Medito

Headspace and Calm are venture-funded for-profits with annual subscriptions at $69.99/year and aggressive trial-to-paid conversion funnels. Medito is a UK-registered non-profit (Medito Foundation) with the explicit mission of making meditation accessible — every track is permanently free with no premium tier. Content quality is comparable: licensed teachers, professionally recorded sleep stories, structured beginner courses. The difference is that Medito does not have the celebrity content or production budget for the polished marketing flagship sessions (LeBron, Harry Styles, Matthew McConaughey on Calm).

Yes — Medito is permanently free with no premium tier, no in-app purchases, no time-limited trial and no ads. The Medito Foundation is funded entirely by donations from users and small philanthropic grants (Mozilla, the Awesome Foundation). The mobile app and PWA ship the full catalog to every user. The financial model is the same as Wikipedia's: voluntary donations rather than subscription. The source code is Apache 2.0 on GitHub, so you can self-host or fork if needed.

Insight Timer has the largest free meditation library (130,000+ sessions from 17,000+ teachers) but uses a freemium model — most courses and many guided sessions are paywalled in the $59.99/year Member Plus tier as of 2024. Medito's catalog is much smaller (~300 sessions) but every single one is free forever with no premium track. Insight Timer is better for variety-seekers who want hundreds of teachers and traditions; Medito is better for users who want a small, curated, permanently-free set without confronting a paywall every other session.

Yes — Medito is designed for offline use. The PWA lets you download individual sessions or entire courses to your device, after which they play with no network connection. The app shell is served from a service worker cache, so the UI itself loads instantly even offline. Your progress and favorites are stored locally; optional account-based sync exists for users who want to move between devices. The offline-first design is intentional: meditation is often practiced in airplane mode or in places with poor connectivity (retreats, planes, trains).

Medito is recommended by the UK's NHS apps library as a self-help mindfulness resource, has been featured in The Guardian, BBC and TechCrunch as the non-profit alternative to commercial meditation apps, and is endorsed by several university wellness programs as a free option for students. Insight Timer and Calm still dominate in terms of users (10M+ vs Medito's ~3M downloads), but Medito's mission-driven non-profit model makes it the preferred recommendation for institutions wary of pushing students into paid subscriptions.