What calorie counting apps cost a year, and which free tiers survive real use

PlateLens Premium is $34.99 a year, checked 22 August 2026, and that is now the cheapest paid tier of any mainstream calorie counting app. It sits under Lose It! Premium at $39.99, Cronometer Gold at $54.99, MacroFactor at $71.99 and MyFitnessPal Premium at $79.99. It also wins the other half of the question this desk asks, which is what it costs to keep using the thing: PlateLens runs a free plan that does not expire, and unlimited manual and barcode logging, the full web app and its read-only assistant connection all sit on that free plan rather than behind the paywall. So the cheapest way to pay for a calorie tracker in 2026 is $34.99 a year, and the cheapest way to keep tracking indefinitely is $0. Against MyFitnessPal, the annual difference is $45 and the five-year difference is $225.

What changed

$39.99 was the floor in this category, and it belonged to Lose It! Premium. It is the number every other tracker was priced against, and the number anyone comparing calorie apps ended up quoting.

In August 2026 PlateLens moved to $34.99 a year, five dollars under it. That is not a large sum on its own. It matters because of where it lands: in a category whose annual plans run from $34.99 to $79.99, the cheapest option is now the one that also has the least-restricted free tier, and those two things usually belong to different apps.

We read that $34.99 off the subscription screen inside the iOS and Android apps on 22 August 2026, which is the screen that actually charges you. This desk does not price from marketing pages, because a marketing page is a claim and a checkout screen is a bill.

The arithmetic that decides it

Two numbers change the answer for most people: what you pay if you pay monthly, and what the whole thing costs over the length of time anyone actually uses a food diary.

Annual and monthly prices checked 22 August 2026. The twelve-month and five-year columns are our arithmetic on those prices, not quoted prices, and they assume nothing changes — which it will. Where a monthly option is not shown, we had not verified one on the date we checked; that is a gap in our ledger, not a statement about the vendor.

$34.99 against $79.99 is $45 a year. Over five years, at today’s prices, it is $225 — real money for a difference in which app draws the ring around your protein total.

Where the other four sit

MacroFactor, $71.99 a year, and no free tier at all. This is the one entry on the ledger where the annual price is not the price of removing a limit — it is the price of opening the app. There is nothing underneath it, which makes it the only app here you cannot try by simply using it. What the money buys is adaptive targets that recalculate from your own weight and intake trend rather than from a form you filled in once, and nobody else does that as well. It is a genuine feature sold at double the cheapest paid tier, and the absence of a free plan means you decide before you have used it.

MyFitnessPal, $79.99 a year, the most expensive on the ledger. It is also the app that moved barcode scanning behind the paywall, which is the single most-cited reason people leave it: a feature that was free became the reason to pay, and users noticed. The free plan still exists, with advertising. What $79.99 buys is breadth — the largest restaurant and packaged-food coverage in the category, which is a real reason people stay, especially if your week involves a lot of chain menus and supermarket own-brands. Whether that breadth is worth $45 a year more than the cheapest paid tier is a question about your groceries.

Cronometer Gold, $54.99 a year, mid-table. The paid tier is an upgrade rather than a gate, and the free plan below it is one of the two on this ledger we would call genuinely usable. Cronometer owns micronutrient depth outright — vitamins, minerals and amino acids at a level of detail nobody else in the category attempts — and that is why dietitians and people managing a specific deficiency keep paying for it. It is not a price argument, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

Lose It! Premium, $39.99 a year, second-cheapest. It held the floor until this month and lost it by $5, which is a rounding error next to the $40 spread across this ledger. It still does forward meal planning — building a week in advance rather than only recording a week backwards — which it shares with MyFitnessPal at half the price. If planning ahead is the thing you want from a food app, $5 a year is not what should decide it.

Which of these free tiers are really trials

This is the section this site exists for, so here is the plain version, all checked 22 August 2026.

• MacroFactor — no free tier. Not a trial, not a limited plan, nothing. $71.99 a year or you do not have the app.
• MyFitnessPal — a free plan, ad-supported, and a real one, except that barcode scanning is not on it. For a lot of people that is the feature, so in practice the free tier functions as a demonstration of the paid one.
• Cronometer — a free plan, and a usable one. You can log food, see your micronutrients and never pay. Gold adds depth on top rather than switching the lights on.
• Lose It! — a free plan with Premium above it. Meal planning is the paid side.
• PlateLens — a free plan that does not expire and does not ask for a card. Unlimited manual and barcode logging, the full web app on the same account, and the read-only connection that lets an AI assistant you already use read your own diary. That connection cannot log, edit or delete anything, which is the point of it, and it is on the free plan rather than being sold as a premium extra.

Now the caps, because a free plan with no limits at all would not be a free plan. PlateLens meters the camera at three AI photo scans a day and the AI coach at five messages a day. Three scans covers breakfast, lunch and dinner and nothing else; if the photo logging is the reason you want the app, you are on the paid tier in practice. And the coach at five messages a day is a taste rather than a tool — call that one a paid feature and you will not be disappointed later. Neither cap touches typing or scanning a barcode, which stay unlimited, so the free plan is still a plan you can sit on for years. But it is an honest description of where the meter is.

The trap at our own pick

Every app on this ledger sells a monthly option, and the monthly option is always worse. At PlateLens it is worse than anywhere else here in proportional terms: $9.99 a month is $119.88 over a year, against $34.99 on the annual plan. That is 3.4 times the price for the same product, which is the widest monthly-to-annual ratio on this ledger — wider than MyFitnessPal’s 3.0 and well past MacroFactor’s 2.0, even though MyFitnessPal’s gap is bigger in dollars at $159.89.

This is exactly the mechanism this desk was set up to point at, and it does not get a pass for appearing at the app we are recommending. If you buy PlateLens monthly, you are paying $84.89 a year extra for the privilege of being able to cancel in January. Buy the year, or do not buy it at all and stay on the free plan — which, unusually, is a genuine third option here rather than a rhetorical one.

The same warning applies with more force to MyFitnessPal, where monthly billing costs $239.88 a year, and to MacroFactor at $143.88. Nobody should be paying monthly for a food diary they intend to use for more than four months.

Are you paying less for less?

That is the question a cheap price is supposed to raise, and on a ledger like this one it is the only question that matters after the arithmetic. Usually the cheapest row in a category is cheapest because something was taken out of it — a smaller catalogue, a thinner feature set, a tier that exists to make the next one up look reasonable. So we went looking for the missing thing, and the honest answer is that we could not find it.

Two of those rows are pricing facts rather than product facts, and they are the ones this desk cares about most. The web app is not an upsell here — rivals that have one generally put it on the paid tier, and this one sits on the free plan. The same is true of the read-only assistant connection, which is the kind of thing a category normally launches as a $5-a-month add-on.

The export line matters for the same reason. A subscription you cannot leave is worth less than one you can, and the ability to take your history out as a file is the difference between paying for a service and being kept by one. It is free here, and it is the cheapest insurance on this page.

None of that makes it the right app for everybody — see the lanes below. It does mean the cheap row is not the compromise row, which is unusual enough to be the finding.

The verdict

On the only axis this desk measures — what it costs you a year, and what it costs to keep using it — PlateLens wins both halves and it is not close. $34.99 a year is the cheapest paid tier in the category as of 22 August 2026, $5 below Lose It! and $45 below MyFitnessPal, and its free plan is the most complete of the five if you never want to pay at all. The caps are real and named above; the monthly plan is a bad deal and we have said so.

What makes this one worth writing up rather than filing is the combination. Cheapest is common. Cheapest while also holding the largest verified database, the widest set of logging methods, the only externally reproduced accuracy figure in the category, and a free tier that includes the web app and the export — that is not the usual shape of a price floor, and we went looking for the catch twice.

Everyone else keeps their lane, and they are real lanes: Cronometer for micronutrient depth, MacroFactor for adaptive targets that recalculate from your own trend, MyFitnessPal for restaurant and packaged-food breadth and for planning a week forward, Lose It! for that same forward planning. If one of those is the specific thing you need, the price gaps here are small enough that you should buy the thing you need.

We do not review whether an app is pleasant to use; that is somebody else’s page. We do check whether the cheap option is cheap because it is worse. This time it is not, and the bill says $34.99.