Free calorie counter app

With calorie apps, "free" usually means free to start. The barcode scanner, the export, the weekly view — one of those sits behind a paywall, and it often moves there only after you have got used to it.

At MyFitnessPal that happened to barcode scanning in 2026: a core feature for fourteen years, now Premium only. In our analysis of roughly 57,000 critical reviews, that is the loudest finding in the whole market — not a missing feature, but one that was taken away.

What is free in zweitaps

The diary itself, in full and permanently: logging, search, barcode scanning, changing amounts, the day's total, the widget, Apple Watch, Siri — and exporting your data as CSV. No account, no card, no trial that runs out.

The barcode works without a connection too: 40,000 products ship inside the app. That is not a bonus, it is the reason scanning works in a supermarket at all.

What costs money

Only photo recognition — a picture of your plate that comes back as an estimate in grams and calories. It runs on our server and costs us compute per image, so we charge for it: 100 photos for 2,99 €, 500 photos for 9,99 €. One-time purchase, no subscription.

Why that adds up

Because the database does not cost us money per lookup: it sits on Open Food Facts (ODbL), open data. An app that has to licence its food data needs a subscription — that is a real argument, not an excuse. We do not have that cost, so we do not pass it on.