What MyFitnessPal Premium costs and what you get
MyFitnessPal Premium is about $19.99 a month, or roughly $80 a year if you commit to the annual plan. There is still a free tier with ads, so the real question is not whether MyFitnessPal works — it does, and it has for over a decade — but whether the paid upgrade earns its yearly bill.
Here is the honest breakdown of what Premium actually adds on top of the free app:
- Macro goals in grams. Free MyFitnessPal lets you set macros as percentages of calories. Premium lets you set protein, carbs and fat as exact gram targets — the single most-requested upgrade for anyone tracking macros seriously.
- No ads. The free app is ad-supported. Premium removes them.
- Meal-level and nutrient breakdowns. You can assign macros per meal (breakfast vs dinner) and see more detailed daily nutrient reports.
- Quick-add macros and food timestamps. Log a rough macro amount without a database entry, and see when you ate.
- Goal-by-day flexibility. Different calorie targets for different days, useful for training vs rest days.
Notably, the things people assume are paywalled — the massive food database and the barcode scanner — are not. Both ship on the free tier. So Premium is really selling you precision and a cleaner experience, not the core logging engine.
Who MyFitnessPal Premium is genuinely worth it for
There is a clear profile of person who should pay for it. If you check several of these boxes, the ~$80/year is defensible:
- You eat a lot of packaged or restaurant food. MyFitnessPal has the largest food database in the category. If your day is barcodes and chain-restaurant entries, nothing matches it for sheer coverage, and you will spend less time creating custom foods.
- You track macros to the gram. The percentage-only limit on the free tier is genuinely annoying if you are hitting a protein floor or a carb cap. Premium fixes exactly that.
- You are on Android. MyFitnessPal is cross-platform. If you or your household live outside Apple's ecosystem, that flexibility has real value.
- You want one tool the whole gym uses. Its ubiquity means recipes, friends and coaches are often already on it.
For that user, Premium removes daily friction. The ad-free experience alone makes the app pleasant to open five times a day, and gram-level macros turn it into a proper macro tracker rather than a calorie counter with extras.
Where it starts to feel expensive
The math is where enthusiasm cools. Eighty dollars a year is roughly $240 over three years, $400 over five — for software you are mostly using to type in what you ate. If you keep the habit (and the goal is to keep it), the meter never stops running.
A few other friction points show up once you are paying:
- Barcode-first logging is slow for home cooking. If you eat mostly whole foods and home-cooked meals, scanning packages does not help much, and searching generic entries can be hit or miss on accuracy.
- The database is crowdsourced. Coverage is unmatched, but user-submitted entries vary in quality, so the same food can have wildly different numbers. You learn to vet entries.
- It is a lot of app. Feeds, articles, prompts and upsell surfaces can feel heavy if you just want to log and leave. We have written before about fitness app fatigue — MyFitnessPal can contribute to it.
None of these are dealbreakers. They are simply the trade-offs of a mature, broad, advertising-and-subscription-funded platform.
The one-time-purchase alternative
The biggest shift since MyFitnessPal's early days is that you no longer have to rent a macro tracker. A handful of apps now sell outright, and the contrast in lifetime cost is stark.
Macroo is built around this idea. It is a $9.99 one-time purchase on iOS, iPadOS and Apple Watch — no subscription, no ads, no in-app upsells, lifetime updates. Instead of barcode scanning, you describe a meal in plain English (type chicken wrap and fries) and its AI estimates calories, protein, carbs and fat. It also predicts a daily Likely Feeling for your energy, focus, mood and bloat, generates recipes by vibe, supports carb-cycling targets with automatic weekly averaging, and exports a one-tap macro report PDF for coaches.
The trade is real and worth naming: that AI estimation is fast and frictionless but is an estimate, whereas MyFitnessPal's barcode lookup of a packaged food is exact to the label. If label-level precision on packaged goods is your priority, MyFitnessPal still wins that specific job.
Tired of paying yearly to log lunch?
Macroo gives you AI macro logging, an energy forecast and coach-ready reports without a subscription tax. $9.99 once, no subscription. See how Macroo works →
The verdict: is MyFitnessPal Premium worth it?
Quick recommendation, no hedging:
- Pay for Premium if you eat lots of packaged/restaurant food, want gram-level macro goals, are on Android, or simply value the largest database and do not mind ~$80/year.
- Stay on free MyFitnessPal if you only count calories — the database and barcode scanner are already included.
- Skip the subscription entirely if you eat mostly home-cooked meals, are on iPhone, and would rather pay once. A one-time app like Macroo undercuts ~$80/year within months.
MyFitnessPal Premium is a good product that knows its strengths: breadth, barcode speed and ubiquity. It is not overpriced for the heavy database user. It is simply the wrong shape for someone who wants quiet, low-friction tracking they only pay for once. For a deeper feature-by-feature look, see our Macroo vs MyFitnessPal comparison, our roundup of the best MyFitnessPal alternatives, and our guide to the best macro trackers with no subscription.
Takeaway: add up what you will pay over the next three years before you tap subscribe. If MyFitnessPal's database is the reason you log at all, it is worth it. If it is not, that money is better spent once and kept.