The pitch
Renpho's Lynx smart ring costs $170 with no subscription fees. That's $180 less than an Oura Ring 4 before you factor in Oura's mandatory $70 annual subscription. For enterprise wellness programs evaluating wearables, that cost difference compounds across deployments.
What it does
The Lynx tracks sleep stages, heart rate, and basic activity. Battery lasts seven days. It's waterproof. The charging case looks like a skipping stone. That's about it.
Side-by-side testing against an Oura Ring 4 revealed competent baseline data capture - sleep duration and heart rate matched closely enough. Where it falls apart: no workout tracking, no temperature sensing, no stress metrics, no recovery scores worth trusting.
The subscription-free landscape
The real question: Is $170 with no features better than $299 with decent ones?
RingConn's Gen 2 ($299) and Gen 2 Air ($199) offer 10-12 day battery life and fuller feature sets without subscriptions. Amazfit's Helio Ring ($150-199) adds their Aura AI analysis at no extra cost. Ultrahuman Ring Air ($349) matches Oura's weight class at 2.4-3.6g and includes metabolic tracking - though it's currently import-banned in the US over Oura's patent dispute.
For corporate wellness deployments, these subscription-free options reduce long-term costs. The catch: reliability gaps, buggy apps, and limited integration with enterprise health platforms remain common across the category.
Who this is for
First-time smart ring users curious about the form factor. Users who want passive sleep tracking without paying Oura forever. That's a narrow slice.
Anyone needing workout tracking, temperature insights, or actionable recovery metrics should look elsewhere. The Lynx handles basics competently but stops there - and at $170, "competent basics" isn't the value proposition it might seem when RingConn offers more capability for $30-130 more.
Worth noting
Oura Ring 4 remains the category leader for good reason - polished software, clinical-grade insights, reliable workout detection. Its subscription model is expensive, but the delta between "free data" and "useful data" matters more than the price tag suggests.
The smart ring market is sorting itself into two tiers: premium devices with premium insights (Oura, Samsung Galaxy Ring for Galaxy users), and budget alternatives that sacrifice depth for upfront savings. The Lynx sits awkwardly between being too expensive to ignore its limitations and too limited to justify its price.
We'll see if that middle ground holds.