Health and fitness apps guide you to better behavior and typically cheer you on. But Pact rewards you with cold hard cash. This mobile app, which requires a credit card and PayPal account to use, lets you form a pact for your health, either to work out a prescribed number of times per week or to eat right. If you fail, you get charged a minimum of $5. Succeed, and you get a cut of the pot. The app is very clear in its rules, including instructions for getting out of your pact temporarily or permanently. If money moves you, Pact is an excellent fitness app. It's a PCMag Editors' Choice.
How Pact Works
Pact is free to download, but you do need to provide a credit card or PayPal account to wager and earn money, and you can only cash out via PayPal. After you set up a Pact account, you create an agreement, promising to workout a certain number of days per week or walk 10,000 steps every day, eat five servings of fruits and vegetables, or log the calories you consume each day using MyFitnessPal. You are allowed to participate in more than one pact at a time.
The rules for each pact are made very clear as you use the app, but I'll summarize them here.
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Every pact lasts a week, running Monday through midnight Sunday in your local time zone. For gym pacts, you choose how many days per week you want to work out. Every workout must be a minimum of 30 minutes long. Only one workout counts per day.
You can verify that you've worked out a few ways. One is to log in at a gym using your phone's GPS. Using GPS to certify activity is one of the primary features of the app. When you arrive at the gym and launch the app, it will look for nearby gyms, and you can log your presence. If your gym doesn't appear (mine didn't), you can draw a rectangle on a map around the gym to enter it. That entry will be reviewed by someone at Pact within a few days.
If you work out at home or at an office, which won't show up as a gym on a map, the Pact app can tap into the motion tracker in your phone to verify you're moving your body for at least 30 minutes. The same thing goes for general outdoor activities, such as running or bicycling. Once again, the motion tracker data will confirm that you were actually on the move. Swim workouts won't count unless you have a compatible tracker that can record that activity or a waterproof case for your phone that lets track your motions while you're in the pool.
For 10,000 steps to count as your exercise, you need to use a compatible fitness tracker and app, or to enable a step-counting feature within the Pact app. The list of compatible apps comprises Fitbit, UP by Jawbone, Moves, Map My Fitness, and Runkeeper.
I wear a Garmin Vivoactive and a Misfit Ray, and I was a little disappointed that their companion apps were not yet supported. Polar is another fitness and sports tracking device maker whose app is not supported.
One thing you can't do is manually log that you worked out without any data to support it. With real money at stake, you need to prove you're actually at the gym or exercising.
The food logging Pact requires that you log at least three meals (and snacks count as a meal) and a total of 1,200 calories per day using MyFitnessPal. The final pact, called Veggie Pact, has you aim to eat five servings of vegetables and fruits every day, and you prove it by posting photos of your foods. Other users rate whether the food counts. The image must show a full serving, and it also must indicate that you're eating them. If you've been longing to see pictures of bananas with a single bite taken out of them, rest assured you'll find plenty on Pact.
Wagers and Earnings
Before you confirm your pact, you need to set a wager amount if you fail. The minimum is $5 per day that you're short on meeting your commitment. The default is $10 per day, but you can lower it to $5. If you wager $5 and miss three days, you'll be charged $15 for the week.
The payout amount changes every week based on the amount of cash collected from failures. In my first successful week, I earned $0.76. Surfing around a bit, I noticed that voracious people who max out their pacts (i.e., agree to six workouts per week and enroll in more than one pact) earn around $2 per week. It doesn't seem like much, but it adds up over time.
Pact, Inc., the company behind the app, takes 40 percent of the total before it doles out the leftover cash to those who have fulfilled their pacts. Everyone who succeeds gets a cut of the rest. Before you can get any money into your real bank account, you need to reach a balance of $10 in your Pact account, which could take a few weeks. You'll also end up paying any associated PayPal fees. But the money is real.
Pact in Practice
When I tested the app, I had to enter my gym because it didn't exist on the map. I work out in a fitness center that's in a basement with no Wi-Fi and no data signal, and I worried what might happen if the app lost GPS. After my first workout, I was relieved to see it didn't matter. As long as I logged in before I went underground, the app counted my total time at the gym as valid.
I also added a dance studio where I take a barre fitness class, and Pact initially rejected it. The company sent an email with instructions for how to dispute the rejection. I provided some additional information about the studio and my class, and within a day, Pact had added the new location and informed me that any previous workouts I had done there would count.
There's a timer in the app to make sure you hit your 30-minute minimum before you end your session. If you leave the gym before 30 minutes is up, the app can tell from the GPS, and your workout won't count.
After the first week, I didn't see any earnings in my app. I learned from Pact's help pages that it takes a few days for Pact to calculate everyone's success and failures. I wouldn't see any rewards until mid-week after the Sunday when my pact ended.
The only part of the process that confused me was that my very first week didn't count, and I think it's because I signed up for Pact midway through the week. Even though I completed my four workouts, that week didn't count.
Cheaters, Lapses, and Other Issues
It is possible to cheat with Pact, but it takes some work. You could log yourself as working out at the office gym when you're actually working instead. You could go to your gym and sit in the sauna for 30 minutes (in my mind, that's not necessarily not a workout) and Pact won't know the difference. You could take a 30-minute horse-drawn carriage ride through Central Park and pretend you're actually running the whole time, but you'll probably pay a whole lot more for the horses than you'll get paid for the phony workout. If you have the diligence to cheat four or five times a week, consistently, over enough weeks to earn your $10 payout, you probably also have the discipline to simply work out that much.
Pact gives you the opportunity to pause your pact in case of an injury, illness, travel, or any other reason that requires you to take time off of your commitment. Again, the instructions in the app are very clear from the day you sign up.
Surfing around the FAQs and help pages some more. I noticed people had questions about what to do if their fitness tracker failed and an activity didn't count. Most of the questions are answered thoroughly. Pact also has a members-only help forum for submitting specific questions about your account. I never encountered any problems during my testing, and I felt like the app was more than adequate at predicting what questions I would have before I had a chance to fully form them.
Get Fit, Earn Cash
An app that rewards and penalizes people for their behavior with real money can be scary. But Pact works because it is so clear about the rules of engagement. Whenever I use an app that's going to charge me, I need detailed information about how, when, and why I'll be charged. Pact is thorough, and that alone gives me a lot of confidence in it. It's also been around for a number of years, so it's had ample opportunity to learn from its users how to make the experience as strong as it can be.
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