Calorie Cownter - Food Log

Log meals in seconds — type it, scan a barcode, or snap a photo and let AI do the math. No account, no ads, and your food diary stays in your own iCloud.

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Inspiration

I've used several nutrition apps in the past to track calories but more and more I felt frustrated by the amount of ads that were everywhere. It almost felt like you were being forced to pay something for features you didn't really want to use. I just wanted a simple nutritional tracker, thats it. So I built Calorie Cownter, a simple food tracker with a lot of the basic features that users would like to use, free of charge.

What it does

You can easily track calories by adding them either manually, through search (via the Open Food Facts database), through AI (generous free tier), or by scanning a nutritional label. This information is synced across all your iOS devices, no account necessary, no ads.

How we built it

The app was built using Swift, Figma (for mocks), and Claude for coding. I'm a coder at heart and I've built apps in the past using the Core Data framework, which allows apps to sync data across apple devices. I thought that this would be key into making an app that requires no subscription and no account to use. So I brought that expertise into the app. Even the AI-addon subscription doesn't require any personal identifiable information to work. This app connects to an API server running Laravel (my web framework of choice) and a marketing site built using Astro.

Challenges we ran into

I found Open Food Facts to be challenging to work with but necessary if I wanted a food database. What I did was take an export of their database, pushed it to my server, had the server fetch on an ongoing basis the latest data from open food facts on a schedule. Today, it continues to stay updated with the latest data. The challenge that will present itself over the next couple of days and weeks is performance, as fuzzy searching over millions of records and returning accurate results is a hard problem to solve (but a fun one).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It takes a lot to build an iOS app from scratch, even with AI. Mobile apps span multiple domains, like API infrastructure, database design, privacy concerns, and knowledge about marketing. As a solo dev, I likely wouldn't of been able to accomplish this without AI (claude in this case) in the time I had available. Nothing here by itself hard, but architecting all of it so it works across various services is.

What we learned

Revenue cat's framework and how it connects to your own website and Apples'. Its been easy to work with. Also, I did not know until now that Apple had a way to authenticate that API requests were coming from an iOS device. I learned that this is called Managed Device Attestation. This is what allows apps to connect with APIs without the need of username/password security. Its great that the website can validate that this is a real user because the API request came from an iOS device.

What's next for Calorie Cownter - Food Log

I'm not quite sure -- optimization, UX tweaks, and ways to make the app as low-cost to run and use as possible. Currently, I pay for server costs and AI usage costs. Its not a lot of money, but I'm sure with enough research I can find ways to make it even cheaper to run and pass those savings to the user. The goal is not to make a lot of money with this - its just to make great software with great features that don't require a subscription to use ultimately.

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