Is MyFitnessPal Premium worth it, according to Reddit?

The database is still the best in the business — but the community is increasingly asking whether you should pay to unlock features that used to be free.

“Is MyFitnessPal Premium worth it?” is one of the most-repeated questions in Reddit’s calorie-counting communities, and the answer has drifted from “maybe” to “probably not, unless…” over the last couple of years. Reading r/loseit and r/MyFitnessPal together, the picture is genuinely mixed — and the souring has less to do with what Premium adds than with what the free tier lost.

The database still wins people over

Let’s be fair to MyFitnessPal first, because the community is. Its food database is the largest and most convenient of any tracker — years of crowd-sourced and verified entries mean almost anything you eat is already in there, often with a verified checkmark. That depth, plus diary history people don’t want to abandon, is the single biggest reason users stay even when they grumble. The direct “is it worth it or should I switch?” thread is full of people who want to leave but find the database hard to give up.

The flashpoint: paying for what used to be free

The thing that turned the conversation is the barcode scanner moving to Premium. The r/loseit news thread is where you feel the resentment most clearly — the scanner had been a free, central part of how people logged, and asking users to pay for it read as a downgrade dressed up as an upsell. That reframes the entire worth-it question: you’re not just evaluating new features, you’re being asked to pay to get back to where you were.

What Premium actually adds — and whether it’s enough

The headline Premium features are custom macro targets, an ad-free experience, per-meal macro breakdowns, and food analysis. The recurring community verdict, captured in the money’s-worth thread, is that these are conveniences, not necessities — several long-tenure users conclude the free diary plus a simple spreadsheet covers the same ground. Threads asking specifically about the meal-scanning feature are cautious: useful, but not accurate enough to be the reason you pay.

And billing matters too. A recurring strand of PSA-style posts about unexpected charges has soured some users on the experience independent of feature value — never a good look when you’re trying to justify a subscription.

The practical takeaway

The honest synthesis from both subs: pay for Premium only if you’re already locked into MFP’s database and use it daily, and the custom macros plus scanner genuinely save you time. If you’re flexible, the communities consistently point elsewhere — Cronometer (free, verified data, strong micronutrients), Lose It! (the easy beginner on-ramp), or MacroFactor (paid, but credited for an adaptive model MFP doesn’t match). Premium isn’t a bad product; it’s just no longer an obvious yes, and the barcode paywall is why.