Is MyFitnessPal free?

Yes, for logging, and MyFitnessPal says so in one line: “The standard features of MyFitnessPal are free to use, and creating a basic account is free.” What makes this subject different from the six that came before it in this format is that its free tier has a date on it. On 1 October 2022 barcode scanning stopped being free, and the company published the announcement itself, with two dates and a stated reason, and left it up. Every other page here has found a company that either promises the free tier will last or reserves the right to change it. This is the one that reserved the right and then used it.

Every price MyFitnessPal publishes, and where

All of these were read on 15 September 2026, in the US, signed out and without an account.

Derived: twelve months of Premium at $19.99 is $239.88 against $79.99, a saving of $159.89 or 66.65%. Twelve months of Premium+ at $24.99 is $299.88 against $99.99, a saving of $199.89 or 66.66%. Both of those round to the 67% MyFitnessPal claims on each page, and every other figure it derives checks out too: $79.99 over twelve months really is $6.67, $99.99 really is $8.34, and the “~$0.28 per day” on the Premium+ page is $99.99 over 365 days to the cent. After a company that understated its own discount, a marketing page whose arithmetic survives checking is worth saying out loud.

One comparison the pricing pages do not draw. Premium+ costs $20.00 more than Premium over a year if you pay yearly, and $60.00 more if you pay monthly, because the monthly gap is $5.00 twelve times over. The same upgrade is three times as expensive one month at a time, and neither page puts the two tiers' monthly prices side by side.

The day the free tier got smaller

This is the finding, and it is unusual because the company reported it. The help article on the barcode scanner opens its instructions with a sentence most companies would have deleted by now: “As of October 1, 2022, Barcode Scan is available only with a Premium subscription.” It links to the original announcement, which is still published.

That post carries two dates rather than one, which is the detail worth keeping. Members who joined before 1 September 2022 kept free barcode scanning until 1 October. Anyone signing up on or after 1 September needed Premium immediately. So for a month the same app had two different free tiers depending on when you registered.

MyFitnessPal also said why, in its own words: “Moving a feature from free to Premium is never an easy decision”, and the change would “allow us to continue to offer and maintain a free version of the app”. The post then spends four paragraphs on what free users kept — searching a database it put at 14 million foods at the time, creating meals and recipes, logging weight, hydration and exercise, and connecting to more than 35 fitness partners.

The right to do it is in the Terms of Service, effective 18 March 2025, and it is broader than the one thing it was used for. MyFitnessPal has “no obligation to provide any Updates or to continue to provide or enable any particular features or functionality of any Service”, and may change the Services at any time, including “terminating, eliminating, supplementing, modifying, adding, or discontinuing any Content, feature, data, or service” and “changing prices”.

That clause is almost word for word the one Strava's terms carry, and the exact opposite of Finch's written promise that its core self-care features are and will always be free. Three companies, three positions on the same question, and only one of them has a public record of acting on it. The record is the reason this page treats MyFitnessPal as the honest case rather than the cautionary one: a feature moved behind a paywall with 30 days' notice and a blog post is a better outcome than one that quietly stops working.

The trial is seven days, or thirty

Three surfaces, two numbers and one silence, all read on 15 September 2026.

The Play entry is not vague about which product it prices. It names the item “MyFitnessPal 12M Premium with Trial” and describes it as a “12-Month, Premium Subscription with Trial” — the same annual Premium plan the website sells with a seven-day trial. The likeliest reading is that the thirty days is a store-specific offer on the annual product, but nothing published says so, and this is the same shape as Duolingo stating its trial as both fourteen days and one week. Assume seven, and read the offer on the screen where you actually subscribe.

One rule applies whichever trial you get, and it is in the terms rather than on any page selling a subscription: once you cancel a Free Trial and receive confirmation, you cannot resume it “even if it was not used for the entire duration of the offer”. Canceling a thirty-day trial on day two does not leave twenty-eight days on the shelf.

What each surface prints, and what it leaves out

This format usually finds a company that will not publish its price. MyFitnessPal publishes all four of its prices; the interesting part is that no single surface carries more than half of them, and the one surface that describes the free tier is the one you have to be sent to.

Two of those rows are worth expanding. The help center never names a price. Its category called Premium Subscription and Billing holds twenty-three articles and not one contains a dollar amount; its own article comparing the tiers answers “Where can I see current pricing?” by sending you to the website. That is the reverse of Finch, whose price lives in a help article and nowhere on Apple. And the Premium page is now reached through a link that calls it legacy: /premium shows Premium+, and the smaller plan is behind a button reading “See Premium plan” whose address ends in legacy=true. The free column lives only on that page.

Apple prints nothing, and does not use the word

The App Store product page says Free · In-App Purchases under the title and carries an In-App Purchases row in the Information block whose value is the single word Yes. There is no promoted in-app purchase section above the App Privacy panel — the optional slot where Fruit Ninja advertises a $9.99 theme — so Apple names no figure.

It goes further than that. The word subscription does not appear anywhere on the page, in any form. The description mentions Premium three times and ends with “Download today & start your free Premium trial”, without a price, without a trial length and without the auto-renewal paragraph that Calm and Duolingo both write into theirs. The only dollar figure on the whole listing sits inside a customer review, which calls the app “worth $99 for the year”. None of this breaks a rule. It simply means the store page cannot answer the question you opened it to ask.

Google Play does better on exactly one point, and it is the point that matters. Its In-app items and offers section is present and prices the annual Premium plan. We checked under both of the headings that section uses — In-app items and offers on an app, In-game items and offers on a game — because searching for only one of them made this site publish a wrong claim once.

What the free tier actually gets you

Two published tables answer this, at two different resolutions, and they do not contradict each other so much as flatter the app to different degrees.

The website's table has eight rows and gives free two of them: nutrition and weight tracking, and exercise tracking. Barcode and meal scan, voice log, custom macro goals, ad-free logging, intermittent fasting, and food insights are all marked as Premium.

The help center's table has thirty-three rows and gives free eight: food and exercise logging; logging measurements and viewing past progress; creating foods, meals and recipes; viewing macronutrients; customizing calorie and macro goals by percentage; sharing and viewing a diary with others; linking to partner apps; and the printable report. Premium adds twenty-one more rows, and Premium+ adds four on top of that, all four of them meal planning.

The free tier is capped by speed rather than by capacity, which is an unusual shape. Nothing expires, nothing is limited to a number of entries, and the food database is not restricted. What you pay for is getting a meal into the diary with fewer taps. Even MyFitnessPal's own article on the free version carries the asterisk: in its step-by-step for logging a food, the line “Select your logging method” is footnoted “some options require a Premium subscription”.

Ads are the free tier's price, and the company says so

The help article on the ad-free experience opens with a sentence worth quoting in full, because it is the clearest statement of this trade any subject in this format has made: “The core of MyFitnessPal is free, and it stays that way because ads help pay for it. That is the honest trade.”

It then itemizes what a subscription removes rather than leaving it at “ad-free”: banner ads in the app and on the website, sponsored posts on the website and in both apps, ads in the community Forums and Groups, and ads in the Blog section of the iOS and Android apps. It also says which thing is not an ad and therefore does not disappear — links to MyFitnessPal's own blog posts. Google Play carries a Contains ads badge; Apple has no equivalent label to carry.

We record all of that without a word of criticism. Four of our own apps are ad-supported for the same reason, and none of them explains the trade as well as that paragraph does.

Three documents, three answers about location

The data price is the one both stores itemize, and here the itemizations disagree. Reading the third document did not settle it, which is the first time that has happened since the Finch page made reading it a habit.

Google's form offers approximate location and precise location as separate items, so the choice between them was a choice. We are not going to say which document is wrong, and neither should anyone quoting one of them. The rest of the declarations are ordinary: Apple names identifiers and usage data as used to track you across other companies' apps, and health and fitness data, contact info, user content, identifiers, usage data and diagnostics as linked to your identity; Play adds photos, in-app messages, email address, fitness info and in-app search history to the collected list. Both say data is encrypted in transit and that deletion can be requested.

One more disagreement, on a different form and a smaller one: Apple rates the app 16+ and Google Play rates it Everyone, with “Users Interact, In-App Purchases”. Neither store publishes the answers that produced those ratings, so there is nothing to reconcile them with.

Leaving, and what it costs

Cancel where you bought it — MyFitnessPal's article is explicit that you must use the same platform you paid on, and that Apple and Google control their own purchases entirely. Canceling takes effect at the end of the paid period rather than immediately, and the account reverts to free rather than closing.

Three things are worth knowing before you subscribe rather than after.

• Deleting things does not cancel anything. The terms say that deleting your account “may not result in a cancellation of your subscription”, and that deleting the app from your device does not either. That is the same trap Google's own help page warns about, stated by the company rather than the store.
• The last day is not the last day. Cancel less than 24 hours before a renewal and the help article says it may still renew.
• US readers have no cooling-off right. Purchases are “final and non-refundable, except at our sole discretion”, and the fourteen-day change of mind that follows in the same clause is granted only to people who reside outside the United States.

The help center has no refund article at all, which is why the terms are the only citation above. Its cancellation article is, for what it is worth, the most-voted article we opened: 769 of 3,076 readers marked it helpful.

The route almost nobody mentions

MyFitnessPal accepts FSA and HSA money for Premium and Premium+, through a partner called Truemed, for people using the app in connection with treatment for a diagnosed condition. You complete a questionnaire at checkout, Truemed decides whether you qualify for a Letter of Medical Necessity, and approval normally takes two to five days. Access starts on pre-approval and you are billed when Truemed confirms.

Four conditions matter and all four are published. It works on myfitnesspal.com only, not through either app. Free trials are not available on that payment method. If you are turned down you keep the features for seven days and then lose them, and MyFitnessPal will not know why you were rejected. And you re-qualify annually even on a monthly plan. It does not make the app free. It makes it pre-tax, which is a real discount nobody writing about this app's price seems to mention — the fourth unadvertised cheaper route this format has turned up, after Calm Health, ChatGPT for Teachers and Finch's Guardians raffle.

What MyFitnessPal does better

Most of this page is about dates and documents, so it would leave a false impression to stop there.

• It announced the thing it is criticized for. A dated blog post, a month of notice, two effective dates, a stated reason, and the post still online four years later with the help article linking to it. Plenty of companies let you find out by opening the app.
• It names the trade in writing. “The core of MyFitnessPal is free, and it stays that way because ads help pay for it.” We have not read a cleaner sentence about ad-supported software this year.
• Its arithmetic survives checking. Two 67% claims, two per-month conversions and a per-day figure, all correct to the cent. That is not the usual result.
• It publishes a thirty-three-row feature table. Three columns, free included, in the help center where it can be linked to, rather than only as marketing.
• Downgrading costs you nothing. “No. Your logs, recipes, and progress history stay in your account.” Compare Todoist, where projects over the limit go view-only.
• It is far bigger than anything we have shipped. 4.7 across 2.4 million Apple ratings and 4.4 across 2.91 million on Google Play, over 100 million Play downloads, an Editors’ Choice badge and second place on Play’s top grossing health and fitness chart. Ours has nothing in that column.

What we could not check

• Anything behind a login. We did not create an account, so the in-app price was not compared with the web price — the question the Calm page left open and the one that keeps recurring.
• Which trial you actually get. Seven days and thirty days are both published; only subscribing would settle which offer appears where, and we are not going to report a number seen once on one screen.
• Non-US pricing. Every figure here is the US one, read signed out. MyFitnessPal's own help center says pricing varies by country.
• Why the two stores rate the age differently. Neither publishes the questionnaire answers behind 16+ and Everyone.

How to check any of this yourself

Start with the page you were not sent to. The default plans page sells Premium+ and has no column for the free tier; the smaller plan and the only Free column are behind the “See Premium plan” link. If you want the fullest published account of what free includes, it is not on either marketing page at all — it is the three-column table in the help center.

Then read Google Play rather than the App Store, which is not advice this site gets to give often. Play's In-app items and offers section is the only store surface with a number on it here. And read the Terms of Service for the two things no help article covers: the refund rule, and the clause that lets any feature move out of the free tier. On this company that clause is not hypothetical, and the date it was last used is published.