Refreshly vs Exist
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Refreshly
This app helps you build a consistent hydration routine with gentle reminders and subtle progress tracking. It focuses on small daily wins to create momentum without pressure, making it easy to log water and visualize your progress.
- Personalized daily hydration goals
- Fast one-tap logging
- Flexible units (oz, mL, L)
- Gentle reminder options
- 14-day history with progress visualization
- Subtle milestone reinforcement
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Refreshly - Stay hydrated. Feel your best. Refreshly is a calm, habit-first hydration app designed around consistency, not streak pressure. Instead of loud rewards or aggressive reminders, Refreshly focuses on small daily wins that build momentum over time. Set a daily goal, log water in seconds, and track steady progress with subtle visual feedback designed to reinforce the habit — not overwhelm you. Features • Personalized daily hydration goals • Fast one-tap logging with customizable amounts • Flexible units (oz, mL, L) • Gentle reminder options for sipping and logging • 14-day history with progress visualization • Subtle milestone reinforcement to keep momentum steady Refreshly helps you build a sustainable hydration routine, one sip at a time.
Exist
This app helps you reduce smartphone usage by rewiring habit loops and providing escape hatches from endless scrolling. It blocks distracting apps during scheduled times and offers an 'Exist Mode' to temporarily disable smartphone functions.
- Blocks distracting apps
- Rewires habit loops
- Escape hatch from doomscrolling
- Protects special time windows
- Go analog with Exist Mode
- Uses behavioral psychology
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The easy way to use your phone less. Exist blocks distracting apps when you want to focus, but it does more than that… It gradually removes your itch to use a smartphone, no willpower required. Based on behavioral psychology, Exist counteracts many of the psychological tricks that tech companies used to make their platforms so addictive in the first place. Specifically… EXIST WORKS BY: 1. Rewiring Habit Loops (AKA, no more compulsive app opening) Part of what makes certain apps and websites so irresistible is that they substitute for real human desires (excitement, belonging, love, etc.). The more you understand what's behind your cravings, the easier it becomes to resist them, and eventually, the less they appear at all. So, just before you open one of the apps that you'd like to use less, Exist will intercept you with a chance to think about why you're opening the app at all. Exist will then give you a chance to bail, plus an alternate idea for a healthier way to scratch your TRUE itch. (Outside your blocking schedules, you won't be hard-locked out of any app until you hit your self-imposed limit for the day.) 2. Providing an "Escape Hatch" from Doomscrolls (AKA, no more randomly losing two hours to the Feed) Ever opened your phone for just a second, then lost two hours to scrolling? This is possible thanks to "bottomless feeds." With Exist, when you open one of your chosen "problem apps," you'll choose a time allotment, and when it's up, you can abandon the doomscroll with one tap. Users have loved this feature so far. 3. Protecting Special Time Windows (AKA, get your nights and mornings back) If there's ONE hack for better health in today's world, it might be simply getting your phone away from your face right before bed and right after waking up. Inside of Exist, you can create schedules in which any combination of apps that you choose will automatically be blocked. Plenty of other apps do this, but Exist offers a feature designed specifically for the hours surrounding sleep. 4. Letting You Go Analog (AKA, pretending like it's 2010 again) Put your phone into "Exist Mode" to block all the phone functions that arrived with smartphones. EXIST IS ALWAYS EVOLVING: We are committed to helping people reclaim their brains from the internet. We are constantly working with our subscribers to make the product as useful as possible. We love talking to fans, and you can submit a request for any feature inside of Settings. MORE INFO: Exist uses Apple's Screen Time system to see and limit app use on your device. Subscriptions are 7 days free, then $59.99/year or $9.99/month. Cancel anytime in Settings. Terms of Use: https://useexist.com/exist-terms
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is in-app purchases: Refreshly at none against Exist's 2. Exist's advantage is ratings volume (10 vs 2). On price, rating, update cadence and ads there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Exist sells 2 in-app purchases, starting at $9.99 per month. Refreshly asks for nothing beyond the download.
On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 5.0 for Refreshly against 5.0 for Exist. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Exist has 10 ratings behind it against 2, so its average is the more settled of the two.
Refreshly ships an update every 9 days, Exist every 2 weeks. The most recent releases landed on October 31, 2026 and November 9, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Refreshly | Exist |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 5.0 (2 ratings) | 5.0 (10 ratings) |
| Positive reviews | — | 100.0% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | 2 | 10 — better |
| Update frequency | Every 9 days — better | Every 2 weeks |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No — better | Yes |
| Monetization | Free — better | Freemium |
| Devices | iPhone, iPod — better | iPhone |
| Requires iOS | 15.1 — better | 16.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 38 MB | 260 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | CHAD DEAN WESSENDORF | John Stringfield |
Customer experience
Refreshly
Exist
In-app purchases
Refreshly
No in-app purchases
Exist
- Exist Monthly7 Days trial$9.991 Month
- Exist Yearly7 Days trial$59.991 Year









