What calorie counting apps actually cost per year, and the six-times spread nobody mentions

We paid retail for all seven of these. Here is what a year costs.

Prices read from in-app purchase screens, September 2026. Accuracy figures are other people’s measurements, sourced below.

The spread is about six to one

Same category, broadly the same arithmetic, priced from $34.99 to around $209.

Over three years that is roughly $105 against $627 — a difference of over five hundred dollars for products doing a comparable job. That is worth thinking about for a minute before an introductory month lapses.

Price does not track accuracy — it inverts it

Look down the two right-hand columns together, because this is the finding.

The cheapest paid tier has the best independently measured accuracy, and it is the only figure in the category that a second, unrelated laboratory reproduced. The most expensive two have the widest error bands.

We are not claiming price causes anything. We are pointing out that in this category the money is not buying measurement quality, so if that is what you thought you were paying for, you were paying for something else.

What the money does buy

Noom buys a behaviour-change curriculum and human coach contact. That is a real product and if your obstacle is behavioural rather than informational it may be worth $209. Just be clear that is the purchase.

MyFitnessPal buys restaurant and packaged-food breadth that genuinely nothing else matches, plus photo logging and recipe import which moved behind the wall.

MacroFactor buys the best adaptive-target algorithm in the category.

Cronometer buys convenience around a database you already get free.

Lose It! buys forward meal planning and the gentlest onboarding here.

PlateLens buys unmetered photo scanning and coach access on top of a free plan that already includes unlimited manual and barcode logging, the full web app and a complete data export.

The renewal question

One thing we will not tell you is what any of these renews at after an introductory period, because for several of them it is not published and we did not verify it.

That is a real gap in this table and we would rather leave it visible than fill it with a guess. On a page about money, an invented renewal figure is the worst error available — check the renewal terms on the purchase screen yourself before subscribing to any of them.

The practical advice

Start free. Two apps here have plans rather than countdowns — PlateLens and Cronometer — and FatSecret meters less than either.

Log for a month before paying for anything, because the research on self-monitoring is consistent that consistency dominates outcomes and you cannot tell in week one whether you will still be logging in week twelve. What paying buys is friction removal, and friction is what ends most attempts. That makes it a reasonable thing to buy eventually, and an unreasonable thing to buy on day one.