What it costs
Most of what the application does costs nothing at all. Paying buys one thing: recognition through our key when the daily free ones run out and you would rather not keep a provider key of your own.
Free, and not as a trial
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 a plate from a photo does cost money — someone has to run the model. Every account gets two of those a day on our key without paying anything, and that allowance resets at midnight UTC rather than being spent once and gone.
Your own key: still nothing
Bring a key from one of the nine providers the application supports and the per-call 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 by a wide margin and it is the one the application nudges you toward. Saying so on a pricing page is unusual, and it is also the honest thing to write down.
Our key, paid: cost plus 10 %
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. Folded into the price of a pack it would stop being checkable, which is exactly why it is not.
There is no subscription and there will not be one. A flat monthly fee means light users pay for air and heavy users eat the margin, and it means promising a service without a ceiling — which is a promise we could not hold.
Packs, and why you get less than you pay
Three sizes: $5, $15 and $50. What lands on the balance is smaller than what you pay, and the exact figure is shown next to each pack before you buy.
The gap is the payment channel. Selling software across dozens of tax jurisdictions is done through a merchant of record, who handles VAT and receipts and takes a percentage plus a fixed fee for it. That fee does not scale with the pack, which is why the smallest one loses proportionally the most — and why the smallest one is $5 rather than $1.
We could quote identical numbers everywhere and absorb the difference. There is no margin to absorb it from, so instead the number is simply shown.
The balance does not expire
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.