Is BitePal Free? BitePal Pricing, Trial and Refund Rules
ChatGPT 
Claude 
AI Mode 
Perplexity 
As a NutriScan nutritionist, I read the trials before I read the paywall. A 2025 meta-analysis of 29 randomized trials found that phone app interventions helped adults with overweight lose about 1.45 kg more than controls, and self-monitoring was the most common technique, used in 25 of them (Li et al., 2025). BitePal sells that self-monitoring behind a subscription, fronted by a raccoon, and the question I get about it is always the same: is it free, or is the pet a sales pitch? Both are true.
This post sets out what is free, the ten in-app purchases on the US App Store as of September 24, 2026, how the trial works, how to cancel, and when a refund is realistic.
TL;DR
BitePal is a free download with paid PRO Features. The US App Store lists $3.99 to $5.99 a week and $23.99 to $59.99 a year. A short trial converts to an annual charge. Refunds: 48 hours on the stores, 30 days on the web.
IMPORTANT
Your checklist for this guide
⏱️ Progress 0/4 • ~0 minutes in
⏳ Step 1: What is free and what BitePal Pro costs
⏳ Step 2: The trial, and why people get charged
⏳ Step 3: Research on gamified tracking and AI calorie accuracy
🔍 The one line in BitePal's terms that decides most refund requests (revealed near the end)
BitePal's mascot is a raccoon, and the raccoon is free. The scanner behind it is where the bill starts.
The quick answer: the download is free, the tracker is not
BitePal is free to install on both stores. You can create an account, name and dress your raccoon, and scan meals. BitePal's terms of use state that "BitePal requires payment of a fee for the use of certain features or functions of the Services", which the terms call PRO Features, and that the company can "change/introduce prices and fees" at any time "without prior notice".
The terms do not list which features are PRO. The clearest evidence comes from users. One of the top reviews on the US App Store says the writer "didn't realize that changing calorie values was only a paid option" and stopped using the app, adding that "the calorie counter should be included in the free version, otherwise theres not a whole lot of tracking you can do without paying." August 2026 release notes say BitePal "brought back" manual calorie input, without saying whether it is free.
So the honest answer is: free to try, paid to use as a daily calorie tracker, and BitePal's price is not a single number.
Who makes BitePal and how big it is
BitePal is published by Reface Lithuania UAB, registered at Gynėjų St. 4-333 in Vilnius, Lithuania, according to its terms of use. The terms also say payments may be processed by either Reface Lithuania UAB or Neocortext Inc. in Wilmington, Delaware, "depending on your location and the payment method used", and that the entity name will appear on your payment confirmation or bank statement. That matters later, when you try to match a charge to the app.
On the US App Store the app is listed as "Food Calorie Tracker: BitePal", first released on June 10, 2024, with a 4.7 rating from about 55,000 ratings. The listing shows English as the only language, requires iOS 15 or later, and weighs 248 MB; version 2.32.0 was the current build on September 24, 2026. On Google Play it is "BitePal: AI Calorie Counter" with 4.5 stars from about 419,000 reviews and more than 5 million downloads, updated on September 18, 2026.
The company's website says the app is "used by 1M+ people worldwide" and shows a testimonial of 70 kg to 60 kg in one month. Hold that thought for the research section.
What the free version includes, and where the paywall sits
BitePal does not publish a free versus Pro feature table. Section 1 of its terms describes the product in four parts: a virtual pet you personalize, a photo analysis that returns a "Nutrition Score" with detected items and estimated macros, a profile page with meal history and a logging streak, and share and download tools for your meal photos and pet.
From the terms, the help center and user reports, the free tier works like this:
- Account and onboarding: free, but you must create an account with an email, Apple or Google login. You must be at least 16.
- The raccoon: free. The pet reacts to what you log and is the reason many people download the app. The UK App Store also sells a "BitePal 400 Bitecoins Pack" for £0.99, a pack of in-app coins.
- Photo scans: available, but an App Store reviewer reports that correcting the calorie value on a scan was a paid option. On a tracker that often overestimates, that is the feature that matters, so test it on the free tier before you pay.
- PRO Features: sold as a weekly or annual subscription. BitePal does not publish the exact split.
- Add-ons: the help center's billing page names a Custom Meal Plan and a Vitamin Guide that can be bought alongside the main subscription and are billed separately.
BitePal Pro pricing on the App Store and Google Play
BitePal does not publish a price list on its website or help center. The App Store does. Apple shows an app's in-app purchases on its public listing, and on September 24, 2026 the US listing carried ten of them.
| Listed in-app purchase | Price (USD) | Billing period | Cost over 12 months |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weekly Subscription | $3.99 | Weekly | $207.48 |
| Weekly Subscription | $4.99 | Weekly | $259.48 |
| Weekly Subscription | $5.99 | Weekly | $311.48 |
| BitePal Yearly 23.99 | $23.99 | Yearly | $23.99 |
| Annual Subscription | $29.99 | Yearly | $29.99 |
| Annual Subscription (listed 3 times) | $35.99 | Yearly | $35.99 |
| BitePal Plus Annual | $49.99 | Yearly | $49.99 |
| Annual Subscription | $59.99 | Yearly | $59.99 |
Figure: Kept for a year, the cheapest weekly plan ($207.48) costs more than three times the most expensive annual plan ($59.99).
Three things follow from the list.
First, there is no monthly plan on the US listing. BitePal sells by the week or by the year. A weekly subscription is the most expensive way to buy any app, and BitePal's is no exception: the $5.99 weekly plan costs $311.48 over a year, while the $23.99 annual plan costs $23.99. That is a factor of 13 between the cheapest and most expensive way to own the app.
Second, annual plans appear at five prices between $23.99 and $59.99, one of them a separately named "BitePal Plus Annual" at $49.99, and the $35.99 plan is listed three times. Several prices for one product is the pattern of a paywall that tests offers: different people see different prices.
Third, prices outside the US are set in local currency. The UK listing shows weekly plans at £3.99 and £4.99 and annual plans at £22.99, £29.99, £34.99 (three entries), £39.99 and £59.99, plus the £0.99 Bitecoins pack. On Google Play the listing gives only a range, $0.99 to $79.99 per item.
The number that counts is the one on your own paywall screen. Screenshot it before you tap.
The free trial: how long it is and why people get charged
IMPORTANT
Checkpoint
⏱️ Progress 1/4 • ~3 minutes in
✅ Step 1: What is free and what BitePal Pro costs (done)
👉 Step 2: The trial, and why people get charged (you're here)
⏳ Step 3: Research on gamified tracking and AI calorie accuracy
🧩 The refund line in BitePal's terms (coming up)
The US App Store listing does not name a trial product, but the trial exists and drives most complaints about the app. On Apple's community forum, a user wrote in January 2026 that after a "3 days free trial" the app charged "39,99€ for the annual subscription instead of the monthly subscription". On the Google Play help community, a user who started the free trial, decided the app was not for them and deleted their account was charged 40.99€ for "a year fee for the app". They had expected "3 or 4€". Eighty-four other users marked that thread "I have the same question".
Three mechanics explain those stories, and none of them is unique to BitePal.
A 3-day trial is short. Start it on Friday evening, forget over the weekend, and the annual charge lands on Monday. Set an alarm for 24 hours after you start.
Deleting the app or the account does not cancel. BitePal's help center says this in one sentence: "deleting the app doesn't cancel your subscription, and you may still be charged". The same rule applies to every store subscription.
Web purchases do not appear in your phone's subscription list. BitePal also sells through a quiz funnel at quiz.bitepal.app. A subscription bought there lives with BitePal's payment processor, not with Apple or Google. The help center lists a web purchase as one of three reasons you "can't find my subscription in the App Store or Play Store". MyNetDiary's February 2026 Diet App Scorecard, which read 221 BitePal App Store reviews from that month and scored the app 1.79 out of 5, found billing to be the dominant complaint, including charges "through third-party processor Paddle that bypass Apple's subscription management entirely". MyNetDiary is a competitor, so read its scorecard with that in mind, but the mechanism it describes matches BitePal's own help pages.
If you want the trial without the risk, start it from the App Store or Play Store rather than the website, and cancel it the same day. Apple's own cancellation page says to cancel a trial "at least 24 hours before the trial ends", and on a 3-day trial that leaves you two days of real use.
A 3-day trial runs out faster than you think. Set the reminder before you close the paywall.
What BitePal Pro includes
BitePal's App Store description lists what the app does, without marking which parts are paid:
- AI photo logging that returns a "nutrition score, key highlights, and simple guidance" per meal.
- A dashboard for calories, nutrients and weight progress.
- Water tracking and a fasting timer with "gentle reminders".
- Raccoon customization with "outfits, accessories, and seasonal looks".
- Pattern insights and weekly meal plans, described as "a friendly breakdown of your eating patterns" and "simple weekly meal plans tailored to your goals".
The release notes for versions 2.24.0 and 2.25.0 (July and August 2026) add a searchable food database with "verified products", voice logging and multi-input meals. They do not say which of these sit behind the paywall.
Two details from the terms matter before you pay. BitePal's ingredient and nutrition data comes in part from the OpenNutrition Foods dataset, which incorporates Open Food Facts, and the terms say that this data "may include estimates or AI-generated values". And by uploading meal photos you grant BitePal a license to use them, "including, but not limited to, the use for training artificial intelligence models in a de-identified manner".
Does a raccoon help you lose weight? What the research says
BitePal's pitch is that a pet makes logging fun, and fun makes you consistent. The evidence on gamified health apps supports the first half more than the second.
A 2025 randomized controlled trial in 50 adults with obesity or type 2 diabetes compared a gamified digital physical activity program with a supervised in-person program. The gamified group added 1,085 steps per day during the 3-month intervention and 1,775 steps per day at follow-up compared with usual care, but the authors also report "marked heterogeneity", with "some participants showing no improvement" (Mazéas et al., 2025). The lead author's PhD grant was co-funded by Kiplin, the company behind the program. Gamification moved the average. It did not move everyone.
What the tracking itself achieves is well measured. A 2022 meta-analysis of randomized trials of weight loss apps found that weight loss peaked at 2.18 kg at 3 months and tapered to 1.63 kg at 12 months (Chew et al., 2022). A 2023 meta-analysis by the same group, covering 14 trials and 2,478 participants, found that adding a human coach to a self-monitoring app improved weight loss by 2.15 kg and cut daily intake by about 128 kcal compared with controls (Chew et al., 2023). BitePal has no human coach. Its tips are generated.
Trials of tracking apps report 1.5 to 2 kg over months, not the 10 kg in a month from BitePal's website testimonial. If a raccoon gets you to log every day, the app has done what the evidence says an app can do.
How accurate are BitePal's AI calorie estimates?
IMPORTANT
Checkpoint: halfway
⏱️ Progress 2/4 • ~5 minutes in
✅ Step 1: What is free and what BitePal Pro costs
✅ Step 2: The trial, and why people get charged
👉 Step 3: AI calorie accuracy (current)
⏳ The refund line in BitePal's terms (next)
The same February 2026 scorecard that flagged billing also reported that estimates were "wildly inaccurate", with users describing "an apple estimated at 438 calories, two eggs at 460". Two eggs are about 150 to 160 kcal (a large boiled egg is 78 kcal), so that is a threefold error on a food every database gets right. The App Store reviewer quoted earlier logged a 140-calorie bag of popcorn and got 775.
The research on photo-based estimation explains why those misses happen and why they are not unique to BitePal. A 2024 scoping review of 25 studies found that AI food detection accuracy ranged from 74% to 99.85%, while nutrient estimation errors were typically 10% to 15% (Zheng et al., 2024). Recognizing the food is easy; estimating how much is on the plate is hard. A 2025 paper testing multimodal language models on the Nutrition5k dataset states the limitation directly: their ability to estimate energy "is hindered by limitations in recognizing food size" (Tanabe and Yanai, 2025).
The most practical finding is from a 2025 evaluation of 195 dishes, where a general-purpose vision model was given the image alone, then the image plus written descriptors, then the image plus an ingredient list with amounts. Accuracy improved at each step, and dropped again when the image was removed but the ingredient list kept (Rodríguez-Jiménez et al., 2025). The photo helps, but the photo plus your correction helps much more.
For a BitePal user that means one habit: treat the Nutrition Score as a first draft, and check whether your plan lets you edit it before you pay. If the app says an apple is 438 kcal, fix it. If it cannot see the oil in a stir-fry, add it. An AI logger that is corrected daily is more accurate than a manual logger that is abandoned in week two, and the same rule applies to every photo scanner, including the one I work on.
NutriScan asks for food type and cooking method before it estimates, and lets you adjust the portion after. Home > Camera Icon > Crop Picture
How to cancel BitePal
BitePal's cancellation page gives three paths, and which one applies depends on where you paid.
iPhone or iPad (App Store):
- Open the Settings app.
- Tap your name at the top, then Subscriptions.
- Find BitePal in the list.
- Tap Cancel Subscription and confirm.
Android (Google Play):
- Open the Google Play Store app.
- Tap your profile icon, then Payments and subscriptions, then Subscriptions.
- Find BitePal.
- Tap Cancel subscription and follow the steps.
Web purchase:
- Open BitePal and go to Settings.
- Tap Manage Subscription, then Cancel Subscription.
- If the option is missing, email [email protected]. The terms of use say web subscriptions are canceled by email.
One check after you cancel: the help center says that if you cannot find the subscription at all, you may own a lifetime plan, which has nothing to cancel. If you have ever bought on more than one platform, check all three places. BitePal's help page on extra charges lists parallel web and store subscriptions as one of the two usual causes.
Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current period. You keep access until then and are not charged again.
Refunds: 48 hours on the stores, 30 days on the web, one courtesy on renewals
IMPORTANT
Checkpoint: the reveal
⏱️ Progress 3/4 • ~7 minutes in
✅ Steps 1 to 3 done
✨ The one line in BitePal's terms that decides most refund requests (below)
The help center's refund page and section 8 of the terms together set out four cases.
App Store and Google Play purchases. Request through Apple's refund page or Google's refund page within 48 hours. The terms describe this as a full refund "within two (2) calendar days of your initial purchase", after which the purchase is final. BitePal says it has no control over iOS refunds and can only help with Android ones.
Web purchases. A money-back guarantee applies "if you did not get visible results after using our program or if you remain unsatisfied with the results", requested by email within 30 calendar days of the first purchase and before the current period ends.
Renewal charges. A refund is possible if you email within 48 hours of the renewal, your account shows no activity such as logging food after the renewal date, it is your most recent renewal, and you have never received a renewal refund before. The terms call this a "One-Time Courtesy".
When a refund is refused. The terms list four reasons: the request is late, you used the app after the renewal, you simply do not like the product, or "You were not aware of the charge, didn't know the trial would convert to a subscription, or didn't realize that subscriptions renew automatically."
That last line is the one to read twice. The two forum users above describe exactly that, and BitePal's policy does not refund it. Apple and Google apply their own rules to store purchases, so a store request is still worth making, but do not count on BitePal to reverse a forgotten trial.
✅ Step 1: Free download, paid PRO Features, $3.99 a week to $59.99 a year
✅ Step 2: A trial of about 3 days that converts to an annual charge
✅ Step 3: Gamification helps some people, and photo estimates need your correction
✅ The refund line: "didn't know the trial would convert" is a listed reason for refusal (revealed)
Is BitePal Pro worth paying for?
At $23.99 a year, BitePal is one of the cheapest AI photo trackers you can buy, below the $29.99 regular annual plan in the Cal AI pricing guide and under a third of Foodvisor's Premium annual plan at $83.99. At $5.99 a week, it is one of the most expensive. Whether Pro is worth it depends on which price you were shown and how you log.
Pro makes sense if:
- You will log by photo most days and the raccoon keeps you doing it. The gamification research above shows it works for some people and not others; a few days on the free tier tells you which you are.
- You reached the $23.99 or $29.99 annual offer. At that price the app costs about as much as two takeaway lunches a year.
- You will edit the estimates. The accuracy research is clear that photo plus correction beats photo alone.
Skip Pro if:
- The paywall is showing you a weekly price. $311 a year for an entry-level tracker is a poor trade when the same app sells an annual plan from $23.99.
- You want a mature verified food database or micronutrients as the core of your tracking. BitePal's product search is new as of August 2026, and its data comes partly from open datasets that its own terms say may include AI-generated values. The best free AI calorie apps guide lists free alternatives.
- You are likely to forget a 3-day trial. The refund policy will not save you, and a cancel-before-charge routine is the safer habit for every app in this category.
Where NutriScan fits
BitePal starts from the pet and adds a scanner. NutriScan starts from the plate: 5 AI photo scans a week on the free plan, unlimited on Premium at about $59 a year, returning calories, protein, carbs and fat for mixed meals. Before the estimate it asks for food type and cooking method, and after it you can adjust the portion size, which covers the two things a camera misses most.
If the accuracy research above convinced you that the edit step matters more than the mascot, the NutriScan pricing post sets out the free and paid tiers on the same terms as this one, and the AI calorie counter page and meal scan guide show how the scan works. For other apps' refund rules side by side, see the refund rules guide.
NutriScan's trial screen states the period and renewal price before you confirm. Home > Start 7 Days Free Trial
FAQ
Is BitePal free?
Partly. BitePal is free to download on the App Store and Google Play, and you can create an account, set up the raccoon and scan meals. BitePal's terms say certain features are PRO Features that need a paid subscription, and one App Store reviewer reported that editing calorie values was one of them. Most people who call the app free are describing the first few days.
How much does BitePal cost?
On September 24, 2026 the US App Store listed weekly subscriptions at $3.99, $4.99 and $5.99, annual subscriptions at $23.99, $29.99 and $35.99, a $49.99 BitePal Plus Annual plan and a $59.99 annual plan. Google Play lists in-app purchases from $0.99 to $79.99 per item. The price you see depends on the paywall screen you reach, so screenshot it before you confirm.
Does BitePal have a free trial?
Yes, on some paywalls. The App Store listing does not name a trial product, but users on Apple's community forum and the Google Play help community describe a short free trial, 3 days in one case, that converted to an annual charge of 39.99 to 40.99 euros. The trial converts automatically unless you cancel in the store's subscription manager before it ends.
How do I cancel BitePal?
iPhone: Settings, your name, Subscriptions, BitePal, Cancel Subscription. Android: Google Play, profile icon, Payments and subscriptions, Subscriptions, BitePal, Cancel subscription. Web purchase: open BitePal, Settings, Manage Subscription, Cancel Subscription, or email [email protected]. Deleting the app does not cancel the subscription.
Can I get a refund from BitePal?
It depends on where you paid. App Store and Google Play purchases: request within 48 hours through Apple or Google. Web purchases: a money-back guarantee within 30 days of the first payment, requested by email before the current period ends. Renewals: within 48 hours of the charge, only if you did not use the app after the renewal date, and only once per account. Not knowing the trial would convert is listed as a reason a refund will be declined.
If you want to test a photo scanner before you hand over a card, download NutriScan and use your 5 free scans this week on the meals you eat most.
