Free alternatives when the barcode scanner is behind Premium

What changed, precisely

Barcode scanning was available to free accounts and is now part of the paid Premium tier. Nothing about the feature itself changed — the same barcodes, the same food database behind it — and neither did its cost to run. It became a reason to subscribe.

Worth being fair about: MyFitnessPal does carry genuine per-person costs. It keeps your history on a server, syncs it between devices, and has run a very large food database for well over a decade. Those are real bills. The scanner is just not one of them, which is what makes the change feel like what it is.

What you lose by leaving, and what you do not

You lose sync, if you use more than one device, and you lose a recipe builder, exercise integrations and the social side if those matter to you. Be honest with yourself about which of them you have actually opened this month.

You do not lose the scan. Decoding happens on your own phone, and the main food databases are open: Open Food Facts covers packaged food, and USDA FoodData Central — public domain — covers generic food that never had a barcode. A small tool reading those can scan a barcode exactly as fast, and has no per-scan cost to charge you for.

You also do not lose accuracy in any direction. Every tracker is quoting a record somebody typed in. What varies is whether it tells you so.

Take your log with you first

Before switching anything, export. In MyFitnessPal, data export lives in the account settings on the website rather than in the app, and it arrives as a CSV file by email.

Do that even if you are not sure you are leaving. A CSV of your own logging is readable in any spreadsheet, is yours regardless of what any company decides next, and takes a couple of minutes to request. It is the single most useful thing in this page.

What to look for in the replacement

Scanning that is not capped, since "free" sometimes means a handful of barcodes a day. Export that is free, in CSV or JSON, so you never have to do this again. A good manual-entry screen, because no database has every own-brand product and the per-100 g column is printed on every European label anyway.

Provenance: which database answered, and when that record was last edited. On a volunteer-edited database that line is the difference between a number and a claim, and the two useful sanity checks — nothing above 900 kcal per 100 g, and macronutrients that cannot outweigh the food — only work if you can see the figures.

And decide what you want from the account question. No account means nothing about your eating on anyone's server, and no sync. An account means the opposite. Both are legitimate; the one nobody should accept is an account whose purpose is to make leaving hard.

If you want the game rather than the calculator

Some people log better with structure around it — streaks, quests, a photo diary, history that follows them between devices. That is a different product, not a worse one, and a one-screen scanner will bore you.

CoreFeed, built in the same workshop as this one, is that shape: an account, quests and photo logging, with your history on a server. kcalkeep is the opposite shape on purpose — one screen, no account, the log on the device, the scanner never capped.