Why MyFitnessPal Costs $79.99 a Year Now

Title: Why MyFitnessPal Costs $79.99 a Year Now

If you've used MyFitnessPal for more than a few years, you've watched it get more expensive while doing less for free. That isn't your imagination and it isn't inflation. There's a specific, documented sequence behind it, and it's worth understanding because it tells you what to expect next.

The timeline

2005 to 2015: almost everything free. Food logging, barcode scanning, macro tracking, exercise logging, reports. This is how the app grew to enormous scale, eventually past 200 million registered accounts. Growth first, revenue later, which is the standard consumer playbook.

2015: Under Armor buys it for $475 million. A Premium tier appears at around $9.99 a month. The free tier stays generous. The strategy is selling apparel and building an ecosystem, not squeezing the app itself.

2020: Under Armor sells it to Francisco Partners for $345 million. They took a $130 million loss on the exit. The buyer is a private equity firm, and the strategic logic changes completely. An apparel company wanted users. A PE firm wants revenue per user, on a timeline, ahead of a resale.

2023: barcode scanning moves behind the paywall. The feature people used most, taken from free and sold back. It's now the most common single reason users upgrade, which was the entire point.

2024: the paid tier splits in two. Premium+ launches at $99.99 a year, with a meal planner as the differentiator.

2026: Premium is $19.99 a month or $79.99 a year. Premium+ is $99.99. The monthly price has doubled from where it started, custom macro targets sit behind the paywall alongside the scanner, and the free tier carries ads in the logging flow.

Why this pattern is so recognizable

Once you've seen it once you see it everywhere.

A product is given away until it has enough users that leaving feels costly. Years of your own logged history, your recents list, your habits. That accumulated switching cost is the asset, not the software.

Then features migrate upward. Not new features added to the paid tier, which nobody minds, but existing free features relocated into it. The user experiences this as loss rather than as a purchase decision, which is uncomfortable but effective, because loss is more motivating than gain.

Then the price rises, usually in steps small enough that no single one justifies the effort of leaving.

None of this is illegal or even unusual. It's a well-understood way to extract revenue from a mature consumer product with a large locked-in base. It's worth naming plainly because the alternative is assuming the price rises are about you getting more, and you aren't.

One detail worth knowing: the price increases haven't bought a better food database. It's still largely crowdsourced, entries are still frequently wrong, and Premium users get exactly the same data as free users. You're paying for speed and features, not accuracy.

What you get for $79.99

To be fair about it, Premium is not nothing. Barcode scanning, custom gram targets for protein, carbs and fat, no ads, more detailed nutrient breakdowns, and photo logging. Premium+ adds a meal planner with grocery lists.

The database remains the largest anywhere, device compatibility is the best in the category, and the community is the most active. If you use the app heavily and those things matter to you, it's defensible.

Whether it's worth it depends on one question: does it actually work for you? If you've been paying for three or four years and the thing you were trying to change hasn't changed, the answer is no, and it's been no for a while.

What to do

If you only need calorie counting: the free tiers of Cronometer and Open Food Facts both include barcode scanning, at zero dollars. YAZIO's paid tier is about $47.90 a year, the cheapest of the mainstream apps.

If you want better data: Cronometer's curated database, or MacroFactor, which calculates your actual energy expenditure from your own logged data rather than using a formula.

If you want something closer to what MyFitnessPal is: Lose It, though note it raised its own Premium to $79.99 in 2026, matching MyFitnessPal exactly. The whole category is drifting upward together.

Whatever you do, how to export your MyFitnessPal data and switch apps is essential knowledge to save your history first. The one-click CSV export is Premium only, but the free privacy data request gets you the same information without a subscription. Do it before you cancel.

Where we fit, said plainly

We make Stride, so here's our position rather than a pretence of neutrality.

Stride is $10 a month. On annual billing that's more than MyFitnessPal Premium, not less, and we're not going to dress that up. What you're paying for is a different product: food logging by photo, voice or barcode on every plan, plus your medications, supplements, sleep, weight and labs in the same app, with an AI coach that reads all of it together and tells you what to do next. If all you want is a calorie count, one of the cheaper apps above will serve you better and we'd rather you went there.

What we can say about the pattern in this article is that we won't take a feature you're already using and move it behind a higher tier. Logging your own data is not something we'll ever charge extra for. That's the specific behavior that made this article necessary, and it's an easy thing to promise and an easy thing to check us on.

The broader point stands regardless of which app you pick. You've probably been paying for years to be told what you ate. At some point it's fair to ask what you got back.

Take Control of Your Daily Tracking

If you are ready for a simpler, unified way to manage your health, give Stride a try. Stride brings your meals, daily habits, and health routines together in one intuitive space while keeping daily nutrition numbers clear estimates you can actually use. Download Stride today and start building a balanced routine that fits your lifestyle.