Photograph your plate.
Know exactly what you ate.
CalorieBuddy reads one photo and gives you the food items, the calories, carbs, fat, protein and fiber, the full mineral and vitamin breakdown, and two scores that say whether the plate actually suited your goal. Then ask Calo, your AI nutrition coach, anything: snap a menu or a plate and it tells you whether it fits your goal, your diet and what you have left today.
One photo. No barcodes, no searching a database, no weighing. Vegetarian, vegan or pescatarian? Every suggestion fits.
Three taps, and the plate is logged.
Most calorie apps ask you to find your food in a list, then guess the portion. CalorieBuddy starts from the photograph and asks you one question you can actually answer: how much of it did you eat?
Snap it
Shoot it in the app or pick it out of your camera roll. Choose the meal, drag How much consumed? to what you actually ate, and add a note if the photo does not tell the whole story: “chicken was in the soup.”
Get the whole picture
Every item on the plate, the calories, carbs, fat, protein and fiber, and the full mineral and vitamin list, with a Food Health Score and a Balanced Diet Score. If the plate may contain something you are allergic to, it says so first.
Correct it, in words
“Skipped the mushrooms.” One correction per scan, written the way you would say it. CalorieBuddy replays the whole conversation and re-reads the plate rather than making you start again.
Two numbers that mean something specific.
A calorie count on its own tells you how much you ate, and nothing about whether eating it was a good idea. So every plate gets two scores instead, and they answer different questions.
Food Health Score
How good the food on the plate is, on a scale of ten. This one is about the food itself, so it reads the same for everybody: a fried plate scores low whether you are cutting or bulking.
Balanced Diet Score
How closely the plate fits your goal. Losing weight and building muscle want different shares of protein, fat and carbohydrate, so the same meal is a hit for one and a miss for the other. This score is measured against the goal you actually chose, not a generic ideal.
Both are worked out the same way every time, from the numbers on the plate. Two identical meals always score identically.
What the scores looked like
A day that came in comfortably under target, leaning a little heavy on protein and light on fat. Close enough to the shape the goal wants to score well, and the food itself was decent without being spotless.
- Around 90%
- The plate is the shape your goal is asking for.
- Around 70%
- Calories are fine, but one macronutrient is crowding out the others.
- Under 50%
- Mostly one thing. Worth knowing, and worth balancing at the next meal.
The whole day, not just the meal.
A scan is only useful if it adds up to something. Your targets come from your BMI, your goal and the activity level you set for that day, so the same plate means something different on a rest day than on a training day.
Ask before you eat it.
Calo is the AI nutrition coach inside CalorieBuddy. It already knows your goal, your diet, your BMI and what you have eaten today, so you can skip the context and just ask. Snap the plate in front of you, a restaurant menu or a nutrition label, and get a straight answer: good fit, fine in a smaller portion, or not ideal today, with a swap that would be.
- Answers from your own numbers. “How am I doing today?” “What did I eat this week?” Calo looks it up instead of guessing.
- Photo questions. Attach a photo from the camera or your gallery and ask if it suits you right now.
- Does the logging for you. Calo can log a meal, record your weight or change your goal or diet. It prepares the change and nothing is saved until you tap Confirm.
- Takes you there. Ask to scan a meal or add a buddy and Calo opens the right screen.
Your diet and your allergies, respected.
Tell CalorieBuddy how you eat during setup, and change it any time in your health data or just by telling Calo. Every meal idea, recipe and swap follows it, down to the stock and the sauce, and Calo points out anything in a photo that does not fit. Restricted diets still hit their protein: Calo leans on lentils, paneer, tofu, tempeh and eggs where they are allowed. Add your food allergies too, from peanuts to sesame, and Calo keeps them out of every idea. Every scan checks the plate for hidden sources like satay, pesto, ghee or soy sauce, warns you before you log it, and flags it in your diary.
Most of the work happens after the photo.
Reading the plate is one step. Everything downstream of it is deterministic code with unit tests, which is why two identical plates cannot produce two different calorie counts.
The nutrition maths is code
Mifflin–St Jeor for basal rate, five activity multipliers from 1.2 to 1.9 for daily expenditure, a goal adjustment between −20% and +20%, and Atwater 4/9/4 for calories. Unit-tested, and the same every time.
Portions are exact
The plate is always read at full serving size, exactly as it reached the table. The server then scales it by how much you said you ate. Nothing about the portion is guessed twice.
It knows where you are
Estimation is informed by your time zone and the time of day, so a plate is read against what people actually eat where you are, at that hour. Portion scale comes from the plates, utensils and hands in the frame.
Micronutrients normalize
Every mineral and vitamin is converted to micrograms, with the international unit conversions applied up front. The same conversion runs inside the database aggregation, so a total can never disagree with itself.
Calo asks before it acts
Calo reads your data to answer, but every change it suggests, from logging a meal to switching your diet, arrives as a card with the details on it. Nothing is written until you tap Confirm, and Cancel leaves everything as it was.
Ours, end to end
Asymmetrically signed sessions with short-lived access tokens and revocation on logout. Containers behind a load balancer with TLS, clustered workers, autoscaling, structured logging and images served from a CDN.
What it refuses to do
Guess at a non-photo If there is no food in the frame it says so rather than inventing a number.
Log something unsafe Food that reads as raw when it should be cooked is flagged, not silently counted.
Fall for a screenshot A photograph of a screen showing food is detected and rejected as not a meal.
Return a broken answer Every result is schema-checked before you see it, and rejected if it is incomplete.
Change your data behind your back Calo proposes; you confirm. A cancelled card changes nothing.
Break your diet, or miss an allergen A vegetarian never gets a chicken stock, and a plate that may contain your allergen says so before you log it.
The people who keep you honest.
Diets fail alone. Add a buddy by scanning their code and you can both see the day as it actually went: their target, what they have eaten against it, and where their BMI sits. No leaderboard, no badges, no streak to protect. Just the person who will ask you about lunch.
To be clear about the camera: the code pairs you with a person. There is nothing to scan on a packet, because CalorieBuddy does not read barcodes and has no database of branded products to look them up in.
One meal is noise. Six months is a signal.
Every scan feeds a record you can actually read back: seven days when you want to know how this week went, six months when you want to know whether anything has really changed. Miss a day and you can go back and add it from the calendar rather than leaving a hole.
- Goals
- Seven, filtered by your BMI so the app does not offer you a deficit you should not be running.
- Activity
- Five levels, set per day, from sedentary through to extra active.
- Health history
- Weight, height and BMI over time, in metric or imperial, with life stage accounted for.
Last 7 days
calories by macroStart free. Upgrade when it sticks.
Every plan gets the same accurate scans, both scores, Calo and full support for your diet. Paid plans simply let you do more of it, every month.
Free
Try the whole app, no card needed.
- 30 photo scans a month
- 30 Calo chat messages a month
- 3 meal idea sets a month
- Up to 2 buddies
- AI photos on meal ideas
Starter
For logging every day.
or $49.99 a year, save 30%
- 120 photo scans a month
- 300 Calo chat messages a month
- 15 meal idea sets a month
- AI photos on every meal idea
- Up to 5 buddies
Pro
For the whole day, every day.
or $99.99 a year, save 36%
- 300 photo scans a month
- 1,000 Calo chat messages a month
- 25 meal idea sets a month
- AI photos on every meal idea
- Unlimited buddies
Every plan includes the full calorie, macro, fiber, vitamin and mineral breakdown, the Food Health and Balanced Diet Scores, one correction per scan, vegetarian, vegan, lacto-vegetarian and pescatarian support, food allergy awareness, history, calendar and trends, and light and dark mode.
Prices in US dollars. Plans go live with the app.
Plan questions
Is there really a free plan?
Yes. Free includes 30 photo scans, 30 Calo chat messages and 3 meal idea sets every month, with the full breakdown and both scores on every scan. No card needed.
What counts as a scan?
Each new meal photo you analyze. Correcting a scan in words, viewing it again, deleting a meal or logging it from your history does not use another one.
What happens when I reach a limit?
Everything you have logged stays available. Limits reset on the first day of each month in your time zone, and you can upgrade at any point to keep going straight away.
Can I change plans or cancel?
Any time. Subscriptions are handled by the App Store or Google Play, so you upgrade, downgrade or cancel from your account there.
Be there on day one.
CalorieBuddy is finishing review for the App Store and Google Play. Send us a line and we will tell you the day it goes live, and nothing else. No newsletter, no drip campaign. Start on the free plan the moment it is out.
Coming to the App Store and Google Play.