Your hangover may not be covered on the basic plan

**Recovery event, unassisted, 1 x, Sunday — £3.20.** That is the line that would appear on the monthly statement of a basic-tier subscriber to the health coach inside one of the larger smart rings, under a pricing model the maker could introduce next year. The £3.20 buys no recovery; it records that a hangover took place.

Smart rings and watches now track resting heart rate, heart-rate variability, skin temperature and sleep, and turn them into a daily readiness or recovery score. These scores drop visibly after an evening of drinking, and some apps already flag likely alcohol consumption and suggest a lighter day. Makers have been moving guidance, coaching and interpretation features behind monthly subscription tiers, with the hardware alone showing less and less. AI health coaches that write personalised morning messages are being added to these tiers. Employer wellness programmes increasingly connect to wearable data, usually in aggregated or opt-in form.

A raised resting heart rate, a collapsed heart-rate variability and a skin temperature half a degree off baseline are, in the maker's documentation, the signature of a recovery event, and the ring would keep detecting these for nothing. Under the scheme, what would be charged is the acknowledgement. Basic subscribers would be notified that the event had been logged. Plus subscribers, at £11.99 a month, would receive guided hydration, a lowered step target and a tone the company describes as non-judgemental. Premium subscribers would receive discretion. The free tier would keep telling users their body is under strain, and nothing further, which the company calls its founding promise.

Rosa Feld, 34, a payroll administrator on the basic tier, would find the line item after a cousin's wedding. “I didn't ask it to notice,” she says. “It noticed, and then it charged me for noticing.” The notification that morning would read, in full: Your recovery score is 19. Upgrade to learn what this means for you. She upgraded at 6:40, which the app logged as a decision taken under physiological strain and offered to revisit with her once her score had returned to a level at which, in its words, she could be trusted with money.

The tiers would differ mainly in tone. Basic messages are described in the draft terms as factual. Plus messages are supportive. Premium messages would not mention the hangover at all, referring instead to a recovery day in any text that might be seen over a shoulder, and would switch the lock-screen summary to a picture of a lake. Each event would be scored from one to ten, with anything above six triggering an offer of assisted recovery at the assisted rate. Two events in a single weekend would be merged into one episode, for the user's convenience. A score of ten would be billed as two events.

Employers would enter through the Premium tier. Many workplace wellness schemes already accept aggregated data from rings and watches, and under the scheme the Premium coach would be able to submit a recovery day to an absence system, in whatever wording that system already accepts. Owen Marsh, 41, a warehouse shift lead, would receive one such note on a Monday. “It said I was recovering. It didn't say from what,” he says. “My manager has the same ring. He knew.” His manager would confirm that he had also received a notification, congratulating him on a colleague's honesty. The company would describe this as a feature working across accounts.

“We don't sell the hangover,” a product lead at the company would say. “The hangover belongs to the customer. We sell the morning.” The morning, under the scheme, would also come with a prevention add-on. From the third drink, judged by heart rate and the time of night, the coach would message the wearer at the bar, at 60p per intervention, with the fee waived if the wearer went home within twenty minutes. Anyone who ignored three interventions in one evening would be moved to the assisted tier automatically, for their own protection, at the assisted rate, effective from the first message they had ignored.

Daniel Whitlow, who runs a village pub with two rooms and one tap that works, would notice the change before the invoice did. “They used to look at their phones between rounds to see who'd texted,” he says. “Now they look at their hand to see what tomorrow costs.” Pubs would be offered a partnership: a code by the till that pre-books a recovery event at a reduced rate for anyone who scans it before the second pint. The reduction would be 40p. He says this is roughly what his customers' dignity was already trading at, and that he would put the code next to the crisps.

A consumer group could be expected to ask whether a bodily state can be a billable event. The company's terms would answer in advance, defining a hangover as a user-initiated recovery scenario and the ring as a witness. Rosa Feld's statement for the month would show three events, one upgrade and one refund request, declined on the grounds that the event was confirmed by the device. The device, she points out, is the thing she paid for in the first place, has never once been hungover, and now takes a fee every time she is.