Free MyFitnessPal Alternative (Ireland)

MyFitnessPal is the app most people reach for when they start counting calories. It’s a good app. The problem is what happened in 2022: it moved barcode scanning — the single feature that made logging food bearable — behind its Premium subscription. That’s around €20 a month, or €80 a year, to scan a tub of yoghurt.

We built the No Nonsense Fitness tracker for the exact opposite reason. Getting fit shouldn’t cost a fortune, and least of all scanning a barcode should be free. So it is.

The €20-a-month vs free question

Here’s the honest bit: MyFitnessPal has a bigger food database, a longer history and a polished app. We’re not pretending to out-feature a company with hundreds of staff. What we’ve done is take the handful of features that actually matter for tracking food day to day — log it, scan it, hit your protein — and keep them free forever, with no ads and no signup wall.

If you were only ever going to use MyFitnessPal to log meals and scan barcodes, you were about to pay €80 a year for something you can do here for nothing.

Feature comparison

MyFitnessPal pricing and feature tiers as publicly listed at time of writing; check their site for the current position. This is an honest comparison, not a knock — MyFitnessPal is a capable app, it just isn’t free for the part most people need.

Our edge: honesty badges, not just numbers

Calories aren’t the whole story. A tracker can tell you a food is 200 calories and say nothing about whether it’s ultra-processed junk or real food. When you scan a product in our tracker, it also shows:

• NOVA processing group — a 1-to-4 rating of how processed a food is, from whole foods up to ultra-processed.
• Nutri-Score — the A-to-E front-of-pack label that sums up a food’s overall nutritional quality at a glance.

Neither replaces thinking, but together they give you an honest, plain-English read on what you’re actually eating — not just a calorie number to game. That transparency is the whole point of the brand.

Who it’s for

If you’re in Ireland, you shop in Tesco, Aldi, Lidl or Dunnes, and you just want to log your food and hit your protein without paying a subscription or wading through adverts — this is built for you. If you want MyFitnessPal’s huge community, recipe importers and integrations, their Premium plan may still be worth it to you. We’re not trying to be everything; we’re trying to be free and honest.

Frequently Asked Questions