How this guide was checked

The question this answers, and for whom

This site answers one question for one reader: someone who is about to install a calorie counter, or who already has one and has noticed a feature they used to get for nothing now asking for a card. The question is which app still does the basic work free, what it costs when it stops, and whether the company’s claims survive a read of its own help centre.

It is not a review of which app feels best to use. Nobody here logged meals for a month, measured a database against a reference, or compared calorie estimates against a laboratory value. That is a different piece of work and this site does not pretend to have done it.

What was done, concretely

This is a documentary review of published information. It is not a hands-on test. Nobody on this team logged meals in these apps over weeks, measured database accuracy, or compared calorie estimates against a reference. Treat every capability claim below as what the vendor states, not as what we observed.

For each app we read the company's own site, its pricing or premium page where one exists, its official help center, and its Apple App Store and Google Play listings, all on 28 August 2026. Prices are recorded as the page displayed them on that date. Where a company publishes no price on its own site, we say so and quote the store listing instead. Several vendors, including FatSecret, MyFitnessPal, Cronometer and Lose It!, block ordinary page fetches; for those we read the same articles through their public help center APIs, and the cited URLs are the canonical human-readable addresses of those articles.

No app was paid for. No subscription was purchased, so paywalled screens were not inspected. No vendor was contacted, no press access was requested, and no affiliate relationship exists with any app here. Affiliate roundups were used only to find candidate names, never as a source for a price, a database size, or a feature.

Where a company contradicts itself across its own properties, we record the conflict rather than picking the friendlier number. Where a fact could not be confirmed from a primary source, the field says so instead of guessing.

The fields, and why each one is here

Every field is here because a reader can open the vendor’s own page and prove it wrong. Descriptive fields, the kind that require trusting the person who wrote them, are not in the ledger. They are in the verdict line, where a named editor owns them.

How sources are weighted

Product facts start with first-party pages, but first-party pages are not automatically equal. A current pricing or checkout page governs what a purchase costs. A help-centre article written for a specific tier outranks a broad homepage claim about feature access. A current store listing governs that storefront. A dated page wins only when it clearly supersedes the older one and answers the same question for the same market and tier.

When that hierarchy produces a clear answer, the conflict remains visible and the answer is named. When the pages may describe different tiers, regions, or products, both remain unresolved. The site does not pick the friendlier number.

Sourced does not mean proven true

A sourced value means the named page published it and the page was read on the date shown. It does not mean the directory independently audited a food database, reproduced a calorie estimate, or proved a marketing claim. The fact layer records what exists in writing; the verdict and conflict guidance explain what weight that fact deserves.

Completeness measures what a vendor discloses, not how good its app is. A polished marketing operation may produce fewer open gaps than a small developer with sparse documentation. Gaps are not a score, and a clean profile is not an endorsement.

The five states a cell can hold

No cell on this site is ever a bare dash. Every one resolves to one of five states, and the difference between three of them is the whole reason to trust the other two.

• A value. We read it and it is what the vendor publishes.
• A qualified answer. The honest reply is yes, but. The qualification is attached to the cell and repeated in full under the comparison table.
• Not offered. The app genuinely does not do this, and the vendor documents it.
• Not disclosed. The app has the answer and does not publish it.
• Not verified. We could not check. Where the reason is that a vendor’s pages sit behind a challenge that blocks an ordinary fetch, the cell’s note says so.

20 of the 180 factual cells are not disclosed or not verified, and 32 carry a qualification. We leave those limits visible instead of filling them with an estimate.

What happens when a vendor contradicts itself

Both figures get printed, side by side, with the page each one sits on named underneath. Each conflict is labeled as affecting a purchase, a feature decision, or only a marketing claim. A best current answer is named when source precedence supports it; otherwise the practical next step is stated. 8 such questions are recorded across 5 apps, covering 23 separately published figures, of which 17 carry a direct link to the page they were read from. Where the exact page was not recorded, the column says so.

This matters more here than it would in most categories, because the figures in question are the ones every roundup repeats. A food database size gets copied from a homepage into an article, and then from that article into the next one, and nobody goes back to see that the vendor prints a second number two paragraphs further down. The contradictions are on the directory page.

How the two parts of the directory differ

The featured set is intentionally seven apps. Those entries receive daily checks and a full comparison across every field in the rubric. The alphabetical database is broader: it currently carries 1082 apps with a dated official source, including products that publish too little information for a full comparison. A hidden price or narrow regional focus is recorded, not used as a reason to pretend the product does not exist.

The broad census starts with nine official US App Store searches for calorie, macro, nutrition, food, meal, carb, and diet trackers. A listing qualifies only when its name explicitly identifies that kind of tracker, or when a food-diary name is backed by listing copy that explicitly describes calorie or macro tracking. Records are deduped by Apple app ID. Store presence establishes an active storefront listing; it does not establish accuracy, quality, or an endorsement.

The superlative vocabulary

There is no composite score on this site, no stars and no letter grade. A computed score needs a laboratory or a published algorithm over public data, and an editorial score needs institutional standing. This site has neither. What it has instead is a closed set of six labels, published here, with every use scoped to a named reader.

How often this is re-checked

The seven featured entries are checked daily. Every other detailed entry and database record is checked at least monthly. A separate discovery pass searches official sites, app stores, company news, and the wider web for new apps and changed facts every day. Every record carries the date its official source was last read, and every verified material change is appended to that app's own history.

Money

No app in this directory has paid to be listed, to be ordered where it is, or to be described the way it is. There are no affiliate links here, no advertising and no sponsored placement. No subscription was bought and no vendor was contacted.

If that ever changes, the disclosure changes with it, in the same place, before anything is published under the new arrangement. A paid listing would be marked so that it could not be mistaken for an assessed one from across the room, and the order of the directory would never be sortable by payment.

How this guide uses automation

Automated checks help find changed pages, stale dates, and new candidates. A change is never silently overwritten: the automation adds a dated, sourced changelog entry to the affected profile and opens a draft change. Publication still requires review and merge.

How to tell us we are wrong

Write to corrections@caloriecounterapps.com. If a price here is out of date, if a vendor has resolved one of the contradictions recorded on this site, or if a field marked not verified turns out to be published somewhere we did not look, it gets fixed and the correction is logged in public at corrections with the date, what was wrong, what it is now, and who reported it.