“Provide a stress-free and peaceful life through an online meditation platform.”
Only a few years back, people used to block app notifications, keep the Airplane Mode on, and silence their devices to control their anxiety and stay mentally active. But, due to advanced innovations in mental wellness, this scenario has now changed.
Various self-care and mindfulness tools like Calm help people to manage their stress levels through mood trackers, training sessions, and expert talks. Additionally, they provide various breathing exercises for anxiety and distress management.
According to a standard report, more than 36 million Americans practice meditation daily, which resulted in a revenue of $2.4 billion in 2025. This is a great opportunity for businesses to create a meditation app like Calm and target people who are suffering from mental stress.
They need an effective guide on the Calm-like app development process that tells everything, from benefits to monetization.
This blog brings valuable information, such as features and cost factors that entrepreneurs require to develop a meditation app like Calm. So, let’s move further and first understand the present situation of the meditation app market across the globe.
Current Global Market of Meditation Apps
Businesses can build a successful meditation app like Calm by understanding the market deeply through revenue growth, user adoption, and market share. Here, we will look at fitness app market statistics for the meditation app segment with some interesting facts.
- The current meditation app market revenue is $2.7 billion in 2026, with North America having 43.2% market share.
- This volume will increase to 7 billion by 2033 with an expected growth rate of 14.7% CAGR between 2026 and 2033.
- More than 60% of revenue is generated by the free app segment, in which iOS apps have a 48.8% market share worldwide.
- From a regional perspective, India is growing at a 21.9% CAGR rate, followed by China with 20.1% and Japan with 19.8% rates, respectively.
- Among all other segments, the Yoga subscription market has a whopping share of 38.2%, with the USA having more than 20% overall.
These figures show the potential of the meditation app business, allowing entrepreneurs to invest more. By developing a stress relief app, you can easily reach your future goals because the industry is favorable for growth and profit-making.
How Does the Calm App Work?
Before moving forward, let’s understand the working of modern-day meditation apps like Calm in this section. They have a simple interface and easy-to-use features that make them a perfect choice for users:
1. User Creates an Account
A mind care app first allows users to create an account by asking for their details, such as name and contact number. It provides a personalized dashboard that shows days, sessions, and other menus.
2. Explore App Content
Now, users can explore the content offered by the mindfulness app, such as the expert corner and daily wellness insights. Additionally, people can follow professional trainers and subscribe to their channels.
3. Choose Meditation Sessions
Users can easily select mindfulness exercises according to their preferences or recommended programs. The top yoga apps provide recorded videos, guided tips, and other facilities to enhance mental stability.
4. Set Practice Reminders
After choosing a program, users can now set personalized reminders for relaxation and focus training. This helps them to practice meditation daily through updated notifications, email, and messages.
5. Track Daily Progress
A Calm-clone application allows users to track their progress regularly through leaderboards and milestones. This helps them to achieve their mental wellness goals and even become an expert.
Benefits of Developing a Yoga and Meditation App
It’s time to build a meditation app like Calm, as it improves mental strength and enhances productivity for users. Additionally, it allows businesses to generate profitable revenue and increase brand visibility:
For Users
1. Improved Mental Well-being
A mobile app for yoga and meditation provides various stress management techniques that improve mental wellness. It helps users to easily focus, enhance thought processes, and make the right decisions.
2. Convenient Practice Sessions
The app allows users to participate in various sleep meditation programs, such as podcasts and yoga sessions. This enhances their sleep cycle, maintains physical balance, and improves work efficiency.
3. Personalized Wellness Journey
A mind training app helps users with personal training sessions based on their health issues and symptoms. It offers quick wellness recommendations that transform personality and mental health.
For Businesses
1. Recurring Revenue Opportunities
An entrepreneur can balance the cost to develop a meditation app like Calm through various revenue streams, such as subscription plans. They enable profitable growth through increased user engagement.
2. Growing Market Demand
It is beneficial to create a Calm-like app because the demand for stress management is increasing. You should develop the best meditation app that offers relaxing features and personal training sessions.
3. Strong User Engagement & Retention
Business investors use Calm app development services like design and integration to engage a large number of users. Additionally, it also helps them to retain customers through various loyalty programs.
Exciting Features of Calm-Like Meditation Apps
The key features of mobile applications like Calm include practice sessions, relaxing sound effects, and mood tracking. They attract users and engage them for a long time by enhancing their mental wellness:
1. Guided Meditation Sessions
A guided meditation app provides step-by-step audio sessions to help users reduce stress and improve focus. These practice sessions are based on different user groups, such as beginners or professionals.
2. Sleep Stories Content
A calmness app offers bedtime stories that are narrated in soft voices to help users relax their minds and fall asleep early. This feature is designed to reduce anxiety and improve the overall sleep quality.
3. Virtual Breathing Exercises
Users can reduce stress through a breathing exercise app that provides interactive techniques, like inhale and exhale patterns. These exercises regularly promote relaxation, mental clarity, and emotional balance.
4. Daily Mindfulness Programs
The best health apps deliver structured programs, encouraging users to practice focused meditation. A mindfulness app like Calm builds long-term habits that enhance emotional well-being and concentration.
5. Relaxing Music & Sounds
Various mental wellness apps include a library of calming music, nature sounds, and ambient tracks. This creates a peaceful environment for meditation or sleep and helps users to easily relieve daily stress.
6. Custom Meditation Timer
A flexible meditation timer with music allows users to set session length, background sounds, and interval bells. Additionally, it also supports various personalized meditation routines without guided instructions.
7. Mood Tracking Feature
Different apps similar to Calm allow users to monitor their daily emotions and identify patterns regularly. This feature promotes self-awareness among users and supports better mental health management.
8. Download & Offline Access
An app similar to Calm provides offline access that enables users to download sessions, music, and sleep stories. This feature ensures better convenience without an internet connection, enhancing comfort.
Some Advanced Features of Mindfulness Applications
To build an app like Calm, you should know some more features that use AI and IoT for a better experience. They provide personalized and gamified plans with wearable integration services:
1. Predictive User Personalization
By using AI in healthcare, it is easy to analyze user behavior, mood patterns, and preferences. Mobile applications like Calm deliver custom meditation sessions and wellness plans for better engagement.
2. Voice & Emotion Recognition
The voice and emotion recognition technology detects changes in tone and speech patterns. A mindfulness app like Calm recommends suitable exercises based on the user’s current emotional state.
3. Wearable Device Integration
A relaxation app connects with smartwatches and fitness trackers for tracking various health parameters. It monitors heart rate and sleep patterns to provide data-driven relaxation recommendations.
4. Gamification & Reward Points
This feature encourages consistent practice through badges, streaks, and achievement milestones. The daily meditation routine increases motivation and improves long-term user retention with fun.
5. AI-Powered Chatbots
AI-powered chatbots offer 24/7 customer support for meditation, stress management, and wellness. A Calm-like mobile app helps to create a personalized and interactive mindfulness experience for users.
How to Develop Mind Care Applications Like Calm?
In this section, we will study the process to create a meditation app like Calm, from planning to app maintenance. These are the generally used development stages that a business investor must know:
1. Market Research & Ideation
Business investors should start by understanding market demands, user interests, current trends, and budget needs. All these things are important to build a meditation app like Calm at a reasonable price. Additionally, they help in business documentation to streamline the development workflow.
This ideation stage allows entrepreneurs to go through various business models and analyze their loopholes. So, they can include the necessary features that target specific user concerns.
2. Hire Development Team
Now, you can hire a fitness app development company that has experience in the meditation app market segment. They offer customized and on-demand solutions based on your needs, user choices, and budget specifications. Additionally, the experts provide access to various advanced tools and technologies.
You can develop a meditation app like Calm by selecting Figma designers, backend engineers, and QA testers. It is also beneficial to choose market experts for brand promotion and app launch.
3. Create MVP Model
It’s time to create Minimum Viable Products that help in identifying essential mobile app features and functionalities. An MVP describes the user interaction with the app interface and the working of backend technologies. It helps to select the right tech stack with the necessary frameworks.
You can easily target various meditation app development solutions through an effective prototype. This allows you to cover the maximum number of users suffering from stress and anxiety issues.
4. Design User Interface
Mobile app design is a primary task that helps in building an interactive user interface with smooth navigation. For quick development, experts use the React Native or Flutter framework that involves built-in libraries. They can increase responsiveness by enhancing refresh rates and media outputs.
As an investor, you should wireframe the complete design through automated tools like Figma. This will help you to develop an app like Calm with a smart interface with user-centric elements.
5. Integrate APIs & Cloud Solutions
Once the design is completed, the developers must work on the integration of APIs, databases, and a cloud-based server. It is important to target various APIs for notifications, payments, and messaging. You must ensure that backend experts use MongoDB, Node.js, and Django for databases.
A Calm app development company provides advanced cloud-based solutions to centralize the information. This helps in smooth communication between users and experts over a secure channel.
6. App Testing and Security
This is an important stage where you must ensure that the mobile app works without any issues. An experienced QA tester uses various testing methods like usability, penetration, and beta. This helps in the analysis of Calm mobile app and provides suitable security solutions according to the budget.
The security expert must implement OAuth 2.0, MFA, and other encryption standards to ensure user safety. Additionally, debugging is also necessary to establish a secure network for communication.
7. Launch & Post-Development Support
The last step involves the launch of mobile applications on various platforms, such as Google or Apple stores. It is crucial to know about App Store Optimization (ASO) so you can easily manage market expenses. After launching, the most important thing is mobile app maintenance and feature updates.
It is based on the beta testing, where user feedback helps you to make possible changes. This may influence the cost to make a meditation app like Calm, but it ensures user trust and engagement.
Top Alternatives to the Calm App
No doubt, Calm is the most valuable and widely used application for meditation and mental wellness. But other apps like Calm deliver similar or more intuitive features that keep users engaged.
Maybe they have an interactive UI/UX design, or their services are more comfortable than Calm. Here, we are observing a table showing the top 10 Calm app alternatives with their downloads and ratings:
| Top 10 Calm Alternatives | Supported Devices | Downloads | Ratings |
| Insight Timer | Android & iOS | 10M+ | 4.7 |
| Meditopia | Android & iOS | 10M+ | 4.5 |
| Headspace | Android & iOS | 10M+ | 4.3 |
| Medito | Android & iOS | 1M+ | 4.9 |
| Serenity | Android & iOS | 1M+ | 4.8 |
| Waking Up | Android & iOS | 1M+ | 4.8 |
| Balance | Android & iOS | 1M+ | 4.6 |
| Sattva | Android & iOS | 1M+ | 4.5 |
| Zen | Android & iOS | 1M+ | 3.7 |
| Happier Meditation | Android & iOS | 500K+ | 4.5 |
Tech Stack Required for Calm-Like App Development
For developing an app like Calm, businesses require the latest tools and technologies that provide engaging user interfaces, responsive server logic, databases, and security.
A tech stack for mobile app development includes various programming languages, frameworks, APIs, and analytics tools. To understand them, we are providing a descriptive table in this section that will help you in the development of Calm-clone apps:
| Component | Tools/Technologies | Description |
| Mobile App Framework | Flutter, React Native, Swift (iOS), Kotlin (Android) | This enables cross-platform or native development for smooth meditation app experiences. |
| Frontend UI/UX Design | Figma, Adobe XD, Sketch | It is used to design intuitive, calming, and user-friendly app interfaces. |
| Backend Development | Node.js, Django, Ruby on Rails | It can handle user data, authentication, subscriptions, and API management. |
| Database Management | PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Firebase Firestore | It stores user profiles, meditation sessions, progress tracking, and content data. |
| Cloud Hosting | AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure | This provides scalable infrastructure for storing audio files and managing app traffic. |
| Audio Streaming & Storage | AWS S3, Cloudinary, Firebase Storage | It ensures secure storage and seamless streaming of meditation audio content. |
| User Authentication | Firebase Auth, OAuth 2.0, Auth0 | It manages secure login via email, phone, or social media accounts. |
| Payment Integration | Stripe, Razorpay, PayPal, In-App Purchases (Apple/Google) | This supports subscription plans and secure payment processing. |
| Push Notifications | Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), OneSignal | It allows you to send reminders for meditation sessions and daily mindfulness alerts. |
| Analytics & Performance Monitoring | Google Analytics, Firebase Analytics, Mixpanel | This can track user behavior, engagement metrics, and app performance. |
What is the Cost to Create a Meditation App Like Calm?
The cost to create a meditation app like Calm is dependent on various market factors like developers’ experience, location, and platform choice. If businesses select low parameters because of budget limitations, then the Calm app development cost ranges from $8,000 to $25,000.
The price may increase to $50,000 or more if the selected parameters are of high priority. In this case, you can use a cost calculator to understand various components and estimate the right cost. Let’s study the factors that affect the cost of making mobile apps in this section:
Project Complexity: Businesses can create meditation apps with AI and IoT if it is easy to expand the budget. But if there are cost restrictions, then it is important to reduce the overall app complexity.
Location Choice: It is beneficial to hire experts from the USA, but they offer an expensive development model. You can choose Indian app developers because they are affordable and provide quality services.
Experience of Developers: Senior developers provide complete support and security assistance at higher rates. Businesses can choose junior developers for small-scale projects and third-party app integrations.
Platform Selection: You can select Android because it is more affordable than iOS for making apps on a single platform. But for multi-platform development, you must use mobile hybrid frameworks like Flutter.
Hiring Model: Entrepreneurs can hire freelancers who provide flexibility for creating low-profile meditation apps. Agency developers are expensive but help in quick app deployment and quality.
Key Monetization Models for Apps Like Calm
Investors should make a meditation app like Calm to generate consistent revenue through various monetization models. These include subscriptions, advertisement services, and in-app stores:
1. Advertisement Model
It is one of the most common revenue models that allow businesses to run ad campaigns, host banners, and sponsor wellness brands. This helps to balance the cost to build a mobile app like Calm through revenue generation and profit-making.
2. Subscription Plans
You can offer multiple membership plans, such as monthly, annual, or lifetime, based on different user preferences. Various similar apps to Calm make income by offering premium features, like AI personalization and IoT device tracking, to subscribed members.
3. In-App Purchases
Businesses should develop a wellness app with an in-app store so users can easily purchase various products, like yoga mats and meditation music generators. With this, they can manage the cost to create a meditation app like Calm and make profits in return.
4. Corporate Wellness Partnerships
Several apps like Calm generate income by providing different wellness programs, like yoga sessions, expert talks, and community building for corporate employees. This enhances their work productivity and improves the overall efficiency for better results.
5. Data Monetization
Headspace is similar to Calm app, which uses customers’ information for delivering personalized suggestions and selling to wellness brands. It allows business investors to make revenue through data access and sharing based on user confirmation.
Why Should Businesses Choose Helpful Insight to Make Calm-Like Meditation Apps?
Now, it’s your turn to come up with a business proposal, listing important requirements and your need to create a meditation app like Calm. In this context, an experienced partner will help you to understand the market and make arrangements accordingly.
You can hire app developers to select the right tech stack and decrease the cost to build a meditation app like Calm. Additionally, they help with sophisticated design, integration, and maintenance services to easily deploy a mindfulness app.
Our professional experts may help you to implement various money-making strategies that help in revenue generation and balance the Calm-like meditation app development cost.
Lastly, the marketing and branding of meditation and yoga practice platforms are important to increase user engagement, ensure trust, and enhance service delivery. It’s time to keep an eye on your competitors to become successful.
FAQs
The Calm app is one of the most popular platforms for meditation and tracking mental health in the USA. It attracts millions of people in the country through the following services:
- The app connects with celebrities and wellness experts, which builds trust.
- It offers free trials, low admission costs, and discounts for new users.
- Calm provides daily reminders to boost user engagement and retention.
If you want to build an app similar to Calm with limited functionality, then the average time required is between 2 months and 5 months. The overall development time may expand to 8 months or more, as the app requirements increase. This duration is mainly dependent on the development process, budget specifications, and market needs.
Businesses should integrate AI technologies like ML models and NLP in meditation or yoga apps like Calm. Artificial Intelligence is beneficial for businesses because it helps them to attract more customers through the personalization of features. Additionally, it can automate sessions, recommend the right wellness programs, and predict health concerns.
On average, the maintenance cost is calculated as 15-20% of the overall development cost. For example, if the project’s total cost is $20,000, then the rate of maintenance is between $3,000 and $4,000, which can expand further. It involves various tasks like bug fixing, feature enhancement, and security checks that affect the budget.
To track mood swings, user behavior, and health issues, businesses use IoT and wearable integration. You can connect IoT-enabled devices with mobile apps through the following measures:
- You should know various parameters like heart rate, sleep cycles, and stress levels.
- It is important to use IoT sensors to adjust sessions based on the environmental data.
- Businesses must create smart homes to control lighting and sound during sessions.
