Noom Alternative: If All You Wanted Was a Fasting Timer

Noom is the biggest app in this conversation -- roughly 871,000 App Store ratings at 4.7 stars -- and it is worth being precise about what it is. Noom is not a fasting tracker. It is a behaviour-change programme: daily psychology lessons, food logged into colour categories, and a human coach. It is priced like a programme, in the region of $70 a month at list price.

That is a fair price for a coaching programme and an absurd price for a countdown timer. Plenty of people signed up for the first and discovered they only used the second. If that is you, this is the comparison worth making. To be transparent: we make FastBreak, one of the apps you might consider, so we show how it answers each point.

1. Work out which thing you actually used

Open Noom and look at your own history honestly:

Did you read the daily lessons past week two?
Did you message the coach more than a handful of times?
Did you log every meal, or drift to logging nothing?
What did you open it for, in the last month?

If the answer to the last question is "to check my fasting window" or "to weigh in", you are paying programme prices for two features that are free everywhere else. That is not a criticism of Noom; it is a mismatch between the product and the job.

2. Understand where the charge lives

This is the part that catches people, and Noom is the best-documented example in the whole category.

Noom sells primarily through its own website -- you take a quiz, and pay Noom directly by card. That is not an App Store subscription. It does not appear in your iPhone's subscription list, and deleting the app does not cancel anything.

In 2022 Noom settled a class action, Mahood v. Noom, for $62 million ($56 million in cash plus $6 million in subscription credits) over exactly this: an auto-renewal model that the complaint alleged made cancellation deliberately hard, at one point routing users through their coach to cancel. The settlement required Noom to improve its auto-renewal disclosures, get separate consent for auto-renewal, and put an actual cancel button on the account page. Coverage from Winston & Strawn, Kelley Drye and Deceptive Design documents the case.

The general lesson outlives the case: an App Store subscription cancels in two taps and nobody can charge you afterwards. A card subscription cancels when the company processes it. That difference is invisible while you are happy and decisive when you are not.

Everything in FastBreak is billed by Apple through your Apple ID. There is no web checkout and no card on file with us.

3. Separate the timer from the programme

Here is the honest split of what each thing is worth paying for:

| What you want | What you need | |---|---| | Know when the eating window closes | A timer with a widget, Live Activity and watch complication. Should be free. | | Not break the streak | Streak tracking and a reminder you can tolerate. Should be free. | | Someone to talk to about food | A coach. This is what costs money. | | Calories and macros | Fast food logging. Photo scanning helps. | | Psychology of overeating | A programme, or a book, or a therapist. |

Most people leaving Noom want the first two rows, which is also the case for people leaving Simple.

In FastBreak the timer with fasting zones, full history, stats, widgets, Live Activities and the Apple Watch app are all free. Food photo scanning and the AI coach are the paid parts.

4. Check what happens to your data

Noom needs an account, because a coaching programme needs your history on its servers. A fasting timer does not.

FastBreak asks for no registration -- no email, no password, no profile. Your history lives on the device and backs up through your own iCloud, plus to our server against an anonymous id so a new phone can restore it. That id is not tied to your name or email, and Settings has a delete-everything button. Being straight about the one exception: the AI coach sends your question to our server, which calls a language model, so it is not on-device. If you never open the coach, nothing is sent.

Cancelling Noom properly

Because the charge can live in three different places, cancel in the right one or it will not stick:

Signed up on noom.com (most people): cancel in Noom's own subscription portal, or contact support and ask for written confirmation with a case number. Then check your card statement the following month. Deleting the app does nothing.
Signed up through the App Store: Settings → your name → Subscriptions, select, cancel.
Charged after cancelling: if the charge came via Apple, use reportaproblem.apple.com. If it came via card, dispute it with your bank; keep the confirmation you asked for above.

The bottom line

Noom is a real programme and some people get real value from it. But if your last month of use was checking a timer and stepping on a scale, you are paying about $70 a month for something that costs nothing.

Work out which row of that table you are in. Then pay through the App Store, keep your history somewhere you control, and never subscribe to anything you cannot cancel in two taps.