HevyGPT vs Trunk Connect AI: Two Ways to Put AI on Your Lifts

By the Trunk teamUpdated September 7, 202614 min readPrices verified September 7, 2026

If ChatGPT is your assistant and your split fits inside four routines, HevyGPT is the smoother option and costs nothing on the Hevy side. Trunk Connect AI at $9.99 one-time is the one that works for Claude and Gemini users, and for any program that runs to five or more routines. Everything below is the arithmetic and the caveats behind those two sentences.

HevyGPT is an official custom GPT that Hevy publishes inside ChatGPT: two-way, ChatGPT-only, and capped at four routines while your Hevy account is free. Trunk Connect AI is a private URL you paste into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or anything else that opens links, unlocked by a $9.99 one-time purchase, with no routine cap and no Android app.

Neither is the only route. Liftin' announced an MCP beta for ChatGPT and Claude on its official account on 2026-07-22 (source), and Hevy's public API — Pro-only, by Hevy's own docs — is what the community MCP servers are built on. These two are what a lifter can switch on today without third-party tooling, so these two are what this page compares.

What HevyGPT is, exactly

HevyGPT is a custom GPT that Hevy publishes and maintains inside ChatGPT. You turn it on from the app: Profile, then Settings, then Integrations, then Connect. With an active integration, ChatGPT can analyze your Hevy training history and recommend loads from it, and it can write a generated program back into your account, where it shows up as a folder in the Workout tab. Details verified 2026-09-07 from Hevy's HevyGPT page.

Getting started is cheap. Hevy Pro is not required, so a brand-new free account can connect on day one. What Hevy does not state is which ChatGPT plan you need — HevyGPT lives inside ChatGPT and you bring your own account there. OpenAI documents web search as available on the ChatGPT Free plan (source), but that is OpenAI's statement about search, not Hevy's statement about this integration.

Two things make it narrow. The integration exists for ChatGPT and nothing else; Hevy publishes no Claude or Gemini equivalent of HevyGPT. It also does not run in the Android ChatGPT app, and Hevy's guidance is to use the web version instead.

The four-routine wall

Free Hevy accounts hold four routines. Hevy states plainly on the HevyGPT page that a free account is limited to four and that a plan with more than four unique workouts cannot be imported — the whole import is blocked, not trimmed down to the first four. A four-day upper/lower fits. Six-day push/pull/legs does not, and neither does a plan with a deload week written as its own routine.

Other free-tier caps are worth knowing before you ask an AI to redesign your training: seven custom exercises, and stats history that stops at three months (Hevy's Pro subscription help article). Lifting the caps means Hevy Pro, at $2.99/mo, $23.99/yr, or $74.99 one-time on the US App Store, verified 2026-09-07 (source). A second monthly SKU at $3.99 is also listed on that page; Hevy publishes no explanation for it.

What Trunk Connect AI is, exactly

Trunk takes the opposite approach. Instead of one integration with one assistant, it generates a private web address that holds your training data and lets you paste it wherever you like.

Setting it up

1. Open Trunk, go to Settings, tap the Trunk+ row, open Connect AI.
2. Tap Generate Key. Trunk creates a random token and builds a ready-made prompt around it.
3. Tap Copy Prompt. The prompt carries your data URL plus instructions that tell the assistant to fetch the page and list what it found before answering, because ChatGPT will otherwise answer from memory.
4. Paste it wherever you actually work — Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, ChatGPT, anything that follows a link. Claude needs web search switched on from the plus menu before it will fetch.
5. The assistant opens the link and reads your real logged sets. Ask it whatever you want about your training.
6. For a program, ask the assistant to build one; the reply comes back as a single import link. Open that link, review the program on the confirmation page, tap Add to Trunk, and it lands in the app.
7. Revoke Key kills the link whenever you want. Generating a new key invalidates the old one as well.

What the AI can read

The whole log: every profile, its sessions, each exercise, and every set with reps, weight, volume, notes, timestamp and the plate configuration you used. It can also narrow the request — one exercise, one profile, one session, or only the last five sets per exercise — which matters when a long history would otherwise fill an assistant's context window. Nobody has published a measured page size for a heavy Trunk log, so treat the narrowing options as the fix if an assistant complains rather than as a number you can plan around.

What the AI can write

Three actions, and only three: create a new program, add sessions to an existing program, or add exercises to an existing day. Caps per request are 20 sessions and 30 exercises per session, and it will not overwrite a profile you already have. The AI never writes sets, reps or weights. You log those in the gym, which keeps the training record honest and stops an assistant from inventing a workout you did not do.

Treat the link like a password

That URL is a bearer secret. Anyone holding it can read the workout data until you revoke the key. It carries no name and no email, and your profile names are whatever you called them, but this is a password, not a link you paste in a group chat.

HevyGPT vs Trunk Connect AI, side by side

Prices in USD from the US App Store and ratings from Apple's lookup API, all verified 2026-09-07; prices, caps and rating counts change.

What each one costs over three years

This is where the two models separate. Hevy's free path genuinely costs nothing on the app side, which is a real advantage and worth saying out loud. The moment your split outgrows four routines, though, the cost becomes recurring unless you buy the lifetime tier.

Hevy Pro ($2.99/mo, $23.99/yr, $74.99 one-time) and Trunk+ ($9.99 one-time) verified 2026-09-07 on the US App Store (Hevy, Trunk); multi-year totals are our own arithmetic. Hevy also runs a 50%-off-first-year promo on annual Pro for first-time subscribers a few times a year, with no dollar figure published, and says lifetime is never discounted (Hevy help center). USD, and subject to change.

Neither path forces you to pay an AI company. Free tiers of ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are all $0, and that is the majority case for both apps. If you do pay for an assistant, you are paying for something you use for work and everything else, not for a fitness feature: ChatGPT Plus is $20/mo and Claude Pro is $20/mo, or $17/mo billed annually, verified 2026-09-07 (source, source). That distinction is the whole argument for bring-your-own-AI, and the wider market is broken down in what AI fitness apps actually cost.

The assistant you use decides more than the app does

Pick the app that matches your assistant, not the other way round.

Assistant free plans are $0 and paid tiers are USD, verified 2026-09-07 (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini); plans and capabilities change. ChatGPT: web search is available on the Free plan (OpenAI help center) and OpenAI's bot docs say a ChatGPT-User agent "may visit a web page" when users ask about one (OpenAI bot docs). Claude: with web search enabled, Claude can retrieve full content from specific URLs you provide (Anthropic support). Gemini: Google publishes no page saying Gemini opens a URL you paste; its documented behavior is Google Search grounding (Google support), and the Gemini row above rests on Trunk's developer having run it. No vendor publishes a numeric free-tier browsing quota.

The practical takeaway: if ChatGPT is your assistant, HevyGPT is the smoother of the two, because nothing leaves the chat window. Lifters who live in Claude or Gemini have no HevyGPT option at all, and Trunk's plain-URL approach is the one that works for them. Step-by-step for the Claude case sits in getting a workout plan out of Claude.

Where each one wins

Two honest concessions on the Trunk side. It is Apple-only — iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision, with no Android and no Wear OS — so an Android lifter has no decision to make here. Newness is the other one: 5.0 from a single App Store rating is not social proof, and there is no Apple Watch app, no CSV export button, and no built-in exercise library with instruction videos. Hevy has all of that, plus roughly 91,000 US ratings behind it.

Hevy's other AI features, briefly

Three separate things get called Hevy AI, and they are not the same product.

• Hevy Trainer is the in-app program generator, and it is Pro-only. Hevy's help center is refreshingly direct that its programs are "generated using an algorithm and do not rely on AI" (Hevy help center, verified 2026-09-07). An 11-question intake feeds a rules engine, not a language model.
• Send workouts to ChatGPT and Claude arrived in iOS v3.1.12 on 2026-09-03 as a button on the finish-workout screen (App Store release notes). Its wording reads as a one-way push of a completed session, but no help-center article describes the mechanism, so treat it as a share rather than a live connection — and note that this is the one place Hevy names Claude.
• The public API is the path that lets an outside tool read your full history. Hevy's own API documentation states it is currently available to Hevy Pro users only, with the key generated in the web app (Hevy API docs, verified 2026-09-07). Those docs are labelled version 0.0.1 and carry an explicit no-guarantees warning. Community MCP servers that connect Claude to Hevy are built on that API; they are third-party projects, not Hevy products.

Add it up and the Hevy ChatGPT integration is genuinely good, while the Hevy Claude story is thin: a one-way share button, or a Pro subscription plus unofficial tooling you maintain yourself.

Who should pick which

Pick Hevy

You already have hundreds of Hevy workouts. Stay. Connect HevyGPT, keep lifting, and do not migrate a training history to save a few dollars. If your split needs more than four routines, Hevy Pro Lifetime at $74.99 buys the caps away permanently, and Hevy's help center says lifetime is never discounted, so waiting for a sale is pointless.

ChatGPT is your only assistant and you are on Android. Hevy, without question. Trunk has no Android app at all, and HevyGPT still works from the ChatGPT web version.

You want the exercise library, the watch app, the social feed and the polish. Hevy. Trunk does not compete on feature count and does not pretend to; its case is the price model and the fact that any assistant can read the data.

Pick Trunk

You use Claude or Gemini. Trunk is the straightforward option. HevyGPT will not talk to either one, and the Hevy alternative is Pro plus a community MCP server.

Your program needs five, six or seven training days. Trunk, or Hevy Pro. Free Hevy blocks the whole import once the plan has more than four unique workouts, and an AI that just designed a six-day program should not be stopped by the app's pricing tier.

You do not want another subscription. Trunk+ is $9.99 once and Trunk sells nothing else. Hevy's equivalent answer is the $74.99 lifetime tier, which is legitimate at 7.5 times the price — and it buys a far more complete app around it.

Still deciding how to wire an assistant to a log at all? Start with the overview of connecting ChatGPT to a workout tracker, which puts custom GPTs, MCP connectors, export-and-paste and plain URLs side by side.