Wearable APIs charge per user. Here's what that costs at scale.
Quick math.
SaaS wearable APIs: $0.50-2.00 per user per month. Sounds fine at 100 users.
At 10,000 users: $5,000-20,000/month. Just for data access. No scoring, no AI. Just moving heart rate from point A to point B.
At 100,000 users: $50,000-200,000/month. For data plumbing.
Open Wearables: you pay for your own infra. $200-500/month for a typical startup, whether you have 1,000 or 100,000 users. Data layer, scoring, AI reasoning, all MIT licensed.
We think the margin should be in what you build on top, not in moving JSON between a wearable and your database.
We're on Product Hunt today. If you're building anything health-related, check it out:
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This breakdown really puts things into perspective for me. I’ve underestimated how fast costs scale with users. Makes me rethink whether I should rely on third-party APIs long term
Open Wearables
@judith_wang Per-user pricing is fine at 100 users. At 10,000 it becomes a business model problem. Self-hosted means you pay for infrastructure only: at that scale, the difference is typically $200-500/month versus $5,000-20,000/month with the major third-party providers.