MyFitnessPal Cost – What You Get for Free vs. Premium

Thinking about using MyFitnessPal to track your food and fitness goals? You’re not alone. It’s one of the most popular health tracking apps out there, but if you’re wondering what it actually costs and whether it’s worth upgrading to premium, you’re in the right place. Let’s break down what you get for free, what you’ll pay for, and whether it’s really worth your money.

What Is MyFitnessPal and What Can It Do?

MyFitnessPal is a health and wellness app that helps you track what you eat, how much you move, and how your habits impact your goals. Whether you want to lose weight, build muscle, manage a specific diet, or just become more aware of your health, the app offers a wide range of tools to support your journey.

Core Features:

• Food and exercise tracking
• Weight and measurement logging
• Daily calorie goals and macro breakdowns
• A big database of foods and meals
• Syncing with wearable devices like Fitbit and Apple Watch
• Tools to create your own meals, foods, and recipes
• A community message board for support and motivation

MyFitnessPal works on both mobile and desktop, and syncing your account across platforms keeps everything up to date. The app is flexible, beginner-friendly, and supports most eating styles and fitness routines.

The Free Plan: Solid Basics Without the Extras

The no-cost tier is still a capable food and workout log. You can:

• Track calories, macros, weight, and exercise sessions
• Create custom foods, meals, and recipes
• Sync major wearables like Fitbit and Apple Watch
• Pull printable reports from the website
• Share your diary with friends for accountability
• Adjust calorie and macro targets by percentage

Where It Falls Short:

• Ads appear throughout the app
• Barcode scanner, meal scan, and voice logging are locked behind Premium
• No custom macro goals by gram
• No intermittent fasting tracker
• Limited customer support
• Daily nutrition insights are fairly basic

Who Free Suits Best:

If you only need a digital notebook for calorie math or you’re testing the waters before a new routine, start here. The free tier keeps core logging intact and doesn’t cost a cent.

Premium: Faster Logging, Deeper Data, Ad-Free Screens

Price: $19.99 monthly or $79.99 yearly

Premium unlocks every tracking shortcut plus advanced goals and reports. Think of it as turning MyFitnessPal into a turbo spreadsheet that runs itself.

Key Upgrades:

• Barcode scanner, Meal Scan, and voice logging speed up data entry
• Custom calorie, macro, and micro goals down to the gram
• Intermittent fasting tracker with clear fasting timers
• Ad-free interface for faster loading and fewer distractions
• Deeper nutrient dashboards with daily, weekly, and custom views
• Priority customer support for troubleshooting

Who Premium is for:

• Anyone logging food most days of the week
• Athletes tweaking macros for performance
• Users tired of closing pop-up ads
• Keto, plant-based, or macro-specific eaters needing precision

Premium+: Add Meal Planning for a Few Extra Dollars

Price: $24.99 monthly or $99.99 yearly

Premium+ includes everything in Premium, plus a guided Meal Planner that builds weekly menus, auto-generates grocery lists, and supports grocery delivery in select countries.

Meal Planner highlights:

• 1,500+ goal-friendly recipes organized by diet style
• Budget and prep-time filters so plans match real life
• One-tap grocery list creation and optional delivery
• Flexible serving sizes and leftovers built in

Who Premium+ is for:

• Busy households wanting hands-off menu creation
• Beginners who like prescriptive, “just cook this” guidance
• Users already paying for meal-planning apps and looking to consolidate

If you aren’t interested in ready-made menus, Premium is usually enough. If cooking feels like homework, the extra $20 a year can replace hours of planning stress.

Feature Checklist at a Glance

To make things easier, we’ve laid out a side-by-side comparison of what each MyFitnessPal plan includes. If you’re unsure which tier fits your needs, this quick snapshot helps you see exactly what you get with Free, Premium, and Premium+ without needing to dig through menus or marketing pages.

Feature	Free	Premium	Premium+
Calorie and macro tracking	✔	✔	✔
Barcode scan & Meal Scan	✖	✔	✔
Voice logging	✖	✔	✔
Custom macros by gram	✖	✔	✔
Intermittent fasting timer	✖	✔	✔
Ad-free experience	✖	✔	✔
Priority support	✖	✔	✔
Weekly Meal Planner	✖	✖	✔

Why Some Users Say the Price Isn’t Worth It

While MyFitnessPal is packed with features, not everyone feels the value justifies the price, especially for casual users. Over the years, tools that were once free, like the barcode scanner and deeper macro tracking, were moved behind the Premium paywall. For many long-time users, this shift felt like losing functionality they had grown used to without warning or added value in return. When popular tools like the barcode scanner moved behind the paywall, frustration grew. 

Common complaints include:

• $79.99 a year feels steep for casual tracking
• Free tier ads interrupt the experience
• Features once included now require upgrading

For casual trackers, students, or anyone on a budget, it’s understandable why the Premium cost might feel like too much. When the free version starts to feel limited or cluttered with ads, users often begin looking for more affordable or more focused alternatives, especially if they’re primarily interested in things like meal planning, recipe nutrition, or simpler logging experiences. That’s where apps with fresh, modern solutions are stepping in.

What About ReciMe? A Smart Alternative for Recipe-Based Tracking

When we created ReciMe, we wanted to solve a real problem we kept running into: tracking nutrition and planning meals felt too complicated, especially for people who love cooking at home or follow specific diets. Most apps focus on logging individual ingredients or barcode scanning. We thought, what if we made it easier to track nutrition straight from the recipes people are actually cooking?

So that’s what we built. ReciMe is a recipe-first meal planner where you can collect, organize, and plan your meals in a way that actually fits your life. Whether you’re saving recipes from Instagram, TikTok or Pinterest, you can store everything in one place.

And yes, we made sure ReciMe calculates the nutrition of each recipe. Just tap “Calculate nutrition” and we’ll give you the calories, protein, carbs, and fats, so you can stay on top of your goals without needing to enter each ingredient manually. 

What Makes ReciMe Stand Out:

• A built-in nutrition calculator to track recipe macros
• Weekly meal planner with categories for breakfast, lunch, dinner
• Smart grocery lists that sort by aisle or recipe
• Recipe organization by cuisine, diet, or custom cookbooks
• Support for scaling servings and converting measurements
• Cloud sync and access across devices
• An interface built for real-world cooking, like keeping the screen unlocked while you follow a recipe

Better Pricing Point:

We also wanted to make it affordable. ReciMe’s yearly subscription is $59.99, which works out to about $5 per month, a lower cost than MyFitnessPal Premium or Premium+. If you’re a student or over 60, you may even qualify for a discount.

We built ReciMe to make cooking and meal planning feel less like work. If you’re trying to stick to a diet, eat healthier, or just stay more organized in the kitchen, ReciMe gives you the tools to do that, without endless ads or complicated tracking steps.

Our goal was simple: create something that helps people enjoy cooking again while still reaching their health goals. If that sounds like something you need, give ReciMe a try.  Check it out on iOS or use it as a Chrome extension, with Android support coming soon.We think you’ll love it.

Just try it – you’ll love it:

Final Thoughts

MyFitnessPal remains one of the well-known tools for food and fitness tracking, but the right plan really depends on how you use it. If you’re just getting started, the free version gives you enough to build healthy habits. For more serious users who need detailed data, speed, or custom goals, Premium is a solid upgrade. And if meal planning is your biggest pain point, Premium+ can save time and reduce stress in the kitchen.

Start with your goals, your routine, and your budget, and let that guide which plan (or app) makes the most sense for you. The best choice is the one you’ll actually use and stick with consistently.

Frequently Asked Questions