App That Paid Users to Exercise Owes Nearly $1 Million for Not Paying Users to Exercise: Supported by investors like PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, Pact was initially called GymPact before it changed its name to reflect its additional meal-tracking features. The idea behind the app was relatively straightforward: A user could set a goal like, “I’ll go the gym for an hour five days in a row.” Then, the user set an amount of money that they’d be willing to pay as a penalty if they failed to meet their goal. When setting a goal, the app would tell you how much money you’d be rewarded with if you managed to achieve your goal—usually a small amount that was pulled from the pool of failures out there. At first, Pact had a deal with thousands of gyms that the user could check into and that feature was expanded to GPS tracking.
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