A calorie counter without a subscription

Why scanning went behind the paywall

Not because scanning became expensive. MyFitnessPal, the most-used tracker of its generation, moved barcode scanning out of its free plan and into paid Premium in October 2022; before that, free accounts could scan. The feature did not change and neither did its cost. What changed was the pricing.

That is a rational decision for a company with investors: the scanner is the most-used feature, so it is the most effective thing to gate. It is also why the complaint is so sharp. People were not asked to pay for something new; they were asked to pay to keep something they already had.

Which features carry a real cost

A short, honest list of what costs money for every person using it: a server holding your history, syncing that history between devices, anything with a model behind it such as photo logging or a coaching chat, and human support.

And what does not: decoding a barcode, which happens on your own phone; reading an open food database, since Open Food Facts is free to read and USDA FoodData Central is public domain; doing arithmetic on your own numbers; and writing a CSV file in your browser.

A tool built only from the second list has no per-person bill, and can be free without that being a countdown. A tool built on the first list has to charge somebody, and will.

What to check before you trust a free one

Export, first. A log you cannot take out as a plain file is a log you will eventually lose, and export is itself a common paid feature — check it is not.

Then caps: a daily scan limit makes the free tier a demo. Then where your history lives, which decides who else can read what you ate. Then whether it needs an account at all, because an account exists so a server can keep your data.

And whether the numbers are checkable. A tracker reading a volunteer-edited database should name the source and the date of the record, and should say so when a figure cannot be right — nothing edible passes 900 kcal per 100 g, since fat, at 9 kcal per gram, sets the ceiling.

Counting without a subscription, in practice

A scanner, a day total, and a figure you chose is enough for most people. Scan or type the barcode, confirm how much of it you had, and the four numbers go into the day. European labels are required to carry a per-100 g column, so even a product no database has takes about ten seconds to enter by hand.

Two small things make it stick. A "copy yesterday" button, because most people eat roughly the same breakfast and re-scanning the same four barcodes every morning is what makes people stop logging. And a regular export, because if the log is on your device it is the only copy — on an iPhone especially, where storage for a site goes after seven days without a visit.

Where a price would be honest

This is not an argument that software should be free. It is an argument that a price should point at a cost.

If a tool starts holding your log on a server so two phones agree, that is a bill that arrives every month, and charging for it is fair. Photo recognition is a bill per photograph. A scanner that reads an open database is neither. A tool that charges for the scanner and gives away the server is telling you something about how it sets prices.