Finch
Self-care app where looking after a virtual pet bird rewards you for looking after yourself.
About
Finch turns self-care into a gentle game. You adopt a virtual bird and care for it by completing real-life goals like journaling, breathing exercises, drinking water, or getting out of bed. Completed goals give your bird energy for daily adventures, and the app layers in mood tracking, guided reflections, breathing sessions, mental health quizzes, and a friends feature for sending encouragement. The tone is deliberately low-pressure: there is no guilt for unfinished tasks, only celebration of what you did.
The app is made by Finch Care Public Benefit Corporation and is free with a generous free tier and no ads. Finch Plus, the paid upgrade, is listed around $9.99 a month or $69.99 a year with regional offers varying. It has passed 10 million installs on Android alone with a 4.88 average rating, which makes it one of the most widely used self-care apps in its category. Its wellness claims are modest lifestyle claims rather than clinical treatment claims.
What it can do
- Virtual pet care loop
- Daily goal and habit tracking
- Mood journal and mood trends
- Guided breathing exercises
- Mental health quizzes
- Friend tree and good vibes
- First Aid Kit for rough moments
- Micropets and seasonal events
Setup
Download from the App Store or Google Play, hatch your bird, and set your first daily goals.
Prerequisites
Smartphone; account via email or Google sign-in.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 6/10
Scored 6/10 (TIER metrics, metrics-v1). Evidence: the official site confirms the free core tier, the Finch Plus model, and the bird-care loop; store data confirms 10M+ Android installs and a 4.88 rating; 2026 reviews confirm $9.99/month and $69.99/year list pricing. Strengths: massive real adoption, high user ratings, honest modest claims, public-benefit corporate structure. Docked for: (1) no clinical efficacy studies; wellbeing effects are engagement-based, not therapeutic; (2) closed-source app, pricing offers vary by region. License: proprietary.
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 9.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 8.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 3.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 6.0/10
- · 10M+ Android installs, 4.88 average rating confirm broad real adoption
- · Made by Finch Care Public Benefit Corporation
- · Efficacy claims are lifestyle-level, not clinical; no RCT evidence
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.