Photograph a meal.Then check the numbers.
CheckCal reads a photo of your plate and gives you calories and macros in a few seconds. It also shows what it measured each portion against, and lets you correct the weight in one tap — because the weight is the part these apps get wrong.
Not out yet. It is being built. The pages below are here because the App Store needs them.
Three taps, and one of them matters
The third one is the whole product. Everything else is plumbing.
Photograph the plate
Fit the whole thing in frame. A fork or a hand in shot gives the estimate something to measure against.
Read what it thought
Each item says what it judged the size by — “fills about half a 27 cm plate”, “four florets, each about a thumb”. When it had nothing to go on, it says that too.
Fix the weight
One tap per 10 g. Calories and macros follow instantly, because the app stores nutrition per 100 g and your weight beside it.
What the number actually is
It is an estimate, and it is worth knowing where the error lives. Identifying the food is close to solved — published measurements put it at 85–95%. Sizing the portion is not. Lab conditions give 15–25% error on the weight and field conditions are worse. Our own measurements on a public reference set, where every ingredient had been weighed, agree: nearly all of the error is in the grams, not in knowing that the plate has rice on it.
So CheckCal does not present a guess as a fact. Every item carries what the estimate was based on and how sure it is, the correction is one tap rather than a trip into an edit screen, and a corrected weight is remembered as yours. An app that hides all this teaches you to accept whatever number it printed.
- Protein
- Carbs
- Fat
What is in it
Photos
The main way in. Calories and macros per item, portions you can correct.
Barcodes
For packaged food, where the label is authoritative and a photo is not. Reads EAN-13, EAN-8 and UPC-E.
Typing it in
For everything a camera cannot help with. Also where a barcode miss lands, with the code already filled in.
Your day
Calories left, the three macros against their targets, meals grouped, and a streak that counts logging rather than perfection.
Weight and trend
Daily weight is mostly water. The chart draws the trend through the noise and tells you the rate you are actually achieving, not the one the plan assumed.
Apple Health
Optional, off until you turn it on. Writes what you log; reads your weight so a smart scale saves you typing.
Price
One thing is paid, and it is the one thing that costs us money to provide.
Free
no account, no card
Three meal photos a day. Barcodes, typing things in, your day, your weight and Health are not behind the subscription and will not be.
$29.99 a year
or $4.99 a month · 3 days free
Unlimited meal photos. Every photo is read by a vision model we pay for per picture, which is the whole reason there is a price at all. Cancel any time in your Apple account settings.
Questions
How accurate is it, really?
Good at naming the food, rough on the weight — and the weight is what decides the calories. That is why the app shows its reasoning and makes the correction a single tap. If you want numbers you can lean on, correct the portions on the few big items; the rest rarely moves the total much.
Do my photos leave the phone?
The meal photos do — that is how the estimate is produced. They go to our server, which passes them to the model and keeps neither the picture nor the result. A copy stays on your phone with the meal and is deleted when you delete the meal. Nothing else leaves the device: the log, your weight and your profile stay put. See the privacy policy for the specifics.
Is there an account?
No. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to log into. Your data is on your phone, which also means it does not follow you to a new one unless you restore from a backup.
What happens after the three free photos?
Nothing breaks. Barcodes, typing meals in, the day log, weight and Health all keep working exactly as before, and the photo allowance resets the next day.
How do I cancel?
In Settings on your iPhone — your name, then Subscriptions. Subscriptions are handled by Apple, so we cannot cancel or refund one for you. Refunds go through reportaproblem.apple.com.
Does it work on iPad or Apple Watch?
iPhone only for now. It will install on an iPad and run in a phone-shaped window, but nobody has designed that layout and we would rather say so than claim support we have not built.