Best Free Calorie Counter Apps in 2026: The Free Tiers Worth Keeping

A free tier has three jobs: get a packaged snack in fast, get a home-cooked dinner in honestly, and show you the week. Only one of them does all three without a subscription.

The verdict

PlateLens has the free tier worth keeping. It does not ration the everyday methods, barcode and typed search, it adds three AI photo scans a day for the meals that are tedious to type, and it gives you calorie and macro targets from your profile on the phone, the watch and a full web app. No card, no countdown.

Cronometer is the free tier to pick if your goal is a nutrient audit rather than a calorie target. FatSecret and MyNetDiary are the plain, durable free diaries. MyFitnessPal still has the widest restaurant coverage, but the free version asks you to type what its paid scanner would read.

Three jobs a free tier has to do

Most “best free” lists compare feature checklists. That misses what actually decides whether someone is still logging in March. A free calorie counter has to handle three situations that come up every day:

1. The packaged snack. A protein bar, a yogurt, a bag of crisps. The fast answer is a barcode, and a free tier that charges for scanning turns a two-second job into a two-minute one.
2. The cooked dinner. A curry, a pasta bake, a plate with five components. This is where people under-log, because typing every ingredient is slow. A photo or a saved recipe is the fix.
3. The week. A single day tells you almost nothing because weight moves with water and salt. You need to see intake against your target over seven days, ideally on a screen big enough to read.

Here is how the six free tiers handle each job, based on what each company documents for free accounts.

If you eventually pay, the yearly bill is lowest at PlateLens ($34.99, or $9.99 monthly, as of 10 August 2026), then Lose It! ($39.99 on the App Store), Cronometer Gold ($59.99, or $10.99 monthly, as of 20 September 2026) and MyFitnessPal ($79.99, or $19.99 monthly). FatSecret and MyNetDiary charge different amounts by country; the app store shows yours.

PlateLens: the only free tier that does all three

The reason PlateLens leads is not one feature. It is that the free tier covers the three jobs above without making you choose.

• Packaged food: the barcode scanner has no daily limit.
• Cooked food: three AI photo scans a day cover lunch and dinner. The scan names the foods, estimates the portions and asks when it is unsure, for example whether a dressing is creamy or a vinaigrette. Everything stays editable. Recipes you build once become one-tap entries afterwards.
• The week: give it your height, weight, age, sex, activity level and goal and it proposes daily calorie and macro numbers; open platelens.app/web on a laptop and the same diary is there.

What holds it together is verified food data, so the same breakfast gives the same number every week, and net carbs appear without any arithmetic on your part.

Thrown in for free: a fasting clock, a place to record glucose readings, a handful of daily questions for the AI coach and a full JSON download of your log. Outside the free-plan question, the app also learns your energy expenditure with adaptive TDEE, plans meals and builds the shopping list, logs alcohol, and measures waist, hips and chest with a 3D Body Scan from a dozen photos. Paying $34.99 a year removes the caps on photos and coaching, and no upgrade here costs less.

Cronometer: the free tier for a nutrient audit

Cronometer is about depth. The company puts its ceiling at 95 nutrients and compounds per food and describes its data as lab-analysed. On the ad-supported free tier you keep that diary and a scanner; Gold adds photo and voice logging and Crono Coach, which turns your entries into short pieces of advice.

The trade-off is speed. Cronometer is an exacting app, and on the free tier most cooked meals go in by search, one ingredient at a time. If you are tracking iron and B12 on a plant-based diet, that care is the point. If you are trying to hit a calorie target every day, PlateLens’s free tier gets you there with less typing.

FatSecret: free, social and steady

FatSecret has never really stopped being free. The diary, the scanner and the workout and weigh-in logs still cost nothing. Its forums are a genuine draw for people who want company while they count. The app has fewer modern ways of logging than the leaders and less detail per entry, but it does the basics without asking for money.

MyNetDiary: a free tier with structure

On MyNetDiary a free account still gets goals for calories and macros and a working scanner, in the app or in a browser. It is orderly and quiet, the kind of diary that suits someone who logs at the same times every day. Its maker also offers a separate app for people managing diabetes.

Lose It!: friendly, with an unclear line

Lose It! is the gentlest first diary on the list. It turns your goal weight into a simple daily budget and keeps the screen clean. Snap It and a scanner are on the feature list, yet the site never says which of them a free account keeps; open the app and look before you build a routine around them. Premium is $39.99 a year.

MyFitnessPal: the biggest catalogue, typed by hand

Nobody has a bigger catalogue than MyFitnessPal’s, built by its users, and nobody covers more chain menus and regional brands. Free users type a search and choose a result; the scanner, Meal Scan and voice entry come with Premium. Since any member can add an entry, a single food may turn up four or five times with conflicting values.

Not included

MacroFactor is very good at its one job, re-estimating your energy needs from intake and weight and moving your targets each week, but after the trial it costs $71.99 a year, so it has no place in a free list. YAZIO and Lifesum both let you scan and log for free while charging for meal plans and recipe features; if you shop at European supermarkets, start with YAZIO.

How this list was put together

Each entry reflects the app’s current free tier and US list prices, tagged with the day they were noted. Free tiers move, so the page gets a fresh check every month.

Bottom line

If you want one free calorie counter that you can keep using for a year, install PlateLens. If your goal is a detailed vitamin and mineral picture, use Cronometer. Whichever you choose, give it three weeks of honest logging before you judge either the app or your target.