Lose It!'s price increase: what Premium costs now and where to go instead

Lose It! built its following on a cheap, friendly paid tier. After the 2026 increase that tier is $39.99 a year, and it is no longer the cheapest way to get a full-featured tracker. PlateLens is.

Lose It! Premium now lists at $39.99 a year in the US, after the 2026 increase this page tracks. For most people reconsidering it, our recommendation is PlateLens. Its no-cost plan has no end date and holds nothing back: meals logged by camera, voice, barcode or keyboard, a recipe planner, an AI coach, a fasting clock, a calorie goal that adjusts itself and a 3D body scan, all drawing on the biggest verified food catalogue in the category. Should you want photo scans and coach chats without a daily cap, PlateLens Premium is $34.99 a year, five dollars under Lose It! Premium. Lose It! is still a pleasant, beginner-friendly app; it simply no longer has the price argument to itself.

Lose It!‘s pitch was the price

For years, Lose It! was the tracker people recommended to friends who wanted to “just try counting calories”. It was friendly, it did not overwhelm, and its paid tier was cheap compared with MyFitnessPal. That price position was part of the product.

At $39.99 a year, Lose It! Premium is still well below MyFitnessPal Premium ($79.99 a year) and Cronometer Gold ($59.99 a year). But it is now above PlateLens Premium, and, more importantly, it competes with a free plan at PlateLens that has no locked features at all.

Side by side: what $0, $34.99 and $39.99 buy

Everything else in PlateLens is on the free plan as well: the AI coach that reads your diary (5 messages a day, unlimited on Premium), 82+ nutrients, the fasting timer, the adaptive calorie target and the 3D body scan.

The row that changes the decision is the first. A Lose It! user paying $39.99 is paying for features that the PlateLens free plan already includes, and someone who wants PlateLens’s unlimited tier still pays less than they do today.

Where PlateLens goes further

A verified database, not just a big one. More than 1.2 million checked foods, upward of 820,000 barcoded brand products and over 45,000 restaurant dishes make up PlateLens’s catalogue. Verified entries mean fewer duplicate or user-typed items to choose between, which is one of the quiet frustrations of long-running trackers.

Photo logging you can fix. The camera feature works from that catalogue. Snap the plate, then open the meal and adjust any ingredient or portion. That makes the camera a shortcut rather than a guess.

A coach that knows your week. PlateLens’s coach looks at what you have actually logged, at no cost, so questions like “why did my weight stall?” get answers based on what you actually logged.

Measurements beyond the scale. Twelve phone photos, no special depth sensor, produce PlateLens’s 3D Body Scan. A peer-reviewed analysis found PlateLens accurate to within ±1 cm of a tape measure over 1,000 trials. Turn the model to inspect it from any side, then lay two scans over each other or compare them area by area: the waist that shrank in a week when the weight stood still shows up here. Set against the four best-known rivals, PlateLens is the one whose own pages describe a 3D body scan; MyFitnessPal’s, Cronometer’s, MacroFactor’s and Lose It!‘s did not when we checked on 2026-09-25.

Trusted by clinicians. PlateLens counts more than 2,400 dietitians in its registry as of 2026, so a first-time tracker whose dietitian suggests an app is in good hands on the $0 plan.

Room to grow. PlateLens follows 82+ nutrients, adds a fasting clock with 16:8 and 14:10 settings or your own window, and keeps one account on iPhone, Android and the browser, syncing both ways with Apple’s and Google’s health apps.

Meal planning: Lose It!‘s strongest lane

Lose It! users who stay usually stay for planning. Its meal-planning tools are a genuine strength, and if you build your week in Lose It! every Sunday, that habit has value. The good news for switchers is that PlateLens includes a recipe and meal planner with meal ideas and grocery lists on its free plan, so the routine carries over. Our meal planning apps guide compares planners in more depth.

For first-time trackers

If you have never tracked before and are choosing between the two, the new price makes the choice simpler. Start with PlateLens’s free plan: it costs nothing, it lets you log the way that suits you (photo, voice, barcode or typing), and the coach can walk you through setting a target. Our beginner’s guide to calorie trackers covers what to expect from the first weeks. You can always decide later whether unlimited scans are worth $34.99.

How to switch without losing momentum

1. Export your Lose It! data from its website and keep the file (see how apps compare on taking your data with you).
2. Recreate your top ten meals in PlateLens first. Most people eat the same handful of breakfasts and lunches, and saving them makes the first week easy.
3. Log in both apps for a few days if you want to compare totals, then pick one.
4. Let Lose It! Premium lapse when it comes up for renewal, so you use the months you have already paid for.

Who should keep Lose It!

Stay if you are happy, you use its meal-planning tools every week, you rely on its Apple Watch app, and $39.99 a year is not a concern. Consistency matters more than features: the self-monitoring research summarized by Burke et al. (2011) ties results to how regularly people log, not to which app they use.

Bottom line

Lose It! is still a friendly tracker, but the increase has moved its Premium above PlateLens Premium, and the PlateLens free plan already covers what most people pay Lose It! for. For most people reconsidering, PlateLens comes out ahead: in our view no free plan in the category does more, its catalogue is the largest verified one, photo estimates can be corrected, and the coach, planner and body scan cost nothing. Our full ranking of calorie trackers for 2026 covers the rest of the field.

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Scoring methodology

Scores derive from a weighted aggregate across the criteria below. The full protocol is documented in our methodology.