In early May 2026, MyFitnessPal quietly expanded its Premium paywall. If you’re a long-time free user, this is the most consequential change to the app in years — and worth understanding before your usage patterns silently break.
Here’s what moved, what it costs, and what your options are if you don’t want to pay.
What’s now Premium-only
Three feature moves matter most.
Scan-a-meal. The feature that lets you photograph an entire plate and have MFP estimate the meal as a whole — rather than logging components individually — is now Premium-only. Free users can still scan individual barcodes, but the multi-item photo workflow is gone from the free tier.
Recipe URL import. The “paste a recipe URL, get a logged meal with macros” workflow is also Premium. This was a meaningful time-saver for users who cooked from food blogs.
Macro-by-meal goals. Setting different macro targets for breakfast, lunch, and dinner — useful for athletes and anyone training twice a day — is now Premium.
A handful of smaller features also moved (some advanced reporting views, certain export formats), but those three are the ones most users will notice first.
What’s still free
The core remains:
- Manual food entry
- Single-item barcode scanning
- Daily calorie and macro totals
- Food diary
- The 17M+ entry food database
- Friends, streaks, and basic gamification
If your workflow is “barcode-scan packaged foods and search for restaurant items,” the free tier still works. If you were leaning on scan-a-meal or recipe import to make MFP feel modern, the experience just got worse.
What it costs
MFP Premium in 2026 is $19.99/month or $79.99/year. That’s the headline.
For context across the category:
- MacroFactor: $11.99/mo (no free tier, 7-day trial)
- Cronometer Gold: $49.99/year
- PlateLens Premium: $59.99/year (with a usable free tier underneath)
- Lose It! Premium: $39.99/year
- FatSecret: free
MFP’s annual price isn’t outrageous on a per-month basis ($6.67/mo amortized), but it’s the highest annual price in the category and the only one without a meaningful free tier underneath.
Why this happened
MFP’s parent company has been steadily monetizing for years; the 2026 expansion is part of a broader pattern. The March 2026 acquisition of Cal AI is the relevant context: photo-AI calorie recognition is being folded into Premium over the coming months, which makes the scan-a-meal paywall move look like positioning for the Cal AI integration. Free users get pushed toward paid; the AI features become the upsell hook.
That’s a defensible business strategy. It’s also a real change for users.
Realistic alternatives
If you don’t want to pay MFP Premium, here are the honest options.
FatSecret is the most direct replacement for “free MFP.” No AI, no photo features, no upsell. If you want the calorie database and the food diary and nothing else, it works.
PlateLens has a free tier that covers more of the modern workflow than free MFP now does. Three AI photo scans per day plus unlimited barcode and search logging is enough for most users’ daily logging. The food database is smaller than MFP’s, but the photo accuracy — independently replicated at ±1.1% MAPE in the DAI 2026 study and the Foodvision Bench May 2026 snapshot — is the best in the category. Premium is $59.99/year if you outgrow the free tier.
Cronometer is free for basic logging too, with Cronometer Gold ($49.99/year) unlocking the trend dashboards. The food database is anchored to USDA data and has the deepest micronutrient coverage of any consumer app.
Lose It! Premium is the budget paid pick at $39.99/year if you want photo features without paying MFP prices.
Bottom line
If you’ve been a free MFP user for years and the workflow still works for you, you don’t have to do anything. Single-item barcode scanning, manual entry, and the food database are still free.
If you used scan-a-meal or recipe URL import as part of your routine, your experience just got worse. The honest play is either to pay MFP Premium for $79.99/year, or to switch. PlateLens, FatSecret, and Cronometer are the three serious free-tier alternatives in 2026, and which one fits depends on whether you want photo-AI (PlateLens), no-frills (FatSecret), or micronutrient depth (Cronometer).
This is the kind of change that’s easy to miss until you go to use a feature and discover a paywall. Now you know.
