Is MyFitnessPal Premium Worth It? 202 Reviews (2026)

On July 27, 2026 we pulled the 300 most recent MyFitnessPal reviews from the US Google Play store and the newest reviews from the US App Store. 202 of the 300 Google Play reviews were 1-3 stars. On the App Store, 35 of the 49 newest reviews were 1-3 stars.

That is not what the lifetime averages look like. MyFitnessPal sits at 4.40 from 2,906,256 Google Play ratings and 4.71 from 2,346,282 App Store ratings, with 100M+ installs. It is one of the most established apps in its category. The gap between a 4.40 lifetime average and a recent feed that is two thirds negative is the entire story of this article, and the reviews are specific about when it started.

The Play listing shows in-app purchases from $0.99 to $99.99 per item and confirms the app contains ads. Reviewers most often quote around $20 a month for Premium. This is a breakdown of what that money buys, built from what subscribers say they got.

Quick Answer: Is MyFitnessPal Premium Worth Paying For?

Only if the barcode scanner alone is worth roughly $20 a month to you. That is the honest summary, because scanning is the single feature that moved from free to paid, and it is the reason most of these reviewers came to the app in the first place.

The harder finding is what Premium does not buy. Paying subscribers in this data set report the same logouts, the same crashes, the same broken food search and the same failed device sync as free users. Several of the angriest reviews in the set are from people who have paid for years.

• "I have changed my reviews multiple times over the years. always getting steadily worse. the latest UI is dismal. why am I still paying for premium when I could just make my own app?"
• "Used to be great app, paid for it. They've somehow managed to completely screw it up over the last 18 months to the point where I can't log in now, even as a paid user."

Cost 1: The Barcode Scanner Went Behind the Paywall (29% mention the paywall, 13% name the scanner)

59 of the 202 negative reviews mention Premium, a paywall or a feature that used to be free. 27 of them name the barcode scanner specifically, which makes it the most-cited single feature in the entire set.

• "remember when we used to be able to scan barcodes without premium? Good times before corporate greed took over"
• "Looks like they fixed the UI issues, it looks much more streamlined now. However, basic required features are now paywalled. Can't even scan a barcode anymore to input food, pathetic. uninstalled"
• "making barcode scanning premium after users have made the entire database is classic enshittification"
• "it used to be 5 stars. but I got back to this app after years, and I see that the feature I used the most is now pay walled (scan barcode). no thanks"
• "Kind of a load of nonsense that you have to pay for the premium just for the barcode scanning function.... especially when other apps have it for free."
• "Loyal fans now have to pay $20 a month just to be able to scan food barcodes in order to post it to our Diary."

Two things are true at once here. A company is allowed to charge for its product, and food databases are genuinely expensive to maintain. But the complaint in these reviews is not that Premium exists. It is that the free tier was where these users built years of history, and the feature that made logging fast was removed from underneath them rather than added on top.

The reviews also show what the removal costs behaviorally. Scanning a barcode takes two seconds. Searching for the same product takes twenty and often fails, which is the next cluster.

Cost 2: The 2026 Redesign Added Taps to the Only Task That Matters (11%)

23 of the 202 negative Google Play reviews are about the new interface, and on the App Store it is the dominant theme of the newest reviews. Long-term subscribers date it to spring 2026.

• "Paid subscriber since 2018. This new (May 2026) UX is atrocious. You turned simple tasks into 4-5 clicks instead of 1-2. Tracking food should be fast, not a scavenger hunt through menus. A Classic View option would have kept longtime users happy. Instead, after years of paying, I'm now shopping for another app."
• "I've used MFP since 2017, and I've always loved how simple and efficient it was... And I could see everything I'd eaten in one place. Not anymore!"
• "As a 400+ day daily tracker, this new redesign completely degrades the app's utility. Managing critical micronutrients like potassium and sodium for daily heart health now requires buried menus and endless scrolling. Defaulting to weekly averages makes zero sense for real-time daily nutrition logging."
• "The new UI is truly just bad. So many useless extra taps now to see the same information."
• "accidentally clicking the log yesterdays meal is too easy, and then having to manually click each item to delete it is time consuming."
• "Cancelled Premium! New UI is horrible mess. Have used MFP 13 years."

This is the pattern we call a version regression: the app did not break in a way a crash report would catch, it got slower to use for the one job it exists to do. Calorie logging is a habit product. It survives on being finished in under a minute, three times a day. A redesign that turns two taps into five does not annoy people once, it annoys them 1,095 times a year, and the reviews above are what that arithmetic sounds like.

The specific losses reviewers name most often: no single view of the whole day, weekly averages shown by default instead of today, micronutrients buried, and the copy-yesterday action sitting where a mis-tap logs an entire day of food you did not eat.

Cost 3: Food Search That Cannot Find Food (7%)

This is the cluster that should worry the company most, because a calorie tracker with a broken database is not a degraded product, it is a non-functional one.

• "I don't know what happened to this app but suddenly it doesn't know what I mean by 'pickle' or 'egg' and I can't deal with that."
• "Super buggy. It won't let me enter any new foods. Lentils? Don't exist. Different flavor of yogurt? Never heard of it. As a food tracking app, it's pretty vital to know that foods exist."
• "Can't look up any food items. It just says, No Results. Check for spelling errors. I wrote ground beef..."
• "used to work great, but for the last several months the search database has been awful. Or rather, I can't search for ANY food! Only the archive of foods I already entered are available; no new foods."
• "After the last update I'm no longer able to search for the foods through the extensive library... no matter what food I put in it tells me no search results available."
• "The search function has been broken for weeks now. I want to like this app, but its not functioning at all..."

Several of these describe a specific state: previously saved foods still work, new searches return nothing. That reads like a failing network call to the search backend rather than an empty database, which also explains why it comes and goes. Either way, combined with a paywalled scanner, a user who cannot search and cannot scan has no way to log a meal at all.

Cost 4: Logouts, and Sometimes Lost History (8%)

• "The app suddenly logged me out and made me log back in, lost nearly two years of tracking and progress that I had done."
• "app just logged me out mid scan, and says I can't log back in with google, and then never sent my password reset email! I paid for my subscription THIS MONTH"
• "currently not able to login with newest update. Can't reset password, can't recognize Facebook login or Google login. I also couldn't create a new user."
• "Every time there's an update you have to enter your details again... Trying to reset the password now leads to recaptcha errors."
• "Generally works ok but will randomly log me out. This morning I logged one food item for breakfast then a second later it logged me out before I could add the rest."

Worth knowing: the data is usually still on the server, tied to the account, not the device. People who report losing years of history most often turn out to be signed into a second account created by a broken social login. Before you conclude the history is gone, try signing in with each method you might have used originally, email, Google and Facebook, and check the website, since several reviewers confirm the web version showed data the app did not.

Cost 5: Ads in the Tier You Are Being Asked to Escape (9%)

• "nearly worthless. mostly just ads to subscribe to their premium service."
• "Ad played loud audio. I didn't even know it was possible to play that loud."
• "now full screen unskippable ads has gone way too far. Clearly they are trying to force their users to buy premium to not have a terrible experience"
• "There is always a ad banner for something at the bottom of page and you can't click on search more items the banner blocks it so you're limited to what ever pops up"

That last one is the meaningful complaint. An ad that covers the control you need is not an ad you can ignore, it is a broken screen. The rest is a normal freemium tradeoff and would not be worth listing on its own.

Cost 6: Sync That Reports Itself Connected and Is Not (10%)

21 of 202 mention a wearable or a health platform, and the shape is consistent: the integration shows as connected, the data does not move.

• "still doesn't track your steps anymore using in tandom with google fit."
• "the app doesnt sync to your fitbit (google health) even if it says its connected. Ive literally logged in disconnected and reconnected the app, etc. and it STILL doesnt migrate my steps"
• "sometimes this app syncs with my Samsung smartwatch and counts every exercise twice. some days, it doesn't count the exercise at all. there's no manual way to force it to sync."
• "they offer integration with third party apps to sync weigh ins from connected scales...however - none of it seems to work. Or if it works, it doesn't work consistently."
• "Even i connected my samsung health it's doesn't add my daily steps to the app but its supposed to come with the premium."

Double-counted exercise is the dangerous one, because it inflates your calorie budget without telling you. If you use a wearable with MyFitnessPal, check one day by hand before trusting the number.

Cost 7: Charges After Cancelling, and Refunds Refused (5%)

The smallest cluster and the one with actual money in it.

• "it charged a premium subscription fee this year when I believed to have canceled it last year."
• "worst app ever you will never know how much subscription they will cut and they do not refund any money after cancellation"
• "this app charge money to ur card even thoo u dint insert ur card detail"
• "i accidentally purchased and i requested a refund but i didn't receive it"
• "not a free app. False advertising! there's only a 7day free trial then it's a subscription. BUT they will collect all your information before telling you the price."

That last quote describes the pattern worth flagging for anyone signing up now. The onboarding questionnaire comes before the price, so you have invested ten minutes of answers by the time you see the number.

Cancelling matters here because deleting the app does not stop the billing. The subscription lives with Apple or Google, not with MyFitnessPal, which is why so many people believe they cancelled and get charged anyway. We wrote the exact steps for both stores in how to cancel MyFitnessPal, including how to check whether a subscription you thought you ended is still active.

So What Is Premium Actually Worth?

Priced honestly, against what these 202 reviews describe:

• You are buying back the barcode scanner. That is the real transaction, and for someone logging packaged food daily it may genuinely be worth it.
• You are not buying stability. Paying users report the same crashes, logouts and search failures. Premium is not a support tier.
• You are not buying the old interface back. Every reviewer asking for a classic view is asking a design question, not a billing one, and no tier answers it.
• You are not reliably buying sync. Several of the sync complaints come from subscribers who expected integration to be a paid feature that works.

The strongest argument for paying is the database itself. Even the harshest reviews concede it is the biggest food library in the category, and that is not easy to replace. The strongest argument against is that the free tier no longer works well enough to evaluate the paid one.

What Reviewers Switched To

We do not rank alternatives by preference, so here is only what the reviewers themselves named, which is useful precisely because it is unprompted: Cronometer for micronutrient tracking, Lose It! and FatSecret as direct replacements with a free scanner, and MyNetDiary. One reviewer noted the tradeoff plainly, calling MyFitnessPal the better app overall and switching anyway over the paywall.

If you want the comparison sorted by complaint volume rather than by opinion, our MyFitnessPal alternatives page ranks same-category apps by their negative review ratio.

The Verdict

MyFitnessPal is legitimate, it is not a scam, and the database is still the best in its category. What the recent reviews describe is narrower and more fixable than either of those facts suggests: the feature that made the app fast now costs money, the redesign made the remaining free workflow slower, and the paid tier does not resolve the reliability complaints that drove people to consider paying.

If you are already a subscriber and the app works for you, nothing here says to leave. If you are deciding whether to start paying, the useful test is to try logging three days of meals by search alone. If the database finds your food and the new interface does not slow you down, Premium buys you a real convenience. If search fails you the way it fails these reviewers, the scanner will not fix an app you already cannot use.

For current sentiment rather than our snapshot, read the newest 1-star reviews on the MyFitnessPal review page, check the code-computed trust summary at is MyFitnessPal legit, and compare the Android complaints, where the paywall and search reports are heaviest.

Related reading: Is BetterMe Legit? covers the cancellation and trial-pricing complaints in another major fitness subscription, Noom vs WeightWatchers vs MyFitnessPal vs Lose It! ranks the weight-loss category by complaint volume, and Calorie Tracking Apps Ranked by 1-Star Reviews covers what breaks across the whole category.