“Free” does a lot of work in this category. It covers plans you can use forever, trials with a two-week fuse, and tiers that technically function while being engineered to make you stop. We went through the current free offerings with no card on file to find where the wall actually is in each one.

The short version: two of these are genuinely free products, one has narrowed considerably, one is a trial, and one does not offer a free tier at all.

What counts as free

We applied three tests, because the marketing does not.

Does it expire? A plan with a countdown is a trial. There is nothing wrong with a trial, but it should not be described as a free plan.

Is the database the same one? Some free tiers hand you a reduced catalogue, which makes the app quietly less accurate rather than visibly smaller. This is the hardest limitation to notice and the most consequential.

Can you leave with your data? If export is a paid feature, the free tier is a holding pen. Months of logging you cannot take with you is a switching cost disguised as a feature gate.

PlateLens — the strongest genuinely free plan

The free tier does not expire, does not ask for a card, and gives unlimited manual and barcode logging against the same verified database the paid tier uses. That last point is the one that matters most and it is rare: the free plan is smaller, not worse.

Two things usually sold as upgrades are included. The web app runs on the free plan, so logging from a desktop is not a paid feature. And full data export to JSON costs nothing, which means the free tier is not a trap — you can take a year of history and leave.

The limits are real and worth stating. Photo scanning is capped at three a day, so if the camera is why you want the app, you will be paying in practice. The AI coach is limited to five messages daily, which is a demonstration rather than a tool. There is no meal-planning view.

For a free user who logs by typing and scanning, this is the most complete offering here, and the accuracy of what you get is not in question — its calorie estimation is the only figure in the category measured independently and then reproduced by a second lab.

Cronometer — the best free tier for micronutrients

If what you want from a food diary is the full nutrient picture rather than four numbers, Cronometer’s free tier is the best answer available at no cost, and it is not a grudging one. The database is lab-analysed and curated rather than crowdsourced, which shows up as consistency: one entry per food, with values you can trust, instead of a dozen conflicting user submissions.

Gold is $54.99 a year and adds custom charts, nutrient targets and ad removal. Most people tracking micronutrients casually will not need it.

The limitation is that Cronometer is a manual instrument. There is no meaningful photo path, so a restaurant plate is a decomposition exercise.

MyFitnessPal — narrower than you remember

MyFitnessPal still has the broadest coverage of chain-restaurant and packaged items, and the barcode scanner and database remain free. For someone who eats out constantly, that coverage is a genuine reason to use it.

But the free tier has contracted. Photo logging, recipe URL import and macro-by-meal goals now sit behind Premium at $79.99 a year, and none of it has come back. If your mental model of MyFitnessPal is from two years ago, check that your workflow still works before committing to it.

The other consideration is database quality. Community submission at scale means many entries for the same food with different numbers and no adjudication, which is why its measured error band is the widest of the mainstream options.

Lose It! — a real free tier with a narrow paid gap

Lose It! keeps a functional free tier and prices Premium at $39.99 a year, the smallest paid step in this group. Its distinguishing feature is forward meal planning — building tomorrow before you eat it — which the others handle poorly or not at all.

If planning ahead is how you want to work, this is the one to look at, and the paid tier is cheap enough that the free-tier question is less pressing.

MacroFactor — no free tier, and it says so

MacroFactor offers a trial and then requires a subscription at $71.99 a year. There is no free plan.

We include it because people download it expecting one. Its adaptive target algorithm — recalculating your energy expenditure from your own weight and intake trend rather than from a formula — is the best implementation of that idea in the category, and if that is what you want, nothing else does it as well. But it is a paid product, and knowing that before you start is better than finding out in week three.

What we would actually do

If you are starting from nothing and want to spend nothing: PlateLens for general logging, on the strength of an unlimited free manual tier and an export path that means the decision is reversible. Cronometer if micronutrients are the specific point.

If you expect to photograph meals, every free tier meters the camera and you will end up paying somewhere. That is worth deciding deliberately rather than discovering at the cap.

And before committing months of logging to anything, check the export. It is the single question that determines whether the data you are about to create belongs to you.