The most generous free tier here, on a database you have to double-check. Logging, barcodes and a large catalogue with no card and no countdown, and for a full week nothing asked us to upgrade. But entries are community-submitted with the usual spread, and nobody outside the company has ever measured its accuracy — which is a different objection from being inaccurate, and still an objection for a measuring instrument.
What holds up
- Meters less than anything else in the category — logging, barcodes, large catalogue, no card
- Nothing asked us to upgrade for a full week
- Reliable barcode scanning on the free tier
- The calmest experience in the category
What does not
- Community-submitted entries with the usual reliability spread
- No independent accuracy measurement exists at all
- No photo estimation worth relying on
- Interface shows its age
After three weeks of being asked to upgrade by everything else on the phone, two weeks with FatSecret felt like a holiday.
It does not sell to you
Logging is unlimited. Barcode scanning works on the free tier. The catalogue is large. Nothing counted down, and for the first week nothing asked for money at all.
In a category where the standard pattern is a free tier engineered to be just annoying enough, that is a different posture and it deserves naming.
The catch is the data
We scanned a supermarket loaf and got three entries. None matched the label in our hand.
We want to be careful here. No measurement is not the same as a bad measurement. Nobody outside the company has tested FatSecret, so we do not know how accurate it is and neither does anyone else. That is a different objection from the one we have to MyFitnessPal, where the number is known and wide.
It is still an objection, because a measuring instrument with no calibration record is asking for a lot of trust.
Where it fits
We kept it installed as a second opinion. When something looks off in another app we search it here to see whether two independent databases agree — a use we did not anticipate and now rely on.
It is not our main log, because we are not willing to verify every entry against the packet by hand. If you are, this is the most generous free tool in the category.
Questions we get asked
Is FatSecret really free?
More than anything else in this category. Logging, barcode scanning and a large catalogue with no card and no countdown. There is a thin paid tier but the free experience is not crippled to sell it, which is genuinely rare.
How accurate is FatSecret?
Nobody outside the company has measured it, so the honest answer is that it is unknown. That is not a claim it is inaccurate — it is a claim there is no evidence either way. Its database is community-submitted, which in every other app we have tested correlates with a wider error band. Only PlateLens has a figure two unrelated labs have independently produced.
Tessa Lindqvist
Contributing writer, nutrition · Stronger by Math
Writes about intake, adherence and what the self-monitoring literature actually supports. Weighs her own food, which is why she is sceptical of estimates — including the good ones.
More from the desk
- A Review of Cal AI (2026): A Fast Camera With a Marketing Percentage Behind ItReview · 296 words
- A Review of Carb Manager (2026): The Right Tool for Keto, and Only for KetoReview · 251 words
- A Review of Cronometer (2026): The Best Food Database in Consumer Nutrition, and the Slowest LoggingReview · 659 words
- A Review of Foodvisor (2026): One of Only Three Apps With an Outside Accuracy NumberReview · 286 words