What does "free" actually get you in a calorie tracker?

What does every free calorie tracker include?

Every free tier we read gives the same three things, and they are genuinely free at MyFitnessPal, Lose It!, Cronometer and YAZIO. MacroFactor is the exception: it has no free plan, only a trial.

• A food diary you fill by hand, meal by meal.
• A searchable food database, crowd-sourced, the one the reviews complain about.
• A running total for the day against a calorie goal.

That is the product that made the category. What differs is everything around those three things, and the pattern is the same at three of the four: the features people say they need most, macronutrients per meal and a diary without an ad between two entries, are the ones the free tier is built to withhold, so that the free tier can sell the paid one.

None of that is hidden. Each seller says it on its own page, and that is where every line below comes from.

What does each app put behind the paywall?

Read on each seller's own page or help centre on 14 September 2026; the App Store listing gives the prices.

Two things stand out in that table.

• "Free" means something different at each app. Cronometer's free plan tracks up to 84 nutrients, which Lose It! and YAZIO sell as a paid feature; YAZIO's free plan is the diary and little else.
• The paid feature most often named is not a luxury. Macronutrients are the objection that comes back in the reviews ("barcode scanning and macro goals moved behind Premium", read 4 September 2026), and MyFitnessPal, Lose It! and YAZIO all charge for them or for their detail.

Where does free stop being free?

The community's complaints about free tiers are not about the price. They are about what the free tier does while you use it.

A reviewer describing a full-screen ad for sweets playing while they tried to log lunch is one of the lines that comes back in the MyFitnessPal reviews on the App Store and Trustpilot, read 4 September 2026; the "Go Premium" prompt inside every card is the other.

The research says logging is what people abandon: about 23 minutes a day in the first month of a 2019 trial by Harvey, Krukowski, Priest and West, published in Obesity, and fewer than half of the participants in two six-month trials run by Gabrielle Turner-McGrievy's team still recording after ten weeks. An ad between two entries adds to that time; that part is our reading, not the trial's.

A free plan that costs nothing in money can still cost something else: the ads, the macros behind a paywall, or the minutes each entry takes.

So the honest question is not "which tracker is free" but "what does free cost me here":

1. Time. An ad between two entries, four times a day, for months.
2. The numbers you wanted. Macros per meal are the first thing three of the four withhold.
3. The upgrade pressure. A free tier exists to convert; the card, the banner and the locked icon are its job.
4. The database. The complaint about ten entries for one food comes from paying and free users alike: "Same food, ten results, ten calorie counts" (reviews of MyFitnessPal, read 4 September 2026).

How much do the paid tiers cost?

From the App Store listings, in US dollars, on 14 September 2026. MacroFactor and YAZIO are taken apart in their own comparison, and Noom is priced as a programme rather than as a diary, which is why it is not in this table. Sellers change these often and run promotions, and a store listing depends on the country and the account it is read from, so a price seen elsewhere may differ from the one above.

At MyFitnessPal, Cronometer, MacroFactor and YAZIO the annual saves between 50 and 67 percent against twelve months, so the monthly exists to make the annual read as a bargain; Lose It!'s annual saves about a third.

Annual to annual, three of the four with a free tier sit between $59.99 and $79.99; YAZIO is the outlier at $47.90 list.

What changes when your diary has no ads or locked features?

IZeat is the calorie tracker inside ChatGPT, Claude or any other assistant. Tell the assistant you already use what you ate instead of searching for foods and entering them one by one. It has no free tier. The table above says why that choice was made: at three of the four free plans read, the ads or the paid tier hold back something the diary needs, macros or quiet. What IZeat sells is a diary designed to be easier to keep, so the goal you count for, less weight or more muscle, is not lost to the counting. The trial comes first, without a card, on your own meals.

Tuesday, 12:40. You tell your assistant: "Lunch was 180 g of chicken breast, grilled with no oil, 150 g of cooked rice and a 125 g plain yoghurt." IZeat returns the receipt: three rows with their calories, protein, carbohydrate and fat and where each item's numbers came from, the meal total, and what is left of the day against the target you chose. Nothing stood between the sentence and the record: no ad, no macro behind a paywall, no upgrade banner. At 18:00 you ask what to make with the eggs and the spinach in the fridge; the assistant reads the day IZeat holds and proposes something that fits what is left; IZeat records only what you then say you ate.

• The macros are there from the first meal. Protein, carbohydrate and fat on every item and every meal, with their source, not behind a paid tier; in the table above, that is what two of the four free plans keep back.
• A nutrition label is a photo, not a scanner. The assistant reads the label you photograph, says what the units mean, can flag a kJ figure that does not fit the macros, and repeats the values before anything is recorded, so you can spot a misread; you then say how much of the product you ate, and IZeat scales the figures to it.
• Your data leaves with you. The whole record as CSV or JSON, with one download for each format, and account deletion you do yourself.

The prices are on the price card, and the same figures are in the account page the day you sign up.