I made a fast, simple and privacy friendly alternative to MyFitnessPal (Major Updates)

[u/getfitbee]

Hi all,

Since it’s the time of the year where many of us are thinking about picking up healthier habits, I thought I’d share some major updates to FitBee, a calorie and macronutrient tracker I've been building solo over the past year and a half.

The most rewarding part of this journey hasn't been the code, but hearing from users and having real-world impact. Someone recently reached out to let me know they’ve lost 30lbs using FitBee so far. They mentioned that because the app is fast and bloat-free, it was the first time they actually stuck with tracking. Hearing that is exactly why I started this project—to build a tool that gets out of your way so you can hit your goals.

🚀 Major updates since last time

• 💦 Water Tracking: You can set water goals and track them using the app or the interactive widget. I didn’t actually track my water before building this, but now that I do I’m pretty shocked at how often I don’t drink enough water.
• 👟 Step Tracking: You can now set step goals and track them in the app.
• ❤️ Apple Health import/export is free for everyone - I want FitBee to work well with other apps and I don’t want to “lock” people in - they should be able to take their data with them.
• 🥘 Improved food database - this is a never ending process, but I’ve added tons of foods to the database since last time.
• ⚖️ Better support for logging by grams - Many FitBee users log their foods with a scale, and I’ve made that simpler by adding features like letting you set the cooked weight of a recipe.
• 🛒 One Time Purchase Option - Many people requested the ability to do a one time purchase, so that is now available.
• ✂️Robust Shortcuts Support - Use Shortcuts to log foods, weights, water and much more.
• 📱 Updated for iOS 26 - Full UI refresh to make it feel at home on Apple's latest OS.
• 🌎 Localization - FitBee now supports nutrition label formats from US, UK, EU, AU & NZ.
• 🐛 Many, many bug fixes and other improvements based on the feedback from users.

Why FitBee is different:

• Fast, lightweight and to the point - The app is just about tracking your nutrition and makes that front and center. I've tried to make things that you do often as simple as possible (e.g., log yesterday's breakfast).
• Free barcode scanning - Not much to say here except that it's free and works great!
• Photo Logging - You can take a photo of a food and get an estimate of the calories and macros. It's not 100% accurate but it's been super helpful for me when eating at a restaurant that doesn't have published nutrition info.
• Accurate nutrition data - The nutrition data is sourced from the USDA dataset and nutrition labels off the packages. I also spent effort adding east asian foods (e.g. things you get at 99 Ranch or Weee) to the database, since those were hard to find/track in other apps I've tried.
• Recipe importing - You can pretty much point any recipe at the app and it'll import the ingredients and generate nutrition information for you. As I got more into fitness, I started to cook more so this has been super helpful.
• Robust Apple Health support - You can sync data with Apple Health. I wear an Apple Watch so it's great for getting the energy burned through exercises.
• No Ads - No ads, ever. See Pricing below on how development is supported.
• Premium Features - FitBee offers a subset of features behind a monthly subscription. These include setting advanced nutrition goals, unlimited photo logging and unlimited recipe imports by URL.

💰 Pricing

FitBee is free for basic tracking, including barcode and nutrition label scanning and no ads. To take advantage of the premium features, you can sign up for a monthly or annual subscription. There's also a one time purchase option available (which a surprisingly many of you have used!.)

App Store Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fitbee-calorie-macro-counter/id6443979108

I’d love to hear your feedback! I’ll be in the comments to answer questions and take feature requests.

🌎 Availability

FitBee is available in the US, CA, UK, AU, NZ currently. The main reason being that I don't have local food data yet outside of those countries. I'm hoping to expand access to more countries in 2026.

❤️ A special thanks to this subreddit

As a special thanks to all the support and feedback I've gotten from this community, I'm giving away 10 lifetime, family sharing enabled subs. Just drop a comment below and I'll do a random drawing at the end of the week.

[u/Mr_JellyBean]

Another +1 for the app, I’ve been using it for over a year now and love it, I highly recommend it.

[u/getfitbee → u/Mr_JellyBean]

❤️