Is MyFitnessPal free? What’s free, what’s paid in 2026 (and the price of Premium)

Good news first: you can use MyFitnessPal for years without ever reaching for your card. The free plan gives you the heart of the app, the food diary, backed by a database of more than 20.5 million foods, restaurant dishes included, according to the App Store listing. You search for a food, pick the serving, and the calories, carbs, fat and protein are added to your day. When you sign up, the app also suggests a calorie goal based on your age, height, weight and activity, an estimate worth comparing with your basal metabolic rate.

Around the diary, the free plan tracks water, exercise, steps and weight, lets you save your own recipes and meals, and connects to more than 40 apps and devices, from Apple Health to Garmin and Fitbit. The community forums are open to everyone. On the official Premium page, the comparison table sums up the free plan in two lines: nutrition and weight tracking, and exercise tracking.

The trade-off comes down to two things: ads and manual logging. Ads appear while you fill in your diary, and every food has to be searched by name. If you eat the same few meals most days, that is very manageable. If you are just starting out, this is often where motivation fades, somewhere around week three, when typing “homemade chicken salad” for the tenth time starts to feel like a chore.

Here is what each plan includes in October 2026, based on the official Premium page, the App Store listings and MyFitnessPal’s help center. Premium+ adds meal planning, but it is only offered in six English-speaking countries.

Many long-time users found out about the change while scanning a yogurt. Until 2022, the barcode scanner was free. In August 2022, MyFitnessPal emailed its members to say that from October 1, 2022, barcode scanning would be available only with Premium, while manual search would stay open to everyone. It is still the most common complaint from free users today.

Newer features followed the same path. Meal Scan, which recognizes foods from a photo of your plate, is limited to Premium and Premium+ members; since the Winter Release in February 2026, iPhone subscribers can even upload a photo taken earlier and log it later. According to the official help center, Meal Scan only works with the app set to English. Voice Log, which lets you describe a whole meal out loud, is also paid and limited to the US. The US App Store listing also highlights an AI Coach for Premium members.

Then there is the subtler question of macros. The free plan does show carbs, fat and protein, and lets you set goals as a percentage of your calories. But goals in grams, different goals for each day of the week or for each meal, quick-logging macros without a food search, and Net Carbs Mode are all Premium features. If you track your macronutrients closely, for example with a protein target in grams, this is often what tips people towards subscribing.

In the US, the official site is straightforward: Premium costs $19.99 a month or $79.99 a year. Elsewhere, MyFitnessPal does not publish a price list, and the price appears in the app when you subscribe. The App Store listings show several Premium offers per country: in the UK, from £7.99 to £15.99 a month and £39.99 to £64.99 a year. The lowest amounts are most likely promotions or legacy plans, the highest the standard rates. The exact offer depends on timing and on your account.

On March 2, 2026, MyFitnessPal announced it had acquired Cal AI, the photo-based calorie counting app built by teenage founders and downloaded more than 15 million times in under two years, according to TechCrunch. The deal had closed in December 2025, and its terms were not disclosed. Cal AI remains a standalone app, but it now runs on MyFitnessPal’s database: 20 million foods, 68,500 brands and meals from more than 380 restaurant chains.

For someone on MyFitnessPal’s free plan, the deal changes nothing day to day. Photo logging has not become free in the main app, and Cal AI itself works with a three-day trial followed by a subscription (in-app purchases from $2.99 to $29.99 on the US App Store). The group simply has two paid front doors now: MyFitnessPal for complete nutrition and weight tracking, Cal AI for people who mainly want to snap their meals. If you were hoping the acquisition would bring a more generous free plan, that is not where it is coming from.

MyFitnessPal offers a 7-day free Premium trial to people who have never subscribed and never started a trial before. It works like every app subscription: if you do nothing, the first charge lands at the end of the trial, and the subscription then renews automatically every month or every year.

How you cancel depends on where you signed up. On iPhone, go to Settings, tap your name, then Subscriptions. On Android, open the subscriptions page in the Google Play Store. If you subscribed on the website, go to your MyFitnessPal account settings. For a trial, Apple advises cancelling at least 24 hours before it ends. And Google spells it out: uninstalling the app does not cancel your subscription, a trap that costs plenty of people a few dozen dollars every year.

The good news is that cancelling does not erase your history. You keep Premium features until the end of the period you have already paid for, then your account simply goes back to the free plan, with your diary, recipes and saved meals intact.

If a free app is your priority, several competitors leave open some of what MyFitnessPal charges for. None is perfect: each has its own free limits, summarized below.

MyFitnessPal is still free for the essentials: you can keep a complete diary, with calories, macros, water, exercise and weight, without ever paying, as long as you accept ads and manual searching. Everything that saves time, from the barcode scanner to Meal Scan and detailed macro goals, has moved to Premium, which costs $19.99 a month or $79.99 a year in the US. Before you pay, use the 7-day trial with a reminder, and remember that deleting the app cancels nothing. Above all, the tool matters less than consistency: a moderate calorie deficit you can keep up beats the best app abandoned after three weeks.