Do you have to pay for Garmin watch faces?

No. Your Garmin comes with watch faces built in, the Connect IQ store is full of free ones, and you can use your watch for years without paying for a dial. Paid faces exist alongside them, usually between one and five dollars, and the honest answer to "is it worth it" depends on what you are actually buying.

The three models you will meet

Free, no strings

Plenty of good faces are free because someone built one for themselves and published it. There is no catch beyond the obvious one: nobody owes you support or updates, and a face abandoned three firmware versions ago may quietly stop working.

Free with a paid unlock

The face installs and runs, but some part of it is limited until you pay — settings locked, a watermark, or a trial that expires. The payment usually happens outside the Connect IQ store, because Garmin's store does not process payments for most developers. You buy a key on the developer's own site and paste it into the face's settings in the Garmin Connect app.

This is the model ALLEZfaces uses: every design runs completely, with nothing hidden, for seven days on your own watch. After that it needs a key, which costs USD 4.99 once, for that design, forever.

Paid up front

A smaller number of faces are sold directly through Garmin's store with a price attached. You pay before you install, which means you have never seen the face on your own watch when you decide.

Why paid faces are not sold inside the Connect IQ store

Garmin does support paid apps, but the practical reality for a small developer is that payment, tax and VAT handling across dozens of countries is the hard part. Most developers therefore use an outside payment processor that acts as merchant of record and deals with the tax, then issue a licence key. It is a little more friction for you — an e-mail, a paste into a settings field — in exchange for the face being maintained by someone who is actually being paid to maintain it.

Garmin permits this, provided the listing says clearly that payment happens outside the store. If a listing does not mention it and the face then demands money, that is worth reporting.

What a licence key actually is

A key is a code tied to one design and one purchase, typically in the format XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX. You paste it into the face's settings in the Garmin Connect app; the watch checks it once through your phone's connection and then remembers the result. After that the face works offline, on a run, on a plane, anywhere — it does not phone home every time you look at your wrist.

Good practice, and what we do: one key covers three watches, so your old Forerunner and your new fēnix are both fine, and a warranty replacement does not cost you another purchase.

What you are actually paying for

Worth being blunt about this, because "it's just a watch face" is a fair thing to think.

• Design work. Layout, typography and colour that stay legible at a glance on a 43 mm screen, in sunlight, at a run.
• Configurability. A face where every cell can be a different metric took much longer to build than one with fixed fields, and it means the same design works on a watch with no barometer.
• Maintenance. Garmin ships new watches and new firmware constantly. Someone has to test against them.
• Support. A human who answers when your key will not activate.

What you are not paying for is more data. Every metric on a paid face is available to a free one; Garmin exposes the same sensors to both.

How to decide without wasting money

1. Use the trial if there is one. Wear the face for a few days. Faces look different on a product photo than on your wrist, at arm's length, in daylight.
2. Check compatibility before anything else. Screen shape and size matter, and so does whether your watch has a barometer if the face leans on altitude.
3. Look at the always-on layout. Half of your looks at the watch will be of the dimmed version. If it is ugly or unreadable, you will notice every day.
4. Ignore the screenshots' data. Every face shows a perfect 10:08 with a full step goal in the store images. What matters is where the numbers sit, not what they say.

The short version

You never have to pay for a Garmin watch face. If you do pay, pay a few dollars once, for a design you have already worn for a week, from someone who will still be there when the next firmware lands. That is roughly the price of a coffee for something you look at a hundred times a day — which is either a bargain or an extravagance, depending entirely on how much the thing on your wrist annoys you right now.

Our own designs are listed here, each with a seven-day trial, and the install and licence help page covers what happens after you buy.