MyFitnessPal Alternatives: Which Ones Still Scan Barcodes Free

This is one of those searches where the reason matters more than the list. Nobody wakes up wanting a
different calorie app. They want the thing that stopped working.

What actually happened

MyFitnessPal announced in August 2022 that from 1 October 2022, the barcode scanner
would require a Premium subscription. Free accounts had used it for years. Premium at the time was
$19.99 per month.

The reaction was loud and it was specific. People were not objecting to a paid tier existing. They
were objecting to a decade-old free feature moving behind one, and to the price attached to getting a
single feature back.

The ownership history explains the pressure without excusing it: Under Armour acquired MyFitnessPal in
2015 and sold it to the private equity firm Francisco Partners in 2020. Features migrating toward a
subscription is what that sequence usually produces.

What MyFitnessPal costs now

• Premium: $79.99 a year, listed as $6.67 a month
• Premium+: $99.99 a year, listed as $8.34 a month
• Premium+ monthly: $24.99 a month

Premium+ adds meal planning: a custom meal planner, over 1,500 recipes and automated grocery lists.
Barcode and meal scanning appear at the Premium level.

Note the gap between the annual and monthly Premium+ price. Paying month to month costs roughly three
times the annual rate per month, which is worth knowing before a trial converts.

The alternative most lists recommend has the same problem

Lose It! is the app most frequently named in MyFitnessPal alternative lists, and it is
the top comparison people search for.

Its own App Store description lists the barcode scanner under premium features. The
free basic plan covers calorie tracking and a weight loss plan; scanning is on the paid side.

So switching from MyFitnessPal to Lose It! to escape a barcode paywall lands you at a barcode paywall.
That is the single most useful thing to know before spending an evening migrating your food diary.

Cronometer keeps it free

Cronometer’s free tier, per its own pricing page, includes:

• Logging food, exercise, biometrics and notes
• A database of over 1 million lab-analysed or verified foods
• The barcode scanner
• Tracking of up to 84 nutrients and other compounds

Gold costs $4.99 a month billed annually at $59.99 a year, or $10.99 a month
billed monthly. What it adds is an ad-free experience and tracking of up to 95 nutrients instead
of 84.

Read that upgrade carefully, because it is unusually honest by category standards. The paid tier is not
holding the core function hostage. It is selling you eleven more nutrients and the absence of
advertising.

The nutrient number is the real difference

Eighty-four nutrients in a free tier is not a marketing figure, it is a different product philosophy.
Most calorie apps track calories and three macros. Cronometer’s database is built around lab-analysed
entries and reports micronutrients as standard.

Whether you need that is a genuine question rather than a rhetorical one. If you are tracking a
deficit, calories and protein carry almost all the useful signal and 84 nutrients is noise you will
ignore. If you are managing a restricted diet, a deficiency, or a medical condition, it is the entire
reason to choose it.

One app we could not verify

FatSecret is widely reported to include barcode scanning in its free tier and is the
other name that comes up constantly in this conversation. We could not confirm its current pricing from
the company’s own site, which blocks automated access, so we are not printing figures for it here.

That is a smaller point than it looks. A large share of the pages ranking for this search print
confident price tables for a dozen apps, and prices in this category change often enough that a table
copied last year is wrong now. Check the app’s own pricing page before you decide, not a comparison
article, including this one.

The thing nobody mentions about switching

Your history does not come with you.

Years of logged meals, saved recipes, custom foods and weight history live in the app you are leaving.
Some tools offer imports and some do not, and the practical result is that switching costs more than the
price difference suggests, particularly if you have built a library of custom recipes.

That is not an argument for staying. It is an argument for switching once, deliberately, rather than
three times in a year chasing whichever app has not yet paywalled something.

A note on the accuracy claims you will see

Comparison pages in this category increasingly advertise precision figures for AI photo recognition:
accuracy percentages in the high nineties, portion estimation errors of around one per cent.

Those figures do not match the published research. A systematic review of 52 papers found relative
error for calorie estimation ranging from 0.10% to 38.3%, and against doubly labelled water, the gold
standard, a food-recognition app showed limits of agreement spanning more than 2,300 calories a day.

Choose an app on price, database quality and whether you will actually use it. Choosing one on a
decimal-place accuracy claim means choosing on a number nobody has demonstrated.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why did everyone start looking for MyFitnessPal alternatives?

Because on 1 October 2022 the barcode scanner became a Premium feature after years of being free to all
users, with Premium priced at $19.99 a month at the time. The searches are a direct consequence of that
change rather than general dissatisfaction, which is why the useful question when choosing a replacement
is not which app is best overall but which ones still include scanning without a subscription.

Does Lose It! have a free barcode scanner?

No. Lose It!’s own App Store description lists the barcode scanner under premium features, with the free
basic plan covering calorie tracking and a weight loss plan. Since Lose It! is the most commonly
recommended MyFitnessPal alternative, this is worth confirming before migrating: the specific thing that
prompted the switch is paywalled in the destination too.

Is Cronometer really free?

The free tier is genuinely functional rather than a trial. Per Cronometer’s own pricing page it includes
food, exercise, biometric and note logging, a database of over a million lab-analysed or verified foods,
the barcode scanner, and tracking of up to 84 nutrients. Gold at $59.99 a year or $10.99 monthly adds an
ad-free experience and 95 nutrients rather than unlocking core functionality.

What does MyFitnessPal cost now?

Premium is $79.99 a year, listed as $6.67 a month. Premium+ is $99.99 a year, listed as $8.34 a month,
and $24.99 if paid monthly. Premium+ adds a custom meal planner, over 1,500 recipes and automated grocery
lists. The monthly Premium+ rate works out at roughly three times the annual rate per month, which is the
detail to check before a free trial rolls over.

Is it worth switching just for the barcode scanner?

That depends on how much you scan and what your history is worth. Barcode scanning is what makes logging
packaged food fast enough to sustain, and sustained use is where the benefit of tracking comes from. Against
that, your logged history, custom foods and recipes generally do not transfer cleanly. The reasonable
approach is to switch once, having checked the destination properly, rather than repeatedly.

Which alternative is best for tracking micronutrients?

On the published feature lists, Cronometer, because tracking up to 84 nutrients sits in its free tier and
its database is built around lab-analysed entries. Whether that matters to you is a separate question. For
straightforward calorie and protein tracking, the extra nutrients are information you will not use. For a
restricted diet or a diagnosed deficiency, it is the reason to pick it.

Are the AI photo features in these apps reliable?

Less reliable than the marketing suggests. A systematic review of 52 papers found relative error for
calorie estimation between 0.10% and 38.3%, and a study measuring a food-recognition app against doubly
labelled water reported limits of agreement from −1,504 to +845 calories a day. Photo logging is a
convenience feature that helps you keep logging; treating its output as a measurement is going beyond what
has been shown.

Should I trust price comparison tables in articles?

Verify against the app’s own pricing page, including for this article. Pricing in this category changes
frequently, tiers get renamed, and features move between them, which is exactly what created this search in
the first place. Any table, here or elsewhere, is a snapshot with a date on it rather than a standing
fact.

Sources

• MyFitnessPal, Premium pricing page: Premium $79.99 annually ($6.67/mo), Premium+ $99.99 annually
  ($8.34/mo) and $24.99 billed monthly; Premium+ features including custom meal planner, 1,500+ recipes and
  automated grocery lists; barcode and meal scanning at Premium level. Checked August 2026 —
  myfitnesspal.com
• Cronometer, Gold pricing page: free tier $0 including food, exercise, biometric and note logging, over
  1M lab-analysed or verified foods, barcode scanner and up to 84 nutrients; Gold $4.99/mo billed annually at
  $59.99/year or $10.99/mo billed monthly, ad-free and up to 95 nutrients. Checked August 2026 —
  cronometer.com
• Lose It!, Apple App Store listing: barcode scanner listed under premium features; free basic plan
  covering calorie tracking and weight loss plan —
  App Store
• Contemporary reporting of the 1 October 2022 barcode scanner paywall and the $19.99 monthly Premium
  price at the time, and the Under Armour to Francisco Partners ownership history —
  Droid Life, August 2022
• AI-based digital image dietary assessment methods compared to humans and ground truth: a systematic
  review. Annals of Medicine, 2023. PMID 38060823 —
  PubMed

Prices above were taken from each company’s own pricing page or
app store listing in August 2026. Pricing in this category changes frequently; check the source before
purchasing. Where a company blocked verification, no figures are printed.