11 June 2026

We got sick of calorie apps paywalling the basics — so we built Rawlog

This is the honest origin story. We didn't set out to build a calorie tracker because we thought the world needed another one. We built one because every existing option had quietly decided that logging a meal — the single thing the app exists to do — was a premium feature.

The day the barcode scanner went premium

If you've used MyFitnessPal for any length of time, you remember the moment. In late 2022, MyFitnessPal moved its barcode scanner behind the Premium paywall — a feature that had been free since the app launched. Scanning a barcode is the most basic possible action in a food tracker. It's the difference between logging your lunch in three seconds and giving up and not logging it at all.

And here's the part that stuck with us: much of that food database was crowd-sourced — users spent years manually adding products, correcting entries, and filling in nutrition labels. Then the barcode tool that made the database quick to use moved behind a subscription. To us, that felt like being asked to pay for the easy way to use a library we'd helped stock.

It wasn't a one-off. It was a pattern.

The barcode scanner wasn't the only change. Reporting on the app shows more workflows moving into Premium over time — and as recently as 2026, features like scanning a whole meal at once, importing a recipe from a URL, and setting macro goals per meal were reported as Premium. You can read each change as reasonable on its own. Our take, as long-time users, is that the trend went one way: more of what we relied on ended up on the paid tier.

For context: MyFitnessPal was acquired by the private-equity firm Francisco Partners in 2020. We won't pretend to know the company's intentions — but a heavier paywall after a private-equity acquisition is a familiar story, and from where we sat as users, that's what it felt like.

What we actually wanted

We weren't asking for much. We wanted an app that:

• Let you log food and weight without hitting a paywall on the core loop.
• Showed your weight trend properly, so a water-weight jump didn't read as failure.
• Gave you a calorie target that was actually right for you — not a stale formula guess.
• Didn't bury the screen in ads, upsells, and features you never asked for.

We couldn't find it. Every app was either a paywalled maze, a bloated mess, or both. So we built the thing we wanted to use.

How Rawlog is different on purpose

Rawlog is deliberately the opposite of feature-creep-and-paywall. The core loop — logging food, tracking weight, seeing your trend — is the product, not the bait. We don't sell your attention to advertisers, and we don't hold the basics hostage.

What you do pay for is the genuinely hard, genuinely valuable part: an adaptive calorie target that learns your real metabolism from your own weight trend and intake, instead of trusting a decades-old formula and an activity-level dropdown. That's the feature worth charging for — not the barcode scanner, not the act of logging a meal.

The takeaway

We didn't build Rawlog to dunk on anyone. We built it because we were the frustrated users, and nobody had made the simple, honest tool we wanted. If you've ever opened a tracking app, gone to scan your lunch, and hit a "Upgrade to Premium" wall instead — this one's for you.