Prices checked 5 September 2026.
Alpha Progression is a good app. This one was built by somebody who paid for it, used it for sixteen months, and then wrote an importer for its export format — so the comparison below is specific rather than dismissive.
Alpha Progression charges $79.99 a year, every year, for a deterministic progression engine. Steady Increment charges $59.99 once for one that also models the equipment in front of you, and it imports your Alpha Progression history so you keep every set you have already logged.
It is a real engine, not a logger with a graph. It generates plans, it progresses them, it has a large exercise library, and it has been shipping long enough to be dependable. Its 10RM figures are consistent and its export is complete. If you are happy paying yearly for it, it is not a bad deal — it is a good app at a subscription price.
It also has things this app does not: a longer track record, a much larger user base, and years of polish. This is a new app. That is a real difference and it is worth weighing.
This is the thing that made the app exist. A progression engine that says “187.5 lb” to somebody standing at a machine whose stack moves in tens has not finished the job. Steady Increment models the bar, the plates the gym actually stocks, and each machine’s own smallest jump — which it infers from your logged weights rather than asking you to configure it.
On a rack holding only 45s and 25s, asked for 200, it will tell you 195, because that is reachable and 200 is not. Machines that stop at 275 lb never get asked for 280. Drop sets drop to a pin that exists.
Both apps notice a stall. This one says which of three things to do about it — deload, change the rep range, or swap the movement — rather than leaving you to work out what the flag means.
Treadmill, bike, rower, stair and elliptical each get their own progression rules, their own interval structures and their own console units. Duration and intensity are advanced in alternation rather than together, deliberately, because pushing both at once is how people wreck an aerobic base.
Every number comes from the engine. The coach reads them and tells you what it makes of the session. There is no field in which a language model could return a weight, so a recommendation is always reproducible. Upgrading that coach to a language model is $4.99 a month and entirely optional.
Two years of Alpha Progression is $159.98. Three is $239.97, and it keeps going. $59.99 is $59.99.
| Alpha Progression | Steady Increment | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $12.99/mo or $79.99/yr | $59.99 once · AI coach $4.99/mo, optional |
| Recurring? | Yes, indefinitely | No. Nothing renews. |
| Progression engine | Yes | Yes |
| Snapped to loadable weights | — | Yes — bar, plates and per-machine increments |
| Learns each machine’s increment from your log | — | Yes, offered rather than applied silently |
| Exact plate solve on a half-stocked rack | — | Yes |
| Names the stall remedy | Flags the stall | Names which of three fixes |
| Multiple gyms with separate equipment | — | Yes |
| Machine cardio with its own progression | — | 5 machines, at parity with lifting |
| Partner’s training, set by set | — | Yes, never merged into yours |
| Imports from the other apps | — | Alpha Progression, Strong, Hevy |
| Free tier | Library; no recommendations, no charts | Full log, full history, every chart, unlimited custom exercises |
| Free trial of the engine | — | First 10 sessions |
| Export your data | Yes | Yes — CSV and JSON, never gated |
| Track record | Years, large user base | New |
| Platforms | Android and iOS | Android only, for now |
Export your workouts from Alpha Progression and open the file here. Sixteen months — 2,846 sets across 87 distinct exercises — imports with nothing dropped and every exercise matched to the library without asking.
There is a nice property in this one. Alpha Progression’s displayed
10RM is raw Epley: weight × (1 + reps/30) × 0.75.
Because the export carries those figures, an imported set can be checked
against the number Alpha Progression itself reported for it. If the parser
ever mis-read a row, the arithmetic would disagree. The import
verifies itself against the app it came from.
Exercises are matched on name and equipment, which matters more than it sounds: an Alpha Progression export uses “Lateral Raises” for three different exercises — machine, dumbbell and band. Merging them would put 145 lb machine sets and 20 lb dumbbell sets on one strength curve and quietly ruin both.
How switching works, step by step →
If you are on iPhone, this app does not exist for you yet. If you need a social feed or a watch app, it does not have either. And if Alpha Progression is working for you and the yearly price does not bother you, there is no reason to move — you would be trading a mature app for a new one to gain equipment modelling and a one-time price.
The case for switching is narrow and specific: you want the engine to account for the equipment you actually train on, and you would rather pay once.