Slowpulse for iPhone & Apple Watch

Your body notices stress before you do.

Slowpulse learns what your heart does when you're calm — then tells you when it stops doing that, and walks you back down with a breath.

Free to download · no account required · iOS 18 and watchOS 11 or later

1

Inhale

4 IN · 7 HOLD · 8 OUT — the real cycle, running now

How does it work?

Built on your baseline, not a population average.

A resting heart rate of 72 means nothing on its own. It means something if yours is normally 58.

It learns your normal

Slowpulse reads up to two weeks of resting heart rate and HRV from Apple Health. About three days of wear is enough to start scoring — overnight especially.

It watches for drift

Your watch records heart rate every few minutes and HRV a few times a day. Slowpulse weighs each against your baseline — and by how recently it was measured, so last night’s reading isn’t treated as describing right now.

It knows exertion isn't stress

A hard workout raises your heart rate too. Slowpulse discounts the score using active energy and exercise minutes, so a run doesn't read as panic.

It gives you the breath

A guided 4-7-8 cycle with haptics on your wrist. Inhale for four, hold for seven, exhale for eight. No screen required.

On the wrist

The part that matters happens without your phone.

The Apple Watch app reads heart rate and HRV directly, shows your current score, and runs the full breathing exercise with a distinct haptic for each phase — one tap up to inhale, a click to hold, one tap down to exhale.

  • Live heart rate and HRV from the wrist sensor
  • Your stress score mirrored from iPhone
  • Guided 4-7-8 with per-phase haptics
  • Works while the phone stays in your pocket
The Slowpulse breathing pacer on iPhone, a ring mid-expansion with a countdown and the word Inhale.
Slowpulse on Apple Watch showing a stress score of 50, marked Elevated.

Show your working

See exactly why your score is your score.

Tap the number and Slowpulse shows you its arithmetic: how many points came from your heart rate, how many from your variability, and how far each sits outside your own normal. It says when a workout discounted a reading, and when a variability sample was too old to count. Nothing is rounded away — the parts add up to the number on the ring.

  • Every figure measured against your own resting numbers
  • Exercise subtracted, because exertion is not stress
  • Stale readings lose their weight instead of being carried forward
  • Worked out on your iPhone, which is why it can be shown at all
The Slowpulse score explainer, breaking a score of 50 into 33 points from heart rate and 17 from heart rate variability.

Privacy

Nothing leaves your device. There is nowhere for it to go.

Slowpulse has no account, no server and no analytics. Your heart data is read from Apple Health, scored on your iPhone, and stored on your iPhone. The app makes no network requests of any kind — the only thing it talks to is Apple's own payment system, when you choose to subscribe.

  • No sign-up, no email, no password
  • No backend to breach — none exists
  • No third-party analytics or tracking SDKs
  • Delete the app and the data goes with it
Slowpulse Settings listing what leaves the device: no account, no servers, no analytics, no uploads.

A stress app that phones home is a strange thing to trust.

You can verify the claim the boring way: put your iPhone in Airplane Mode. Everything still works.

Test the claim yourself

Our pricing plans

Checking your score is always free.

You only pay for the part that works when you aren't thinking about it — being told, and being able to look back.

Free

$0

No account required

  • Check your stress score any time
  • See exactly how that score was calculated
  • Guided 4-7-8 breathing, iPhone and Watch
  • Your five most recent events
  • Everything stays on-device
Join the waitlist
Best value

Premium

$29.99

per year · renews annually

  • Everything in Free
  • Stress alerts the moment you drift
  • Complete history and trends
  • Still entirely on-device
Join the waitlist

Lifetime

$79.99

once · no subscription

  • Everything in Premium
  • One payment, kept forever
  • All future updates included
  • Nothing to remember to cancel
Join the waitlist

Prices in USD. Payment is charged to your Apple Account; cancel any time in Settings. See Terms.

Why it's built this way

HRV is unusually revealing.

Over weeks, heart rate variability sketches your sleep, your drinking, your illnesses and your bad days at work. Most apps in this category upload it, because uploading it is what makes a dashboard, a leaderboard and a recommendation engine possible.

Slowpulse doesn't do those things, and so it doesn't need the data anywhere but your phone. The scoring is a handful of arithmetic on numbers Apple Health already holds — it does not need a model in a data centre to run. Keeping it local wasn't really a feature decision so much as the absence of a reason to do otherwise.

Start with the free tier.

Checking your score and the guided 4-7-8 breath cost nothing, and never will. Upgrade only if you want to be told without looking.

Join the waitlist

Questions? hello@slowpulseapp.com