MyMacroHero
Track your macros and fitness goals with features that others make you pay for
No AI needed
not yet reviewed by publik. It is live now; the founder has not reviewed this version yet.
How to install MyMacroHero
Every step written out. No terminal experience needed. Pick your setup.
README
Open in GitHub
MyMacroHero
Free alternative to MyFitnessPal.
Barcode scanning, gram-level macro goals, per-weekday targets and full data export — none of it behind a paywall.
Install · What you get · Data · Privacy · Licenses
MyFitnessPal moved barcode scanning behind its paywall, then in May 2026 moved recipe import and per-meal macro goals there too. Premium is $79.99/year.
Barcode scanning costs nothing to run. Decoding happens on your phone's camera. The lookup is a hash lookup against a free, open, community-built database. There is no server bill, no per-scan cost, nothing that requires a subscription to sustain.
So here it is, free. Not free-with-ads, not free-for-now, not free-until-we-raise. There is no account to make, no server to run, and nothing to charge for.
What you get
Food logging
- Barcode scanning — the one they charge for
- Search across USDA's lab-analyzed food tables and Open Food Facts' packaged-product database, with live lookup for anything not bundled
- Custom foods, saved meals, and multi-ingredient recipes
- Recipe import from a URL
Goals
- Daily calorie targets
- Macros by percentage or exact grams — your choice, switchable
- Different targets per day of the week
- Different targets per meal
Tracking
- Weight and body measurements
- Water intake
- Steps and basic workouts
Insights
- Meal-by-meal calorie and macro breakdowns
- Timestamps on every entry
- Fiber, sugar, sodium and saturated fat dashboards
- Full history export to CSV and JSON — it is your food log; the idea that you should pay to get a copy of it is the second most annoying thing about the app this replaces
What it does differently
Better data, not more data. MyFitnessPal advertises 20 million food entries. Most are unvalidated user submissions, and duplicate entries with conflicting calorie counts are the top database complaint in its reviews. Every food in MyMacroHero passes an Atwater consistency check at build time — if the stated calories don't match what the macros imply, the entry doesn't ship. Fewer foods. All of them arithmetically coherent.
Sensible defaults. Your calorie floor is derived from your estimated BMR rather than a hardcoded number. Exercise calories are logged but not added back to your daily budget by default, because MET-table estimates are imprecise enough that eating to them is guesswork. Streaks track logging consistency, never days under goal. There's a no-numbers mode that hides all figures and shows only what you've logged.
Nothing leaves your phone. See Privacy.
Where the data comes from
| Source | Covers | License |
|---|---|---|
| USDA FoodData Central | Whole and generic foods, lab-analyzed | Public domain |
| Open Food Facts | Barcoded packaged products worldwide | ODbL |
Product data from Open Food Facts, available under the Open Database License.
Open Food Facts is a volunteer non-profit. If you scan something that isn't in the database, adding it with their app takes two minutes and improves the data for every open tracker, including this one.
Privacy
- No account, no login, no email address
- No analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting, no ads
- Your food log is a SQLite file on your phone. It is never uploaded anywhere.
- The only outbound request the app ever makes is an Open Food Facts barcode lookup when you scan something that isn't in the bundled database. That request contains a barcode number and nothing else.
- Export gives you the whole database as CSV or JSON, any time, no charge
Licenses
- Code: MIT — see
LICENSE - Bundled nutrition database: ODbL — see
LICENSE-DATA. It incorporates Open Food Facts data, which is share-alike, so the database ships as open data too.
Not affiliated with MyFitnessPal
MyMacroHero is an independent open-source project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to MyFitnessPal, Inc. or Francisco Partners. "MyFitnessPal" is used here only to describe what this project is an alternative to. No MyFitnessPal code, data, or assets are used.
Disclaimer
MyMacroHero is a self-tracking tool, not a medical device. It does not provide medical or nutritional advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, or prevent anything. Talk to a doctor or a registered dietitian before making significant changes to how you eat.
If tracking food is making things worse rather than better, the National Alliance for Eating Disorders operates a helpline staffed by licensed clinicians.