Is MyFitnessPal still free in 2026? What is paywalled

MyFitnessPal is still free in 2026, and a free account still logs your food and pushes the nutrition into Apple Health, with ads. I counted the rows in MyFitnessPal's own plan comparison page today: 8 of 33 listed features sit on the free tier, 21 need Premium, and 4 need Premium+ (MyFitnessPal support).

Everything that saves you typing is on the paid side of that line. I read MyFitnessPal's own help centre and its US App Store listing on 28 October 2026. The date each of those pages was last edited is in the table below.

I build a competing app, so the free tier gets credit here where it earns it.

Is MyFitnessPal still free in 2026?

Yes, and you can run it indefinitely without paying, as long as you find your food by searching. The company answers this on its own page: "The standard features of MyFitnessPal are free to use" (What is included in the free version, last updated 6 September 2026).

The download itself is free on the US App Store, where the listing shows ten in-app purchases (App Store). Ads pay for the rest, and MyFitnessPal says so plainly: "The core of MyFitnessPal is free, and it stays that way because ads help pay for it" (ad-free experience, 15 September 2026).

What changed since 2022 is not the price of free. It is how much now sits above it.

What do you actually get for free?

Eight rows, by MyFitnessPal's own count: food and exercise logging, weight and measurements, custom foods and recipes, viewing macros, percentage goals, diary sharing, partner app links, and the printable report.

The partner apps row is the one people miss. That is the row covering Apple Health, so nutrition still flows from a free account into Health, with caffeine, vitamin A and timestamps excluded (Apple Health connection and syncing, 24 September 2026).

The food database is free as well, and it is still the biggest in the category. Search a food by name, set the serving, done. Free MyFitnessPal runs that whole loop with no upsell in the way.

What is behind the Premium paywall?

Every shortcut that removes typing. Barcode Scan, Meal Scan, Voice Logging and the Nutrition Coach are all paid, and so is turning off the ads.

One oddity is worth flagging, because it is the kind of thing that makes people argue in forum threads. Voice Logging sits on the Premium features page under faster ways to log food, but it is not a row in the plan comparison table I counted, even though that table was refreshed two days ago (Premium features; plan comparison).

So the honest statement is that voice is Premium on the page that explains voice, and absent from the page that compares plans.

What does MyFitnessPal Premium cost in 2026?

$19.99 a month or $79.99 a year, as the headline purchases on the US App Store listing. The same listing shows ten Premium purchases at four different prices.

Two of those ten are yearly subscriptions at different prices. "MyFitnessPal Yearly Premium" appears twice at $79.99 and once at $49.99, alongside "MyFitnessPal Annual Premium" at $79.99 (App Store). Which one you are offered is not something the listing explains.

Premium+ I could not price from a primary source today. Its help page describes meal planning and grocery lists but gives no figure, and MyFitnessPal's pricing blog post answered every request I made on 28 October 2026 with a Cloudflare challenge. What I can state: Premium+ adds the Meal Planner, and it is sold in six countries, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and Australia (Premium+, 20 September 2026).

What is the newest thing you need Premium for?

Nutrition Coach, the AI assistant MyFitnessPal added in 2026, which has been Premium from the start. Its help page was edited again on the day I checked, and it says Coach is "available to Premium and Premium+ MyFitnessPal members on iOS", in English, in six countries (Nutrition Coach, 28 October 2026).

Not everything new lands on the paid side. GLP-1 dose tracking, added for the United States and Canada, names no subscription anywhere on its help page and appears in no tier list (GLP-1 Support, 24 October 2026).

The pattern across four years is narrower than the arguments about it. Logging your food stays free. Logging it fast does not.

Is the free tier enough for you?

If you are happy to search the database by name, yes, and you should probably stop reading here. If what stops you logging is the typing, the free version is the one without the fix.

The US listing carries a 4.7 average from 2,384,277 ratings (App Store). That covers free and paid users together, so read it as popularity rather than a verdict on the paywall. The database and the Apple Health write, both free, are genuinely hard to beat.

Cronometer does barcode better, and gives it away: its own Gold page lists Barcode Scanner under Basic Functionality, the free column (Cronometer Gold, read 28 October 2026).

If the paywall is what pushed you out, I compared seven alternatives on price and free tier in MyFitnessPal alternatives, checked this month, and went through the in-app purchase list of each one in what is actually free without a subscription.

I build MealSaid, which is free with no ads and no in-app purchases, and you log by saying what you ate out loud. It is a much smaller thing than MyFitnessPal: no barcode scanner, no photo logging, no database to browse, iPhone only, iOS 26 and English only. For looking up a packaged food by name, free MyFitnessPal beats it outright.

How I checked this

Checked 28 October 2026. I read each MyFitnessPal help article through the help centre's public API, which also returns the last-updated timestamp printed in the table above, and counted the 33 rows of the Free, Premium and Premium+ comparison by hand (8 free, 21 Premium, 4 Premium+). The ten in-app purchases and the rating count came from the US App Store page for MyFitnessPal, read the same day.

Two things I could not verify. MyFitnessPal's pricing blog post is behind a Cloudflare challenge, so the Premium+ price is absent from this post rather than copied from a third party. Help centre pages return 403 to scripted fetches in a browser-less setting, so the links above open fine for you and may look broken to a link checker.

Corrections to ohmbrock42@gmail.com.