The MyFitnessPal Barcode Scanner Isn't Free Anymore. Here's What to Use Instead

Title: The MyFitnessPal Barcode Scanner Isn't Free Anymore. Here's What to Use Instead

You pick up a box of cereal, open the app, point the camera at the barcode, and get a screen asking you to upgrade.

If that's how you ended up here, you're not imagining it and you're not alone. Barcode scanning used to be free in MyFitnessPal. In 2023 it moved behind the Premium paywall, and it's now the single most common reason people upgrade. That was almost certainly the point.

What actually happened

A short version of the timeline, because the pattern explains the pricing.

For most of its life, MyFitnessPal gave away nearly everything. Food logging, barcode scanning, macro tracking, exercise logging, basic reports. It built one of the largest user bases in consumer health that way, north of 200 million accounts.

Under Armor bought it for $475 million in 2015 and introduced a Premium tier at around $9.99 a month. In 2020 it was sold again, this time to Francisco Partners, a private equity firm. What followed is a familiar sequence: the premium price doubled to $19.99 a month, and features that had been free migrated upward into the paid tier.

Today it's $19.99 a month or $79.99 a year for Premium, and $99.99 a year for Premium+, which adds a meal planner. The free tier still exists. It just does less than it did when you signed up.

What you lose on the free tier now

Barcode scanning is the one everyone notices, because it's the difference between logging a packaged food in two seconds and logging it in ninety.

Custom macro targets are also gone. On free, you get preset ratios. If you want to set exact gram targets for protein, carbs and fat, which is the entire point of tracking for most people who track seriously, that's Premium.

Ads are on the free tier, and they're in the logging flow, which is the worst possible place for them.

Worth knowing: paying doesn't fix the database. MyFitnessPal's food data is largely crowdsourced, and entries are frequently wrong, duplicated or missing. Premium users get the same entries free users do. You're paying for speed and features, not accuracy.

The apps that still scan for free

Open Food Facts is a free, open-source, non-profit food database with its own scanner app. No paywall, no subscription, no upsell, because there's no company behind it trying to monetize you. The tradeoff is that it's a database tool rather than a polished tracker, and coverage of US products is thinner than European ones.

Cronometer has a free tier with barcode scanning, and its database is curated rather than fully crowdsourced, which makes it noticeably more accurate for micronutrients. Gold is $59.99 a year if you want the extras. If precision is what you care about, this is the strongest free option.

YAZIO includes scanning on free and is the cheapest paid tier among the mainstream apps at around $47.90 a year.

Lose It has a free tier, though it raised its own Premium price to $79.99 in 2026, matching MyFitnessPal exactly. The industry is moving in one direction on price. If you want to explore more options, you can check out our guide to the best meal logging app choices available today.

Stride includes barcode scanning, and also photo and voice logging, on every plan. We don't gate the act of logging. Charging you to record your own data seemed like the wrong thing to charge for.

Be honest about the math before you switch

Here's the part most articles like this leave out, including the ones written by apps trying to win your business.

If your goal is purely to spend as little as possible, the answer is Cronometer's free tier or Open Food Facts. Use them. They work, and nobody should pay for a calorie counter they don't need.

Stride is $10 a month. On annual billing that's more than MyFitnessPal Premium, not less. We're not going to pretend otherwise, and if price is your deciding factor, we're not your app.

What you get for the difference is a different product rather than a cheaper one. Stride logs food by photo, voice or barcode, and it also tracks your medications, supplements, sleep, weight and workouts in the same place. You can upload a lab report. An AI coach reads all of it together and tells you what to actually do next, and real nutritionists are available when you want a human. The promise isn't a lower price for the same calorie count. It's that your data turns into a decision.

The real question

Everyone focuses on the price. The more useful question is what you've gotten back for three years of logging.

Most people who've tracked for a long time have an enormous pile of data and very little that changed because of it. They know roughly what they eat. They know they should eat less of it. The app confirmed this daily and moved nothing.

If that's your experience, the barcode paywall isn't the problem. It's just the moment you finally noticed you were paying for something that wasn't doing much. Switching to a cheaper version of the same thing solves the price. It doesn't solve the rest.

Make Food Tracking Work for You with Stride

If you are tired of paywalls and disconnected numbers, give Stride a try. Stride makes logging meals simple with barcode scanning, photo tracking, and voice input, providing clear daily nutrition estimates to guide your progress. Download Stride today and start building healthy habits that actually stick.