Morsel

A calorie counter app with no subscription

Short answer

Morsel is a calorie and macro counter with a single $9.99 in-app purchase and no subscription of any kind. The free tier is the whole tracker; the purchase adds unlimited custom foods and recipes, saved meals, macro goals, trend charts, Apple Health weight sync and CSV export, and it never expires.

Almost every calorie counter is a subscription now, typically $10 to $20 a month for the tier that includes the features people actually want. The reasons are structural: those apps run servers, sync accounts, host the food database online and pay for AI features, and a monthly fee covers monthly costs.

A pay-once tracker has to be built differently. It cannot have a server for your diary, so it has no account. It cannot look up foods online, so the database has to ship inside the app. Morsel is built exactly that way, and the price list follows from it.

Morsel unlock screen comparing $240 a year for other apps with $9.99 once

What “no subscription” means in Morsel

There are two prices and neither repeats. Free is the full tracker: the complete database, barcode scanning, search, portions, the Today screen, the goal calculator and your entire history, with a cap only on creating custom foods and recipes (10). Morsel Unlimited is $9.99, once, through the App Store, and it unlocks everything else for good — including every future update.

  1. No free trial that converts to a charge. The free tier simply stays free.
  2. No “premium” badges on half the buttons. Locked features are few and clearly named.
  3. No account, so no password, no email list, no re-login on a new phone. The unlock restores from your App Store account.
  4. No ads in the free tier, and nothing to pay to remove them.

What to check in any pay-once tracker

A one-time price is only a good deal if the app keeps working. Three things to look for: the database should be on the device, not a server that might be switched off; your data should be exportable in a plain format; and the free tier should be usable enough that the purchase is a choice, not a ransom.

Morsel’s database is bundled and built from open sources (USDA FoodData Central and Open Food Facts), with the derived database and build script published openly. Exports are CSV. And the free tier is the tracker most people need, which is why the unlock is about the extras — recipes without limit, saved meals, charts — rather than about being allowed to log.

The math against a monthly plan

A $20-a-month tracker costs $240 a year; a $10-a-month one costs $120. Morsel Unlimited is $9.99 once, so it pays for itself against either within the first month, and against an $80 annual plan in about six weeks. More to the point, it is the same price in year three as in year one: $0.

Questions people ask

Is there really nothing else to buy?
Nothing. One non-consumable in-app purchase, $9.99 in the US store and the local equivalent elsewhere. No tiers, no bundles, no consumables.
What if I never buy the unlock?
Then you have a complete calorie counter with barcode scanning, the full database and unlimited logging and history, for free, forever. You will hit the 10-item cap only if you create a lot of custom foods and recipes.
Will the price go up?
Prices can change over time, but a purchase you have made is yours permanently and includes every future update. It will never be converted into a subscription.

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