A few weeks ago I open sourced my iOS calorie tracker.
Every "AI calorie tracker" on the App Store now charges $8–$15/month.
Scan food? Pay.
See macros? Pay.
Want a lock screen widget? Pay the yearly plan.
Tracking what you eat shouldn't cost $180/year.
So I built Fud AI and made it free.
No subscription, no sign-in, no cloud sync.
Full source on GitHub under MIT.
How it works: snap a photo of your food, speak your meal, or type it.
AI returns calories, protein, carbs, fat, and 9 micronutrients.
Everything logs to Apple Health.
You bring your own API key — Gemini has a free tier so most people pay nothing. 13 providers supported in total.
There's also a coach chat tab that reads your profile, weight history, and food log, so you can ask things like "what's my expected weight in 30 days" or "am I hitting protein this week" and get a plain-English answer.
After I posted about it on various socials last week:
→ 3,000 App Store downloads in one week
→ GitHub stars, issues, and pull requests from strangers
→ Users across 15 languages (iOS auto-selects from device language)
Built entirely in SwiftUI for iOS 17.6 . No third-party dependencies.
@ Observable for state, App Groups for widget sharing, iOS Keychain for API keys, UserDefaults for the food log. Nothing leaves the phone.
A few takeaways from shipping this way:
1. Free open source is still a viable distribution strategy in 2026. People notice.
2. Bring-your-own-key is a better model than charging subscriptions on top of someone else's API margin.
3. Keeping everything local (no account, no cloud, no tracking) is a feature, not a limitation.
App Store:
apps.apple.com/us/app/fud-ai…
Github Source Code:
github.com/apoorvdarshan/fud…
Website:
fud-ai.app
If you're building something — make it free when you can. It feels better.