Frequently asked questions before the first stake

Yes. If you miss a due date, the stake is charged to the card you set up, automatically and once a day around midday. The time is set at midday rather than at night so that overnight measurements (sleep, steps) can still arrive. Otherwise a day you actually completed would be charged as missed. A day can never be charged twice.

80%. Tensio keeps the remaining 20% and uses it to pay for payment fees, server operations and forwarding to the organisation. The split is shown to you before every goal and recorded on every receipt.

What matters is not whether the beneficiary is “good”, but your relationship to them. With “donation” the money goes to someone you support, which makes the loss easier to accept. With “anti-charity” it goes to someone whose success you would rather not see, for example your sporting rival. In surveys, people rate this variant as more effective, although no study has yet confirmed this in everyday life.

Anti-charity is not about the money being wasted, but about who you strengthen with it. A Dortmund fan who has to pay Schalke’s foundation experiences this as a loss. The reason is not the foundation’s work, but the fact that one’s own money benefits the rival.

For these cases there is the pause joker, which pauses a due day. We do not ask for a reason and require no proof. Three jokers per month are free, and up to nine can be saved. A joker preserves your streak but does not extend it, and it cannot be applied retroactively, only to today or to future days.

Yes, in several ways. There is an evening reminder with a final warning at 22:45, plus a learning reminder that notifies you per goal once your usual check-in time has passed. If you wish, Tensio also verifies health goals in the evening and checks in what you have achieved. On Sundays at 20:30 you receive the weekly review. All of it can be switched off individually, and on your home screen the “Tensio – Today” widget shows what is on the line at any moment.

There are three separate channels, and none of them contains advertising you have not agreed to.

Reminders are created on your device and can be switched off individually: the evening reminder, the last warning at 22:45, the learning per-goal variant and the Sunday weekly recap.

Push messages only cover what you cannot see yourself: a stake was charged, a payment failed, your streak is at risk, someone nudged or cheered you, someone used the team joker. This list is complete. The system cannot send any other push messages, which means no tips and no messages such as “we miss you”.

Emails about your account (a charge notice, say) are part of the contract. Anything beyond that, meaning tips and news, only reaches you after you click a confirmation link in a first email, and one click unsubscribes you again.

They are preserved. Your goals and your complete check-in history live on the server and are loaded when you sign in on the new device, automatically and for every account.

The verification details such as the target value, the apps being counted, the coordinates or an alarm time additionally live in an encrypted package whose key is derived from your password. We cannot read it. For this reason it is missing in two cases: when you sign in with Google (there is no password to derive a key from) and after a password reset. The affected goals are then briefly locked and the app asks once for the target value.

In the worst case you therefore have to confirm a few target values again, but your goals themselves are not lost. You cannot change the verification path while doing so, as a running goal could otherwise be lowered unnoticed when the details are filled back in.

Because Tensio could not verify a freely worded goal. A goal such as “no sugar” could simply be claimed, and a stake that can be avoided by a mere claim would have no effect. That is why the catalog only contains goals with a real verification source. Freely worded goals are still available as explicitly marked honour-based goals with Tensio Plus.

Yes. Nobody prevents you from confirming the check-in without having reached the goal, and in that case your stake is not forfeited. We state this openly instead of pretending there is a verification that does not exist. Honour-based goals therefore only serve their purpose if you are honest with yourself.

Health values, location and app usage times are evaluated on the device and immediately discarded. All that is stored is whether the day was done: yes or no. No step counts, no coordinates, no movement profiles. Card data lives with Stripe, never with us. Everything else is in the privacy policy.

For a goal with a stake, yes, because without a card no charge would be possible and the goal would have no financial consequence. Nothing is charged when you save it. A charge only occurs if you actually miss a check-in.

You receive a statement, but no tax certificate. Under “Donations” you can create a PDF for each year that lists every amount collected, broken down by organisation, similar to a bank statement. It is not tax-deductible, because only the organisation itself may issue a tax certificate, and your stake goes to Tensio first and not to them.

Five active goals are possible for free, and archived goals do not count. With Tensio Plus there’s no limit.

Yes, since November 2026 Tensio is also in the App Store. You will find it there as “Tensio – Ziele mit Einsatz”.

On iPhone, Tensio reads steps, sleep, workouts and the other activity and health goals from Apple Health. Some features that exist on Android are still missing there. This mainly affects goals for screen time and app usage, because Apple requires a separate approval for those, which we have applied for. The home screen widget and the reminder when you arrive at a goal location are not available on iPhone yet either.

The app is made for iPhone. It can be installed on an iPad, but runs there in iPhone format.

Where you took it out. On Android in the Play Store under “Subscriptions”, on iPhone in Settings under your Apple Account and “Subscriptions”. The subscription renews monthly and can be cancelled at any time. You can continue to use it until the end of the month you paid for.

In the app under “Profile”, or via this page, even without the app installed.