Francisco Partners is exploring a sale of MyFitnessPal, the food-logging app it bought from Under Armour six years ago, Reuters reported this week, citing people familiar with the process. Neither the private-equity firm nor MyFitnessPal commented on the report, and no transaction has been announced.
The report is short on specifics — no target price, no named bidders, no timeline — and readers should hold it loosely. Private-equity owners test the market for an asset routinely, and a meaningful share of those processes end with the firm keeping the company. What makes this one worth a paragraph in the Money section anyway is the timing. If the biggest name in consumer calorie tracking is being shopped in 2026, the category’s growth phase is over and its consolidation phase has started.
How MyFitnessPal got here
The app was founded in 2005 by Mike and Albert Lee, grew through the smartphone era into the default American food diary, and was acquired by Under Armour in 2015 for about $475 million. That purchase was part of a connected-fitness strategy — MyFitnessPal alongside MapMyFitness and Endomondo — that Under Armour spent the following five years dismantling. In 2020 it sold MyFitnessPal to Francisco Partners for roughly $345 million, a $130 million markdown on the 2015 price.
Six years is a long hold by the standards of technology private equity, where four to seven years is the usual window between purchase and exit. On that arithmetic alone, a sale process in 2026 is unsurprising.
What has happened to the product during those six years is the more interesting part of the story. MyFitnessPal has moved steadily toward subscription revenue. Barcode scanning, recipe import, and meal-level calorie breakdowns have all become Premium features on current builds. Premium now runs $19.99 a month or $79.99 a year, the most expensive mainstream plan in the category. The free tier that made the app ubiquitous is now thinner than the free tiers of several smaller competitors.
That is a recognizable private-equity pattern, and it is not automatically a criticism: the app had to make money, and advertising on a food diary was never going to be enough. But it does mean the obvious lever for a new owner — raise revenue per user — has already been pulled fairly hard. Whoever buys this business is buying a subscription base that has already absorbed several rounds of paywalling.
The competitive picture has changed underneath it
When Under Armour bought MyFitnessPal in 2015, the app’s database was an almost insurmountable moat. Fifteen years of user-contributed entries is difficult to replicate, and for a decade nobody did.
The moat matters less in 2026 than it did, for two reasons. The first is that a large user-contributed database is now as much a liability as an asset — duplicate and conflicting entries for the same food are the leading source of error in the app, as our health desk found when it tested eight food-tracking apps against a kitchen-scale reference this summer. The second is that photo-based logging changes what a database is for. An app that estimates a plate from an image needs a well-structured nutrient reference, not the largest possible pile of user submissions.
Meanwhile the field around MyFitnessPal has become genuinely competitive. Noom built a behavior-change business with its own subscription economics. Cronometer built a smaller, higher-quality database and a loyal micronutrient-tracking audience. Lose It! and Yazio have held mid-market positions with cheaper annual plans. Simple and Carb Manager occupy specific niches — fasting and ketogenic eating — profitably. And a wave of photo-first apps, Cal AI among the largest, have grown quickly on a logging model MyFitnessPal does not lead.
An acquirer is therefore buying brand recognition, a large registered base of roughly 200 million accounts, restaurant-menu coverage that is still the best in the category, and a product that has been losing on accuracy and on logging friction to smaller rivals.
What it means for users
The honest answer is: probably nothing this quarter, and possibly something next year.
The Mint case is the useful precedent, and we covered its aftermath in detail when we looked at the budgeting apps worth using after Mint’s shutdown. Intuit did not close Mint because Mint had no users. It closed Mint because a free, advertising-supported product did not fit the portfolio, and millions of users discovered on short notice that their financial history lived somewhere they did not control. Nobody expects MyFitnessPal to be shut down — it is a paying subscription business, which is exactly what buyers want — but the general lesson holds. The moment to export your data is before an announcement, not after.
Three practical steps, in order of how much they matter:
- Export your log. MyFitnessPal’s website offers a CSV export of food, exercise, and measurement history from account settings. Run it. A local copy of your own history is the only thing that makes switching apps cheap, whatever happens.
- Check what you are paying and on what cycle. Annual subscribers who renew during a transition period generally lock in the old price for a year. Monthly subscribers do not.
- Do not switch on a rumor. A sale process is not a shutdown notice. If the app works for you — and for readers who eat out often, its restaurant coverage is still the best available — there is no reason to move on the strength of a Reuters story.
We will update this piece if a transaction is announced. Corrections and clarifications, as always, go to our corrections page.