad-free experience”. Google Play carries a Contains ads badge. The table built to show what money buys leaves out the thing money most obviously buys. Ad-free appears once in the plans view, in the list of what legacy Pro holders keep.

Where Forest Plus is priced

Every official surface we could reach, read on 16 September 2026, with Apple’s Information row expanded on 19 September.

Forest itself prices Forest Plus nowhere. Its pricing page points at the stores. Google Play doesn’t answer. Apple answers with amounts and no billing periods, including two annual figures and no way to tell which is current. Duolingo and Finch fill in Play’s optional price slot; Forest does not.

Google Play’s page data carries a range it never renders: search the source for per item and Forest’s entry reads “$0.99 - $59.99 per item”. The field is systematic. The same page carries the three other Seekrtech apps in its carousels: $1.99 per item for SleepTown, $0.99 - $14.99 per item for WaterDo and $5.99 - $144.99 per item for Vibe Reader. A range 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.

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

Forest’s FAQ says so: “Can I still buy Forest Pro as a one-time purchase? No. Forest Pro is no longer available for purchase on any platform.” Existing buyers are treated well. “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”. It 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. It adds a Pro gift of a Cotton Puddles land style and a Bald Cypress tree.

Two qualifications are published. The plans view says “Available Pro features may vary by app version, platform, and system support”. 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, and it says so in writing, which is more than Strava’s equivalent clause offers.

The most prominent dollar figure on the App Store page is “$2”, inside a customer review dated 05/12/2019: “This app is well worth the $2.” Seven years old, for a product that cannot be bought. Never take a figure from a review; the current ones are in the collapsed Information row.

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

• forestapp.cc/terms/, linked from the website footer, was last updated 25 April 2018. The words subscription, refund, renew and Plus do not appear in it. Its Purchases section asks for “your credit card number, the expiration date of your credit card, your billing address, and your shipping information”, which Apple and Google never ask Forest for.
• forest-subscription.seekrtech.com/terms/ was last updated 20 December 2024, is headed “Purchases and Legacy Access” where the older one says “Purchases”, and carries the legacy clause quoted above. It still has no price, trial length or auto-renewal paragraph.

The newer document is linked from 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, and forest-subscription does not appear in the website’s HTML. Google Play’s listing links the website and the privacy policy and no terms. So an Android subscriber has no route from any Forest surface to the terms that cover their subscription. It looks like a rebuilt website with a footer link that was not updated.

The price that is itemized

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

Play declares approximate location; Apple’s panel names no location category at all. Forest’s privacy policy sides with Google: it lists geographic position, and its US notice at collection names Geolocation data. The policy also names, under Remarketing and behavioral targeting, TikTok Remarketing (TikTok Inc.) and Twitter Remarketing (X Corp.) alongside Facebook Custom Audience, Facebook Remarketing and four Google services. The TikTok entry “connects the activity of Forest (iOS version) with the TikTok advertising network” and processes device information, trackers, advertising identifiers and usage data.

That is Forest buying ads for itself and telling those networks who has used the app, not handing over your focus sessions, and it is disclosed. It still sits oddly beside a Play description offering 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

Forest has been on the App Store since 25 August 2014 and holds 4.8 from 49,000 ratings there. On Google Play it has 4.3 from 813,000 reviews, 10 million-plus downloads and Editors’ Choice. Taco Rain has one App Store rating.

• The app blocker is free, the most valuable feature in the app and the usual paywall.
• Cancellation is published as numbered steps through Apple’s and Google’s screens, with “All past sessions, trees, and focus history are preserved.”
• It honored a one-time purchase it had every commercial reason to retire.
• The trees are real. The homepage counter read 2,102,946 on 16 September 2026. They were planted through Trees for the Future across Kenya, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda and Cameroon, under its Forest Garden Program, and paid from app revenue. The homepage says “free to start your digital detox” and “your focus contributes to a real forest on Earth”. The FAQ says it is Pro and Plus users who spend coins on real trees. The people who pay fund the real forest, which is fair, and not quite what the homepage says.

How to check any of this yourself

Search a pricing page for a currency symbol instead of reading it; Forest’s is headed “features and pricing” and has none. Expand the In-App Purchases row in Apple’s Information section, where Forest’s $5.99 and $35.99 are. And check whether a company has more than one of the same document. Forest has two sets of terms, nearly seven years apart on different domains. The website links the one that has never heard of the product being sold. Todoist’s two file-size limits and Finch’s two free trials turned up the same way.