Smart rings are having a real moment, small enough to forget you’re wearing them, capable enough to replace a smartwatch for people who just want sleep and activity tracking without a screen on their wrist. The Oura Ring 5 sits at the center of that trend as the category’s best-known name, and it’s a genuinely well-reviewed piece of hardware. What doesn’t always make it into the glowing coverage: the $399 sticker price is not the real cost of using it. A separate $5.99-a-month membership is required, not optional, and most of what the ring is good for lives behind that subscription.
What $399 Buys You
The base Silver and Black finishes start at $399, with premium finishes, Gold, Stealth, Brushed Silver, and Deep Rose, running $499. That’s already a $50 jump over the previous Ring 4’s $349 starting price. On the hardware side, the increase buys something real: the Ring 5 is roughly 40% smaller than its predecessor, down to 6.1mm wide and 2.28mm thick from 7.9mm and 2.8mm, and as light as 2 grams. Oura also quadrupled the brightness of the ring’s internal sensor LEDs while reducing the number of light pathways from 18 to 12, which the company says improves nighttime heart rate variability accuracy by 12% and workout accuracy by up to 19%.
Real-world battery testing landed at 7 days in the first week and roughly 6 days in subsequent weeks, a bit short of Oura’s official 6-to-9-day claim but still a meaningful upgrade over the Ring 4’s 5-to-8-day range. None of that is in dispute; the hardware itself is a genuine, measurable improvement.
Where the Subscription Kicks In
Here’s the part that changes the math: Oura’s membership, $5.99 a month, isn’t a nice-to-have layer on top of a fully functional ring. It’s required to access most of what the ring tracks, sleep stages, readiness scores, detailed activity insights, the day-to-day feedback that’s the entire reason someone buys a ring like this instead of a plain fitness band. A $399 ring without the subscription is closer to an expensive step counter than the sleep-and-recovery tool it’s marketed as.
This isn’t a new complaint specific to the Ring 5; Oura has required a membership since the Ring 3, and the Ring 4 carried the same structure. What’s changed is the price of the hardware sitting on top of that recurring fee, which makes the same subscription question worth re-asking rather than assuming the answer hasn’t moved since the last time you looked at this category.
Run the math over ownership: a year of the membership adds roughly $72 on top of the hardware price, and two years adds around $144, pushing the real cost of a base-model Ring 5 past $470 in year one and past $540 by year two. That’s a genuinely different number than the one on the product page, and it’s worth knowing before comparing this ring’s price to a competitor’s sticker price as if they were measuring the same thing.
The Ring 5 Also Launched With New Health Features Behind the Same Gate
Alongside the hardware refresh, Oura introduced Health Radar, a set of proactive features including nighttime blood pressure trend signals and sleep-related breathing insights, plus a new GLP-1 insights feature that tracks dosing, side effects, and weight trends for people on medications like Ozempic or Wegovy. These are genuinely useful additions for the people they’re built for, and they’re a real reason some buyers will find the subscription worth paying. They also sit behind the exact same $5.99-a-month gate as everything else, adding to the case rather than changing it.
Where the Hardware Still Falls Short
Subscription cost aside, it’s worth knowing what the Ring 5 isn’t good at before assuming it can replace a fitness watch outright. One detailed independent review found the ring “woefully behind even the most basic wearables” for workout tracking specifically: no real-time heart rate display during exercise, heart rate data that doesn’t export to platforms like Strava, and workout files that reportedly fail to sync to third-party platforms entirely when an external heart rate sensor is paired. The same review found its VO2 max estimate significantly off from the wearer’s actual fitness level, and found no meaningful sleep-tracking advantage over competitors.
None of that makes the Ring 5 a bad product for what it’s actually built for, discreet, all-day sleep and recovery tracking without a watch on your wrist. It does mean anyone shopping for it specifically as a workout-tracking device, rather than a sleep-and-recovery tool, is likely to be disappointed regardless of the subscription question.
A Sizing Detail Worth Checking Before You Order
One practical change came with the smaller form factor: the Ring 5’s size range is narrower than its predecessor’s, running sizes 6 through 13 compared to the Ring 4’s 4-through-15 range. Oura still ships a free sizing kit before the actual ring, which is worth ordering and wearing for a day or two before committing, since a ring that’s slightly loose will produce worse sensor readings than one that fits snugly, and a ring outside the new, narrower size range simply isn’t available at all in the Ring 5 lineup. Anyone at either end of the sizing spectrum, particularly on the smaller end where the Ring 4 offered a size 4 and the Ring 5’s floor is now a size 6, should confirm fit before assuming an upgrade from an existing Oura ring will size the same way.
The No-Subscription Alternatives Worth Knowing About
If the monthly fee is the sticking point rather than the hardware itself, several real competitors skip it entirely. Samsung’s Galaxy Ring costs $299.99 with no subscription required at all. The RingConn Gen 2 runs $313.99 across all finishes and sizes, also subscription-free, and RingConn settled its patent dispute with Oura through a licensing agreement, which matters for anyone worried about buying into a product that could get pulled from sale over IP litigation. Ultrahuman’s Ring Air, at $349 with no subscription, is the closest direct price comparison to Oura’s base tier, but it comes with a real caveat: it’s currently subject to an ITC import ban, a genuine risk factor for long-term availability and support that’s worth weighing against its lower sticker price.
Doing the Real Comparison
| Oura Ring 5 | Samsung Galaxy Ring | RingConn Gen 2 | Ultrahuman Ring Air | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $399-$499 | $299.99 | $313.99 | $349 |
| Subscription | $5.99/month, required | None | None | None |
| Year-1 real cost | ~$470-$570 | $299.99 | $313.99 | $349 |
| Known caveat | Weak workout tracking | — | — | Subject to ITC import ban |
Laid out that way, the actual gap between Oura and its subscription-free competitors is bigger than the hardware prices alone suggest. Samsung’s Galaxy Ring costs about $99 less than a base Oura Ring 5 up front, and that gap widens to roughly $170 once a single year of the Oura membership is factored in, growing further every year the subscription keeps running.
So Is the Subscription Worth It
For someone specifically drawn to Oura’s sleep-tracking reputation and the newer Health Radar or GLP-1 features, the subscription buys real, differentiated functionality that the no-subscription competitors genuinely don’t match yet, and $5.99 a month is a reasonable price for software some people will use daily. For someone shopping primarily on hardware and comparing sticker prices, treating $399 as the actual cost of ownership is the mistake worth avoiding; the honest comparison is against $470 in year one and climbing, not against a $299 or $349 ring that never adds a recurring bill at all.
*Source: DC Rainmaker — “Oura Ring 5 In-Depth Review: Smaller yes, but still worth it?”, with competitor pricing cross-checked against Wareable’s smart ring comparison coverage*
Photo credit: “smart ring pull” by conskeptical, licensed BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/). Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/32751486@N00/4609607540
