What it costs

The diary, the goals, the charts, the barcode lookup and the product scoring are free and stay free. They run on your device against an open database and cost us nothing per use, so there is nothing here to meter.

Recognising food — from a photo of a meal or of a label, or from a description in words — does cost money: someone has to run the model. Every account gets three of those recognitions a day on our key without paying anything, and that allowance resets at midnight UTC rather than being spent once and gone.

Bring a key from one of the nine providers the application supports and the daily limit disappears entirely. You pay that provider directly, at their published rate, and we take no cut: the key lives on your device and the request never carries a fee of ours. This is the cheapest route, and it is the one the application nudges you toward.

The third route is for people who want neither the daily ceiling nor a key of their own. Money sits on a balance and is spent per call, at what the call cost us plus a tenth.

The markup sits on spending, not on the pack price, and that is the whole point: inside the application every day of usage shows two numbers side by side — what the call cost us at the provider's rate and what we took off your balance. A tenth is the difference between them, and you can check it with a calculator.

There is no subscription and there will not be one: with it, light users would pay for air.

Three sizes: $5, $15 and $50 — these are the planned pack sizes. What lands on the balance is smaller than what you pay, and, once purchases open, the exact figure will be shown before you buy.

The gap is the payment channel: a merchant of record handles VAT and receipts and keeps a percentage plus a fixed fee. That fee does not scale with the pack, which is why the smallest one is $5 rather than $1.

Money you put on the balance stays there. There is no expiry date, no inactivity fee and no quiet round-down at the end of a quarter — an expiring balance is a promise we could not explain to anyone, least of all to ourselves.

The one case where it does disappear is deleting your account, and the deletion screen says the amount out loud before the button does anything. Refunds, disputes and what happens to the ledger afterwards are on the refunds page; the legal side of buying is in the terms of use.