The best free ADHD apps, and what free actually means for each one

The honest answer to what's actually free looks different for every app marketed as a free ADHD tool. How We Feel is free with nothing to ever upgrade to. Goblin Tools is free if you use the web version, and a small one-time fee if you want the iOS app. Finch gives you a real, generous free tier before a genuine paywall shows up behind it. This site's own free tool has no paid version to compare it to yet, since none exists. None of that makes any of them dishonest on its own: a free tier that funds a bigger paid product is a completely normal, reasonable business. The one dishonest move would be calling something free and then hiding what it actually costs, so that's exactly what the rest of this page states plainly, one app at a time.

How We Feel: free with no catch at all

How We Feel holds a 4.9-star rating across roughly 30,000 App Store ratings and an Apple Editors' Choice award, built with Yale University's Center for Emotional Intelligence^[1]. It's a nonprofit, funded entirely by donations, with no subscription anywhere in the app: no Pro tier, no locked feature, nothing behind a paywall. It isn't built specifically for ADHD, but if being completely free, permanently, with nothing to ever upgrade to, is the single thing that matters most to you, this is the one app on this page that asks for nothing, ever.

Goblin Tools: free on the web, a small fee for the iOS app

Goblin Tools holds a 4.8-star rating on its App Store listing^[2]. Its own web version at goblin.tools stays completely free, kept that way through sponsorships: its own navbar reads "kept free by our sponsors." The iOS app costs $1.99 once, not a subscription, and an optional Pro tier ($3.99 a month or $39.99 a year) only adds sync and history on top of a tool that already works fully without it. If using it in a browser instead of a dedicated app is fine with you, the core tool costs nothing at all.

Finch: a genuinely good free tier, with a real paywall behind it

Finch is free to download with a real free tier of its own: mood logging, journaling, breathing exercises, daily goals, and the bird companion that makes the whole thing stick, backed by a 4.9-star rating across more than 758,000 App Store ratings and an Apple Editors' Choice award^[3]. That free tier is genuinely good, not a trick to get you in the door. It isn't free the way How We Feel is, though: Finch Plus costs $5.99 to $69.99 depending on the term, and it's fair to say the experience isn't static. A number of Finch's own recent App Store reviews point to growing frustration with how much more commercial and promotional the app has become over time. Good free tier, real upgrade behind it: that's the honest version.

This site's own Reset: free because there's nothing to sell yet

This site's free tool, the Reset, has no account, no trial, and no credit card, and takes about two minutes: pick one of six starting points in your own words (a message that went unanswered, a mistake you're replaying, feeling in over your head), and it walks you through naming what's happening and one small next step. It costs nothing because there's no paid tier built yet to charge for, not because of a generous free-tier decision the way Finch's is. A deeper, paid companion tool is planned for later and isn't available yet, so there's nothing to compare it against on price today, only this: nothing will be charged before a real number is written plainly on this page first.

How to actually choose between these

• If free, full stop, with nothing to ever upgrade to, matters most to you, How We Feel is the clearest match here. It's free for everyone, always.
• If you don't mind using a browser instead of a dedicated app, Goblin Tools on the web costs nothing, and its iOS app is a small one-time fee, not a subscription.
• If you want a generous free tier today and don't mind a real paywall somewhere down the line, Finch is a well-built, well-loved choice, as long as you go in expecting Finch Plus to be a genuine upgrade, not a formality.
• If you want something free for one hard moment right now, with no account and nothing to commit to either way, this site's Reset is built for exactly that.