Is Paying for MacroFactor Worth It vs Free Apps? (2025 Breakdown)

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With so many macro trackers that offer some features for free, you may wonder “is Paying for MacroFactor worth it?” After all, why pay for something you can get for free?

Read on for a cost breakdown, an overview of core features, 2025 updates, and a comparison to free apps on the market.

What MacroFactor Offers in 2025

MacroFactor is a macro-tracker known and praised for its science-based and no-nonsense approach to nutritional guidance. It was co-founded by Greg Nuckols, Cory Davis, and Rebecca Kekelishvili in 2021. You can learn more about the app’s history in an interview we did with Greg.

Core Features

One of MacroFactor’s most popular features is its nutritional coaching. If you log weight consistently and track macros diligently, MacroFactor analyzes your trend and auto-adjusts your calorie and macro targets.

If that’s the kind of coaching you want, get an extended free-trial using code FEASTGOOD.

Speaking of tracking what you eat, MacroFactor simplifies the process by offering multiple ways to log every meal and snack. You can:

• Search for various foods in their rich and accurate database
• Use the barcode scanner to find packaged goods
• Save favorite foods and recipes for quick access
• Describe your meals in free-text
• Quickly add food entries with nutritional data if you struggle to find a particular item in the library (which is rare)

Also, a more recent addition is the ability to use AI. Take a photo of a meal, and MacroFactor will determine the ingredients and quantities to calculate the nutritional value. You can add a bit of text to guide the app in the right direction. (Keep in mind that this feature is still in beta.)

Another thing that makes MacroFactor a great all-in-one fitness tracker is that you can log your weight, body fat percentage, and circumference measurements upload progress photos, and track your daily steps by syncing with Apple Health or Health Connect by Google.

This provides a broader overview of your activity and progress, aligning it with your calorie and macronutrient intake over time.

One thing that sets MacroFactor apart is that it presents weight trends to help you better understand if you’re moving in the right direction. In the words of the folks at MacroFactor:

“Weight Trend is based on your scale weight. It represents the meaningful state and changes of your body weight that is free from daily fluctuations related to total body water and gastrointestinal contents, and other factors.” (Source).

Lastly, while MacroFactor has a food library like any other nutrition logger, it stands out for its accuracy and level of detail. Each entry comes with the basic information you would expect: calories, protein, carbs, and fats. 

However, where other apps stop here, MacroFactor provides a thorough nutritional breakdown of carbs, fiber, dietary fat, and even amino acid composition. You can also see the amount of micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) for each serving.

For example, this level of insight can be helpful if you follow a vegan diet and consume only non-animal sources of protein, such as veggies, nuts, seeds, and lentils. 

Being able to see the amino acid composition of each food would make it easier to create the necessary variety and get enough of all nine essential amino acids, especially those limited in plant-based diets, such as lysine, methionine, and tryptophan. 

With this information, you could combine foods more strategically––for example, pairing lentils & rice or nuts & whole grains.

New Features (Added in 2025)

The biggest and arguably most anticipated feature added to MacroFactor this year was AI-powered photo logging. With it, you can log foods by snapping photos.

Since many apps lack the functionality to be a reliable solution in this area, MacroFactor took on this task and offers a more polished, effective photo-meal-logging feature. With photo logging, you get to save time and largely automate the more tedious aspects of macro tracking.

According to MacroFactor, some ways in which their photo logging differs from other apps include:

• Better results. Instead of relying on LLMs (think ChatGPT) to generate food items, the app uses analyzed, accurate nutrition data.

• Transparency. MacroFactor breaks down each meal into its individual ingredients, rather than looking at the whole dish and guessing what’s in it. This makes the results easier to examine and scrutinize.

• Manual control. They admit the technology is not perfect, which is why you can edit, modify, and add to the results for more efficient, accurate meal logging.

Besides photo meal logging, MacroFactor introduced the ability to add favorite foods in the spring of 2025. With this feature, you can quickly access the foods you eat more often. Each entry also comes with your preferred serving size.

You can add any food to favorites by tapping the heart icon on the Food Detail page. As an added option, you can ‘favorite’ the same food multiple times with different serving sizes––particularly beneficial if you eat or drink a particular thing as part of more than one meal of the day.

Another nice touch is MacroFactor’s recipe adjustment. As you add, remove, or adjust ingredient quantities, the recipe’s calories and macronutrients change. You can also adjust the recipe quantity, and the app will automatically scale each ingredient.

In a summer update, MacroFactor released a recipe importer. Create a recipe on the web, save the link, and paste it in the app. The app automatically populates the name, serving size, ingredient list, how-to steps, and other details.

Lastly, MacroFactor became available on Apple Watch in September. There, it shows essential metrics like your calories, macronutrients, and manually tracked key micronutrients. See what you’ve consumed so far and switch to your remaining calories and macros to plan out the rest of your day.

You can also browse through your meals for the day and use voice commands to log items. Quickly access your favorites, custom foods, recipes, and recently logged items.

Cost Breakdown

MacroFactor offers a 7-day free trial (extend it to 2 weeks with code FEASTGOOD), but there is no free version. The three subscription options are:

• Monthly – $11.99
• Every six months – $47.99 paid upfront
• Yearly – $71.99 paid upfront

What Free Apps Offer (and Their Limits)

Some general advantages of free apps include:

• Accessibility
• No payment barrier
• A decent number of features to get started

However, while free apps can be usable, they also tend to come with some drawbacks:

• Ads that can range from slightly annoying to downright frustrating
• Lack of automation and nuanced tracking
• Not feeling as accountable

With that said, let’s look at three popular apps and what their free versions offer:

MyFitnessPal Free

MyFitnessPal’s free version is enough to dip your toe in nutrition tracking and gain some momentum. You can:

• Log foods by searching the library or adding a custom entry
• Log exercise activity (type and duration)
• Log body weight and measurements
• Create and save custom meals, foods, and recipes
• See the calories and macronutrients of foods and meals you log
• See some micronutrients (vitamins and minerals)
• Adjust calorie and macronutrient goals by percentage (in 5% increments)
• View and share your food diary (great if you work with a coach)

However, some food logging options, barcode scanning, setting a macro target by gram, home screen customization, and other neat options are only available with a paid subscription.

Cronometer Free

Cronometer is often praised for its effectiveness and compared to MacroFactor. However, unlike MacroFactor, this app has a free version. Some of the available features include:

• Track your calories, foods, and up to 84 essential nutrients (including the three macronutrients)
• Access Cronometer’s entire food database (each entry is verified before being approved)
• Sync with Apple Health, Health Connect, FitBit, Garmin, Oura, and other products and software to import exercise and health metrics
• Unlimited use of the barcode scanner
• Access to the previous seven days of nutrition data
• Two basic charts that track your body weight and calorie consumption over time
• Create custom meals and recipes

While this is a fantastic start, Cronometer’s basic version is limited and comes with ads. Cronometer Gold is ad-free and allows you to:

• Create all sorts of custom charts (including to track sleep or a specific nutrient intake)
• Schedule meals ahead of time
• Import recipes from the web (similar to MacroFactor)
• Track intermittent fasting
• Look back at your whole history of nutrition and health metrics logged in the app

Lose It! Free

Lose It! is the third app we’ll look at here. Like the previous two, it has a free version that offers some features:

• Log meals and access their rich food database with millions of entries
• Create a personalized weight loss plan that accounts for your body composition and activity level
• Track your calorie intake and energy expenditure
• Sync the app to Apple Health or Google Fit to import exercise data
• Make friends and join groups of like-minded people to support one another and stay accountable

While these are good features and plenty to start with, Lose It! offers numerous other features on its pro plan:

• Track your macronutrients
• Monitor water intake, body measurements, and health metrics like blood pressure
• Use the barcode scanner to easily identify and log any packaged food or drink
• Sync Lose It! to a wearable device like Apple Watch, Fitbit, and Garmin
• Pre-log meals and exercise activity
• Get insight into your eating habits and form logging streaks to stay motivated

Key Comparison: MacroFactor vs Free Apps (Table)

Category	MacroFactor	MyFitnessPal	Cronometer	Lose It!
Price	$5.99 monthly (on a yearly plan); no free version available	$8.34 monthly (on a yearly plan); free version available	$4.99 monthly (on a yearly plan); free version available	$3.33 monthly (on a yearly plan); free version available
Ease of Use	Very user-friendly and intuitive	Familiar interface, though cluttered for some	Highly functional, customizable, and detailed, but not so beginner-friendly	Simple and clean interface; beginner-friendly
Food Database Accuracy	Highly accurate (verified and detailed entries)	Mixed accuracy; large crowd-sourced database	Very accurate; all the entries are verified	Moderate; decent but not as curated as Cronometer or MacroFactor
Coaching/Adjustments	Calorie and macronutrient adjustments based on your progress	None (manual goal setting only)	None (manual tracking and adjusting only)	Basic calorie goal adjustments based on weight goal
Customization	Custom macros, targets, dashboards, and charting	Can adjust goals by %, but limited layout and options in the free plan	Can create custom foods/meals, but limited charting on the free plan	Basic plan personalization, more options with premium
Ads	No ads	Contains ads (free plan)	Contains ads (free plan)	Contains ads (free plan)
Best For	Data-driven users who want accurate tracking with intelligent feedback	Casual users starting to track calories and macros	Nutrition-focused users who care about micronutrients and health stats	Beginners focused on calorie tracking and social support

Who Should Pay for MacroFactor?

MacroFactor is the ideal choice and worth the monthly subscription if you:

• Care about more than basic calorie tracking
• Want to set concrete macronutrient targets
• Want personalized guidance and ongoing nutritional target updates based on your progress
• Care about food library accuracy and level of detail
• Track certain micronutrients for health or fitness reasons
• Want a simple and convenient way to monitor body weight, circumference measurements, and progress photos
• Enjoy interface customizability and want to select what things to see on your dashboard
• Want a simple and intuitive app for logging foods, including through barcode scanning and taking photos
• Are okay with paying a monthly subscription (or paying $71.99 upfront for a whole year)

Who Can Stick With Free Apps?

While MacroFactor is excellent and improving all the time, not everyone needs the functionalities. So, if you:

• Are just getting started with calorie tracking, or only want to try it
• Are okay with some limitations (like not entirely accurate food database, lack of a barcode scanner, and similar)
• Prefer to calculate your calorie and macronutrient needs instead of relying on MacroFactor’s coaching
• Want to save money and not pay a subscription
• Are more focused on building better habits (i.e., becoming more mindful of what you eat and trying to be in the ballpark of your nutritional targets)
• Are okay with seeing ads in the app you use

Then MyFitnessPal, Lose It!, or Cronometer’s free version might be enough.

Is It Worth Paying in 2025?

As discussed so far, MacroFactor is a fantastic app. It works great, the interface is intuitive, and new features are added all the time. That said, whether it’s worth paying for it over a free app depends entirely on the context.

The case for paying:

• MacroFactor offers algorithmic adjustments to your calories and macronutrients based on real progress (or lack thereof)

• The food database is incredibly thorough and accurate, ensuring that its calculations are correct

• It offers precise nutritional tracking, which is important for any serious lifter or athlete chasing goals like muscle gain, fat loss, or even a body recomposition

It’s competitively priced ($71.99 per year) and on par with other paid nutritional trackers

The case against:

• You need to consistently track your nutrition and body weight for MacroFactor to be able to update your nutritional targets accurately; if you can’t be consistent daily, it may not be worth it for you

• You can start with a free app to build the habit, then upgrade to MacroFactor when you want the extra features

• There isn’t as strong a community/social aspect as some other nutrition trackers have

So, my verdict is as follows:

If you’re serious, committed, and have clear goals, MacroFactor is a worthwhile investment. It also helps to have basic food-tracking experience, but you can learn while using the app.

However, if you’re more casual, inconsistent with food tracking, and unclear on what goals you want to chase, a basic food logger might be the better choice now.