MyFitnessPal Price Increase: What Changed and What $80 a Year Actually Buys

If you subscribed to MyFitnessPal Premium a few years ago, you probably remember paying $49.99 a year. Today the renewal comes through at $79.99 — or $19.99 a month if you pay monthly — and there is now a higher tier above it at $99.99. Nothing about that is a scandal. Software gets more expensive, companies change owners, and priorities shift. But if you are typing “myfitnesspal price increase” into a search bar, you deserve a straight answer to three questions: what actually changed, what the money buys now, and whether it is still the right tool for you. This article tries to answer all three without outrage and without a sales pitch.

A short history of the price

MyFitnessPal's paid tier launched in 2015 at $9.99 a month or $49.99 a year, and it stayed there for a long time. The changes came in a cluster:

• 2020: Under Armour sold MyFitnessPal to Francisco Partners, a private equity firm. Ownership changes do not automatically mean price increases, but this one preceded every change on this list.
• 2021–2022: Premium pricing went up sharply — the monthly price doubled to $19.99, and the annual plan rose 60% to $79.99. The rollout was uneven — for a while in mid-2021 the app showed $79.99 while the website still charged $49.99, which is why longtime users remember different numbers.
• October 1, 2022: the barcode scanner, free for over a decade, moved behind the Premium paywall. This was the change that generated the most anger, because it took away something people had built a daily habit around.
• 2024: a new top tier, Premium+, arrived at $24.99 a month or $99.99 a year, adding a meal planner with recipes and automated grocery lists.

Put together: in about four years, the annual price went up 60%, the monthly price doubled, and the most-loved free feature became a paid one. That is the factual core behind every frustrated forum thread on the topic.

What moved behind the paywall

The barcode scanner is the headline, but it is worth being precise about what the free tier does and does not include today, because some of the limits are older than the price increase and some are newer.

• Barcode scanning — Premium only since October 2022. On the free tier you search the food database by name and pick from the results.
• Macro goals in grams — free users set protein, carbs, and fat as percentages of calories only. Gram-based targets, and different targets per meal, require Premium. If you train seriously and work from a protein target in grams, this limit matters more than the scanner.
• Ads — the free experience includes them; Premium removes them.
• Newer logging methods — photo-based meal scanning and voice logging are Premium features, not free ones.

The free tier still does the essential job: a very large food database, manual search, and a daily calorie total. Plenty of people lose weight with exactly that and never pay a cent. The honest framing is that the free tier is slower and noisier than it was in 2021, not that it is useless.

What $79.99 a year actually buys

Here is the current lineup, stripped of marketing language. Prices are US pricing as of August 2026.

Two things stand out. First, most of what Premium sells is convenience and precision, not capability the free tier lacks entirely — you can log the same chicken breast either way; Premium just makes it faster and lets you aim at gram-level targets. Second, the gap between Premium and Premium+ is narrow: on annual billing, the meal planner costs about $20 more per year, and it is the only meaningful difference between the tiers.

Who gets their money's worth

$79.99 a year is about $6.67 a month. Whether that is worth it depends less on the app and more on how you use it. Premium tends to earn its price for people who:

• Log packaged food daily. If most of your diet has a barcode, the scanner alone saves several minutes a day, and the math on your time works out quickly.
• Train with specific macro targets. Gram-based and per-meal goals are genuinely useful for body recomposition. If you have worked out your numbers with a macro calculator, percentages-only tracking fights you at every meal.
• Have years of history in the app. A decade of logged data, custom recipes, and saved meals is a real switching cost, and it is rational to pay to keep the workflow you already trust.

Premium is a harder sell for people who mostly cook from scratch (barcodes help less), who only track calories rather than macros, or who track in short focused stretches a few times a year. For that pattern, paying $79.99 for twelve months to use eight weeks of features is a poor fit, and either the free tier or a cheaper subscription makes more sense.

Your realistic options

If the renewal price prompted this search, you have four honest paths, and none of them is wrong.

Stay on the free tier

Cancel Premium, keep the account, and accept the trade-offs: ads, name-search instead of scanning, percentage-based macros. This works best if your diet is repetitive — once your common meals are saved, you rarely need the scanner anyway. Estimating portions gets easier with practice; our guide to counting calories without weighing food covers the techniques that make manual logging tolerable.

Switch to a different tracker

The paid alternatives cluster between $40 and $75 a year, each with a different center of gravity:

These are different tools, not better and worse versions of the same one. Cronometer is the choice if you care about micronutrients as much as calories. MacroFactor is the choice if you want the app to do the coaching — it recalculates your calorie and macro targets weekly based on your actual results, which nothing on this list does as well. MyFitnessPal remains the safe default if its database and integrations are what you value.

Pay up

Also legitimate. If Premium features carry your daily habit and $6.67 a month does not strain the budget, the price increase is annoying but not a reason to abandon a system that works. A tracking habit you actually keep is worth more than $30 a year of savings on one you quietly drop.

Stop tracking with an app entirely

Worth naming, because it is what a fraction of lapsed subscribers actually do. If tracking has become a source of stress rather than information, a structured break — or a simpler method like logging only protein and rough calories — can serve you better than any subscription. The fundamentals live in our calorie guide hub whenever you want them.

How to decide

Three questions cut through most of the indecision:

1. Which feature do you use daily? If the honest answer is “the barcode scanner and nothing else,” you are paying $79.99 for one feature that several cheaper apps include. If the answer is gram-based macros plus scanning plus history, Premium is priced reasonably for what you use.
2. Do you know your actual targets? A tracker is only as useful as the goal you point it at. Before paying anyone, spend two minutes with a calorie deficit calculator so you know what number you are tracking toward and how fast you can reasonably expect to move.
3. What does logging cost you in minutes? Price the friction, not just the subscription. An app that takes 10 minutes a day to maintain costs you 60 hours a year. If a different logging method — scanning, photos, voice — cuts that in half, the time saved dwarfs the difference between a $59 and a $79 subscription.

Where Cibo fits

We build Cibo, so weigh this paragraph accordingly. Cibo's position in the table above is simple: every logging method — photo, voice, text, and barcode — lives in one tier, at $39.99 a year on either store, with a 7-day trial to see whether the speed difference is real for your diet. There are no ads and no streaks; the app does not penalize you for missing a day. It does not have MyFitnessPal's two-decade database or MacroFactor's adaptive coaching, and we would rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise. If fast, low-friction logging is the thing you would miss most about Premium, Cibo is worth the week of trial. You can find it on the App Store and Google Play.

The bottom line

MyFitnessPal's price increase was real: 60% on the annual plan, a doubled monthly price, and the barcode scanner moved behind the paywall in October 2022. But the right response is not automatic. The free tier still works for repetitive diets. Premium is fairly priced for people who use its precision features daily. And the alternatives — Cronometer for depth, MacroFactor for coaching, Cibo for speed — are genuinely different tools, not just cheaper copies. Decide based on the feature you touch every day, not the headline on the renewal email.