Free Calorie Counter Apps: What You Actually Get (And What They Hide)

Search the App Store for a calorie counter and every result says free. Install four of them and you will find four different meanings of the word. One is free with adverts. One is free until you point the camera at a barcode. One is genuinely free forever and built by volunteers. One is free to install and then asks for money before it will do the thing you installed it for.

This is a guide to which is which. We sell a paid app, so read that as the bias it is, and then check the table, because every claim below came from the companies' own pricing pages, support documents and Apple privacy labels rather than from us. Pocket Fit does not appear in the free list, because it does not belong there.

Prices and feature splits were checked in July 2026 and move around constantly. The pattern is what matters.

The five meanings of "free"

Two of those five are free in the sense you meant when you searched. Two are free in the sense that a shop is free to walk into.

The genuinely free ones

Cronometer: the serious one

Cronometer's free Basic account is the strongest free tier in the category, and it is not close. You get its full food database, drawn from lab analysed sources including the USDA's, and the tracker reports on 82 micronutrients rather than just protein, carbs and fat. If you actually want to know whether you are short on magnesium or getting too much sodium, nothing else on this list will tell you.

Crucially, the barcode scanner is free. Cronometer's own words: "All Cronometer users have access to our Barcode Scanner." That matters more than any other single line in this article, because barcode scanning is the difference between logging a packaged food in four seconds and logging it in forty.

The free account also syncs with Fitbit, Garmin, Oura, WHOOP and Withings, lets you build custom recipes, and lets you set your own macro and micronutrient targets.

The two catches are real but narrow. The mobile app shows adverts unless you pay, and your reports only look back seven days. Cronometer is explicit that longer time periods are a Gold feature. If you want to see a three month trend, that is the wall you hit. Gold costs $59.99 a year or $10.99 a month.

Pick it if you care about nutrition data and can live with a one week rear-view mirror.

FatSecret: the quiet one

FatSecret gives away the same critical piece Cronometer does. Calorie and macro tracking, weight logging, barcode scanning and its community are all in the free app, funded by adverts rather than by a paywall on the scanner.

It is a plainer tool than Cronometer. Fewer micronutrients, less depth in the reporting, a database that leans on user submitted entries in places. What you get in exchange is something that does the basic job without nagging you.

One honesty note: FatSecret does not publish its Premium price on its website. Its own page says pricing varies by region and is viewable in the app. Apple's listing for the US shows a spread of subscription tiers rather than one number, so we are not going to quote you a price we cannot stand behind. Check it in the app for your country.

Pick it if you want simple free tracking with a working barcode scanner and no interest in micronutrients.

OpenNutriTracker: the one with no business model

This is the honest answer to "no subscription" taken literally. OpenNutriTracker is open source under the GPL, on both iOS and Android, and its README states the position plainly: "No subscriptions, in-app purchases, or ads: OpenNutriTracker is free, with no paid tier and no advertising."

It reads its food data from Open Food Facts, the crowd-sourced product database, plus USDA FoodData Central and the German national food database. Your log is AES encrypted and stored on your device rather than on someone's server, which is a genuinely different privacy proposition from everything else here.

The trade-off is what you would expect from a volunteer project. Less polish, fewer integrations, a smaller and patchier product database in some countries, and the developers' own warning that "the application is still under construction. Errors, bugs and crashes might occur."

Pick it if you want no adverts, no account and no company holding your food diary, and you are willing to accept rough edges for it.

The ones that are free to install, not free to use

MyFitnessPal

MyFitnessPal has the database everyone else gets measured against, and a free tier that genuinely works if you are willing to type. What you cannot do without paying is the fast part. MyFitnessPal's own Premium page lists "Barcode scan and meal scan," "Ad-free logging experience" and "Custom macros and goals" as things a subscription buys, which tells you what the free version does not have.

That is the single most consequential paywall in this category. The fastest path to logging a packaged food is a barcode, and it is behind the till. On the UK site, Premium is £64.99 a year and Premium+ £79.99, with the monthly option at £19.99.

If you have been using MyFitnessPal free for years and wondering why logging feels slower than it used to, this is why. The scanner was not always Premium.

Lose It!

Same shape. Basic calorie tracking is free. According to Apple's listing for the app, the barcode scanner sits in the premium tier, along with photo logging, voice logging, macro tracking and device syncing.

It is a competent app with a large database. It is not a free one in the way you meant.

The catch nobody reads: what the privacy labels say

Here is the part that does not appear in any of these apps' marketing, and it is checkable in ninety seconds because Apple forces every developer to declare it.

Open an app's App Store page, scroll to App Privacy, and look at the category called Data Used to Track You. That is data linked to you and shared with other companies' apps and websites, typically for advertising.

At the time of writing, that section reads as follows.

Two things worth sitting with.

First, FatSecret declares nothing in that category, which makes it the quiet winner of a contest nobody runs.

Second, Cronometer is on that list, and Cronometer is also the company whose own blog says "we promise never to sell your data to a third party." Both things can be true. Selling data and using tracking identifiers for advertising and marketing are different activities, and Apple's label covers the second. We are not accusing anyone of anything. We are pointing out that "we don't sell your data" is a narrower promise than most people hear, and that the label is the thing to read rather than the marketing.

Also note what none of this is: a free app funded by adverts is being paid for by your attention and your advertising identifiers instead of your card. That is a legitimate trade. It is just a trade, not an absence of one.

What you actually give up by not paying

Being straight about this, because the free options above are better than the category's reputation suggests.

Long term trends. This is the big one. Cronometer's free tier shows you seven days. Weight and intake are noisy enough that a week tells you almost nothing, and the whole value of tracking is watching a line over months. Most free tiers are generous with today and stingy with last quarter.

Speed of entry. Where the barcode scanner is paywalled, every packaged food becomes a search. Turner-McGrievy and colleagues, analysing two six month weight loss trials in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, found fewer than half the participants were still logging their food by week 10. Friction is not a minor annoyance in this category, it is the mechanism by which tracking fails.

Adaptive targets. Free tiers hand you a calorie number and leave it there. Nothing recalculates when your weight stalls for three weeks.

An advert-free surface. Small thing, until you are logging four times a day.

None of that makes the free options wrong. If you are trying to find out whether food logging suits you at all, starting free is the correct move, and Cronometer's free tier will answer that question properly.

The paid alternative: what one subscription with everything included looks like

This is our pitch, clearly labelled so you can skip it.

Pocket Fit is £9.99 a month or £59.99 a year, and the reason we think it is worth comparing against a stack of free apps is not the food logging on its own. It is that the food and the training are one subscription and one dataset.

Snap a photo of your plate and it logs the meal with calories and macros, one entry per distinct food rather than a single blurred total. Scan a barcode, which is not a premium tier here because it is the fastest path and paywalling it would be absurd. Ask for a different match when the first guess is wrong. Copy yesterday's lunch, because most meals are repeats.

The part a free calorie counter structurally cannot do is connect any of it to your training. Your targets come from your programme, so a heavy leg day and a rest day are not handed the same number. The Body budget keeps one tally across your workout, your steps, your sleep and your food, which is the thing two separate apps can never do because they never talk to each other. And nothing in the app turns red when you go over.

Food is currently bundled with every workout membership rather than sold as a second subscription. The pricing page has the current position.

If you only want a calorie counter and nothing else, we are not the cheapest way to get one, and Cronometer's free tier is a better answer to that question than our paid one. Our case is for people who were about to run a workout app and a food app side by side.

Where the evidence runs thin

Everything above is a snapshot. Feature splits in this category change without notice, MyFitnessPal moved barcode scanning behind Premium after years of it being free, and any of these companies could reshuffle next quarter. Check before you commit.

Apple's privacy labels are self-declared. They are the best comparable disclosure available, and they are still the developer's own account of themselves rather than an audit. A blank entry means nothing was declared, not that nothing happens.

Regional variation is real and we have not solved it here. Prices differ by country, and some features are US only. Where we could not verify a price from a primary source, we left it out rather than guessing.

We have also not run a controlled test of database accuracy across these apps, and we would not trust anyone who claims to have done so cleanly. Database size claims in particular are not comparable between companies, because nobody counts entries the same way.

Put it together

If you want a genuinely free calorie counter with no subscription, the shortlist is short and real. Cronometer for depth and a free barcode scanner, with a seven day reporting window as the price. FatSecret for simple advert-supported tracking that also leaves the scanner unlocked, and the cleanest privacy label of the group. OpenNutriTracker if you want no company, no account and no adverts at all, and can tolerate a volunteer project's rough edges.

Treat MyFitnessPal and Lose It! as paid apps with a demo mode, because with the barcode scanner behind the paywall, that is what they are.

Then read the privacy label before you install, and remember that an advert-funded app is not free of cost, only free of charge.

For the wider comparison including the paid options, our food tracking app breakdown covers six apps in detail. If all you need is your daily numbers, our free macro calculator does that in about a minute with no app at all.

Free calorie counter apps: common questions

Is there a completely free calorie counter app with no subscription?

Yes. Cronometer's Basic account and FatSecret are both free and include barcode scanning, funded by adverts. OpenNutriTracker is open source with no adverts, no subscriptions and no in-app purchases at all. The trade-offs are a seven day reporting window on Cronometer, adverts on both of the commercial ones, and a volunteer level of polish on OpenNutriTracker.

Which free calorie counter has a barcode scanner?

Cronometer and FatSecret both include barcode scanning at no cost, and OpenNutriTracker scans against the Open Food Facts database. MyFitnessPal and Lose It! both place the barcode scanner in their paid tiers.

Is MyFitnessPal still free?

There is still a free tier and it still works for manual logging against a very large database. What is not free is the fast part. MyFitnessPal's own Premium page lists barcode scan, meal scan and an advert-free experience as subscription features.

Why did MyFitnessPal start charging for the barcode scanner?

It moved to the paid tier in recent years, having previously been free, which is why long term users report that logging feels slower than it used to. Only the company can speak to the reasoning. The practical effect is that the fastest route to logging a packaged food now requires a subscription.

Are free calorie counter apps safe with my data?

It depends on the app, and Apple's App Privacy section is the fastest way to check. Look at Data Used to Track You: MyFitnessPal, Lose It! and Cronometer all declare data in that category, FatSecret declares none, and OpenNutriTracker stores your log locally with no account. An advert-funded free app is generally being paid in advertising identifiers rather than cash.

Is it worth paying for a calorie counter?

If you only want a calorie counter, probably not. Cronometer's free tier does that job well. Paying makes more sense when you want long term trend data, adaptive targets, or your food and training handled in one place rather than across two subscriptions that cannot see each other.

References

1. Cronometer. What's Included Under The Free Account In Cronometer? cronometer.com/blog/free-features
2. Cronometer. Cronometer Gold. cronometer.com/gold
3. MyFitnessPal. Premium plans and pricing. myfitnesspal.com/premium
4. FatSecret. Premium. fatsecret.com/premium
5. OpenNutriTracker. Project README, GPL-3.0. github.com/simonoppowa/OpenNutriTracker
6. Apple App Store, App Privacy disclosures for MyFitnessPal, Lose It!, Cronometer and Calorie Counter by FatSecret, checked July 2026.
7. Turner-McGrievy GM, Dunn CG, Wilcox S, Boutté AK, Hutto B, Hoover A, Muth E (2019). Defining adherence to mobile dietary self-monitoring and assessing tracking over time. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 119(9), 1516-1524. DOI: 10.1016/j.jand.2019.03.012

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Pocket Fit is a fitness and wellbeing app, not a medical device. It does not diagnose, treat or prevent any condition. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before starting or changing a training or nutrition programme.

Georgi, founder of Pocket Fit. He went from 122 kg to competing at The Yard Games, having lost 38 kg along the way.