Is MyFitnessPal Premium worth it?

§ 01 · The one feature you are really buying

Barcode scanning. In 2022 MyFitnessPal moved it out of the free app, and it remains the reason most people upgrade — the full story is here.

Everything else in Premium is real but secondary: ad removal, per-meal macro targets, deeper analysis. If you would not pay for those alone — and most people would not — then you are pricing the scanner.

§ 02 · When it is genuinely worth it

You eat mostly packaged food. If most of your day arrives with a barcode on it, scanning is dramatically faster than searching, and the time saved is real every single day.

You have years of history there. Long-running data has value. Switching apps to save a subscription and losing five years of weight trend is usually a bad trade.

The ads genuinely bother you. A legitimate reason to pay. It is worth being clear with yourself that this is what you are buying, though.

§ 03 · When it is not

You cook from scratch. Home-cooked food has no barcode. The scanner does nothing for you and you are paying for ad removal at subscription prices.

You log the same 30 foods. Most people eat on rotation. Once your frequent items are saved, search is as fast as scanning and the scanner stops earning its keep.

You signed up during a diet and never cancelled. Check whether you have opened the app in the last month before the next renewal. This is the most common case by a wide margin.

§ 04 · Before you cancel anything, export

Pull your food and weight history out while your subscription is still active. Export tooling is sometimes itself gated, and getting your data before you lose access is far easier than afterwards. Do this even if you decide to stay — a local copy of your own history is worth having regardless.

§ 05 · If the answer is no

Several apps include barcode scanning free: FatSecret, Cronometer, MyNetDiary, and BiteDeck. We wrote an honest comparison of the free alternatives that recommends other apps over ours where they are genuinely better.

BiteDeck's own answer to this: barcode scanning, nutrition-label OCR, 282 restaurant chains, fasting, weight and body-fat tracking, and CSV/PDF export are all free forever, with no account and nothing stored on a server. The paid tier covers only AI features. If the renewal is what brought you here, the direct comparison is here.

Prices and feature gating change on every app named here, ours included. Verify current terms before deciding.

§ 06 · FAQ

• Is MyFitnessPal Premium worth it?

  If you eat mostly packaged food and scan barcodes daily, Premium buys back real time and is defensible. If you log by search, cook from scratch, or track macros manually, you are largely paying to remove ads and unlock features you will not open. The scanner is the honest reason to pay; everything else is a bonus.

• What do you actually get with MyFitnessPal Premium?

  The headline item is barcode scanning, which moved out of the free tier in 2022. Beyond that: no ads, macro targets by meal, additional analysis, and food-timestamp features. Exact packaging and price change over time, so check MyFitnessPal’s current terms.

• Can I get barcode scanning without paying?

  Yes, in other apps. FatSecret, Cronometer, MyNetDiary, and BiteDeck all include barcode scanning in their free tiers. Switching costs you your MyFitnessPal history unless you export it first — which is worth doing before you cancel anything.

• Should I export my data before cancelling?

  Always. Export your food and weight history while your subscription is still active — some export tooling is itself gated, and it is far easier to pull your data out before you lose access than to argue for it afterwards.