Lose It! App Review: Features, Cost & Is It Worth It? (2026)

Lose It! is one of the longest-running calorie counters on the App Store and the closest in feel to MyFitnessPal: a clean, approachable database tracker built around a daily calorie budget. Its big selling point used to be a generous free tier. That changed in 2025, when the barcode scanner moved into Premium. This review covers what you still get for free, what Premium adds, how Snap It photo logging holds up, and who should pick it.

The short verdict

• Good for: people who want a simple calorie budget, a big food database and a friendly interface.
• Less good for: anyone who wants free barcode scanning, detailed nutrients or fast logging of mixed meals.
• Free tier: still usable for logging by search, but thinner than it was. The barcode scanner, Snap It and advanced macro tracking are Premium.
• Premium: sold mainly as an annual plan. The App Store lists several price points, commonly from about $39.99 a year, so check the price shown to you.

What is the Lose It! app?

Lose It! is a calorie and macro tracker that launched in 2008. You enter your current and goal weight, it sets a daily calorie budget, and you log what you eat against it. Food comes from a large database of branded and generic items, with recently eaten foods and saved meals to speed up repeat logging. It runs on iPhone, Android, Apple Watch and the web.

Lose It! free vs Premium

Lose It! made no announcement about the scanner. Its App Store listing began showing the barcode scanner under Premium features in mid-2025, and many users noticed it disappear from their free accounts around then. If free barcode scanning matters to you, Cronometer and MyNetDiary still include it. Our guide to free calorie tracking apps without a subscription compares them.

What Lose It! does well

A calorie budget that is easy to understand

Onboarding is quick and the daily budget is front and centre. For someone who just wants a number to stay under, Lose It! is less overwhelming than MyFitnessPal or Cronometer.

A big, familiar food database

Most branded and chain-restaurant foods are in there. Like any crowd-sourced database, some entries are wrong or duplicated, so it pays to pick entries with complete nutrition and sensible serving sizes.

Motivation features

Challenges, streaks and a community feed help some people stick with it. These are free.

Where Lose It! falls short

Logging mixed meals is still slow

A plate of pasta with sauce and a side salad means three or four searches and portion guesses. This is the main reason people stop using database trackers, and Lose It! shares it with MyFitnessPal.

Snap It is hit or miss

Snap It was an early move into photo logging. It works reasonably well on single foods, but it leans on matching a picture to database entries rather than estimating the portions on a full plate, so mixed, homemade and restaurant meals often need manual fixes.

The free tier lost its best feature

Free barcode scanning was a big reason to choose Lose It! over MyFitnessPal. With both apps now charging for it, the free tiers are much closer than they used to be.

Lose It! vs MyFitnessPal

For a full comparison see Lose It! vs MyFitnessPal.

Lose It! vs a photo-first alternative

The honest framing: Lose It! is a friendlier MyFitnessPal, but it shares the same friction, because logging a real meal still means searching and selecting entries. If that friction is why past attempts fizzled, a cheaper database app won't fix it. Bento Bunny takes a different approach. Snap a photo of your plate or type what you ate in plain words, and it fills in the calories and macros. It also scans barcodes, and on iOS 26 and later your meal photos are analysed on the device. Bento Bunny is free to download, and meal logging is part of Premium, which comes with a 3-day free trial on the yearly plan. See Bento Bunny vs Lose It! for the side by side.

Who should use Lose It!?

• Pick Lose It! if you want a simple daily calorie budget, like the interface, and plan to pay for Premium anyway.
• Pick Cronometer if you want free barcode scanning and detailed vitamins and minerals.
• Pick a photo-first tracker if logging speed is what has made you quit before.

The bottom line

Lose It! is still a solid, approachable calorie counter, and Premium is cheaper than MyFitnessPal's. But with the barcode scanner now behind the paywall, the free version is mainly for people happy to search for every food. Decide whether you'll pay before you invest weeks of history in it.