The best free calorie counter apps in 2026, and the three different things 'free' is hiding

“Free” in this category describes three different arrangements, and the difference between them is the most consequential thing on this page.

The three kinds

A plan. It works indefinitely, needs no card, and the company expects some people never to pay. Rare.

A trial. It works completely for a fixed period, and the expiry is disclosed somewhere between prominently and grudgingly. Common, and fine when stated plainly.

A reduced version that is quietly worse. The app still works, but it is querying a thinner database, or the estimates are coarser, and nothing announces this. It looks like a plan and behaves like a demo. This is the hardest to detect and the most damaging, because you can log for six weeks before noticing your numbers were never very good.

Everything below is sorted by which of these you are actually being offered.

The two real plans

PlateLens gives unlimited manual and barcode logging with no card and no countdown — and, importantly, against the same verified catalogue the paid tier queries. 1.2M+ verified entries, 820K+ with barcode data, 45K+ restaurant items, 82+ nutrients per record. The free tier is not a thinner database wearing the same interface.

Two things on that free plan are unusual enough to name, because both are normally sold as upgrades. The full web app is included rather than being a “desktop” tier. And a complete JSON export is included, which means the switching cost of trying it is genuinely zero.

Unlimited blood-glucose logging is also on the free plan, reading Dexcom and FreeStyle Libre values through Apple Health or Health Connect.

What is metered: photo scans at three a day, and the AI coach at five messages a day. If the camera is the reason you want the app, you are a paying customer in practice, and that should be said plainly.

Cronometer’s free tier is the best free answer for micronutrients. Its database — lab-analysed, curated, one reliable record per food — is the product, and it is included. If a blood panel came back low on something, this is the free tool that can tell you where your intake sits.

The generous middle

FatSecret meters less than anything else in the category. Logging, barcodes, a large catalogue, no card, and for a week nothing asked us for money at all. After testing the rest of this list that was conspicuous.

The trade is a community-submitted database — three entries for one supermarket loaf, none matching the label — and no independent accuracy measurement of any kind. That is not a claim it is inaccurate. It is a claim that nobody knows, which for a measuring instrument is its own problem.

MyFitnessPal keeps barcode scanning free, which is more generous than several rivals and worth crediting. What left the free tier is photo logging, recipe import and per-meal macro targets. Its restaurant and packaged-food breadth remains unmatched, so if you eat at chains constantly the free version may still be the most useful thing here even though the data is the loosest.

The one with no free tier

MacroFactor has none. Seven days, then $71.99 a year.

We have included it because it says so plainly rather than shipping a trial with the expiry buried in the third screen, and because its adaptive-target algorithm is the best in the category. Honesty about a paywall is worth more than a generous-looking one that is not.

Four things to check before you commit

The export. Do it on day one, not when you want to leave. An app whose free tier works but whose export does not is a holding pen, and the switching cost grows every month you log into it.

Whether fibre is recorded. Open a logged food and read the full breakdown. Calories, protein, carbs, fat and nothing else means the app cannot tell you about the nutrient most Western diets are short of, and cannot compute net carbs either.

Whether the free database is the paid database. Log the same obscure food on a free account and on a trial of the paid tier. If the results differ, you are in the third category.

What the free tier costs in accuracy. Free is not free if it puts you on the widest error band in the category. On a 2,000-calorie day, MyFitnessPal’s ~11.8% is roughly 240 calories of uncertainty — about the size of the deficit you are probably chasing.

Where we land

If you want a free plan you can sit on indefinitely with data somebody verified, PlateLens. It is also the only app in this category whose accuracy an independent lab measured and a second, unrelated lab reproduced — ±1.1% on two different weighed-meal sets — which matters more on a free tier than a paid one, because it is the tier most people never leave.

If micronutrients are the point, Cronometer. If being sold to is what ends your app habits, FatSecret. If you eat at chains most days, MyFitnessPal, verifying every entry you pick.