Is CalNote Free? CalNote Pricing and Trial Explained
ChatGPT 
Claude 
AI Mode 
Perplexity 
CalNote is free to download, but its App Store listing carries ten separate in-app purchases running from $3.19 a week to $69.99 a year, and the developer says plainly on the company blog that the app "doesn't currently offer a permanent free tier." So the honest answer to "is CalNote free" is: for three days, yes. After that, no.
There is a second complication. Two different calorie trackers are shipping under the name CalNote right now, from two different developers, on two different platforms, with two different business models. One is a subscription. The other charges once. If you have read conflicting answers about CalNote pricing, that is why.
As a nutritionist on the NutriScan team, I read pricing pages for a living, and this one took longer than most. Everything below comes from the App Store listing, the two CalNote websites and the developer's own blog, checked on 10 September 2026.
TL;DR - CalNote pricing at a glance
• Is CalNote free? No. Free download, 3-day trial, then a subscription. The developer confirms there is no free-forever plan.
• What it costs: $3.19 or $3.99 a week, $7.99 to $12.99 a month, $39.99 to $69.99 a year. Ten purchases sit on one listing, and the paywall decides which you see.
• The Android CalNote is a different app. 20 free meal estimates, then a one-time payment with no subscription. The amount is not published.
• Trial length: 3 days, the shortest in the category alongside Cal AI and Fitia. MyFitnessPal, Lose It and YAZIO run 7, Fastic runs 14.
• Price note: US App Store figures, verified 10 September 2026. They change by country and by whichever price test you land in.
• The 30-second check that shows your real price before you subscribe: revealed near the end. Keep reading.
IMPORTANT
Your CalNote pricing plan at a glance.
A quick roadmap so you can act fast.
⏱️ Progress 0/4 • ~0 minutes in • Keep going
⏳ Step 1: Work out which CalNote you are looking at
⏳ Step 2: Read every price on the listing and learn why there are ten
⏳ Step 3: Judge the trial, the free version, the accuracy and the rivals
🔍 The 30-second check that tells you your real price before you tap Subscribe (revealed near the end)
The short answer
The CalNote most people mean is Calorie Tracker: CalNote, published by Ogan Kurtulus, App Store id 6756247925. It is iPhone and iPad only, rated 4.7 from 15 ratings, and it runs on a subscription with a 3-day free trial. There is no free tier underneath the trial.
The other CalNote lives at mycalnote.com and is Android only. Its own FAQ says: the app is "free on Android," gives you 20 meal estimates to try it out, and after that "a one-time payment unlocks unlimited logging. No subscription."
Same product name, opposite pricing model. Check which store you are downloading from before you decide what CalNote costs.
The Android CalNote charges once, not monthly
The Android app at mycalnote.com answers the same question differently. Its FAQ gives you 20 free meal estimates, then a one-time payment for unlimited logging, with no subscription. The site also states the app is Android only and that iOS is "coming."
Two caveats before you go looking for it. First, the developer never publishes the amount of that one-time payment anywhere on the site, so you find out at the checkout sheet. Second, the two CalNotes are not the same codebase, the same company or the same feature set: the Android one is text-first with a per-meal confidence score, while the iOS one adds photo scanning and restaurant menu scanning.
If a one-time unlock is the reason you are interested, confirm you are on the Play Store listing and not the App Store one.
IMPORTANT
Checkpoint: here's where you are right now.
Quick status update so you always know the next best move.
⏱️ Progress 1/4 • ~2 minutes in • Keep going
✅ Step 1: Which CalNote you are looking at (done)
👉 Step 2: Every price on the listing, and why there are ten (you're here)
⏳ Step 3: Trial, free version, accuracy and rivals
🧩 The 30-second real-price check (coming soon)
Every CalNote price on the App Store listing
Apple publishes the full in-app purchase list on every product page, and CalNote's is unusually long. As of 10 September 2026 the listing shows ten purchases:
| In-app purchase name | Price |
|---|---|
| CalNote Weekly Subscription | $3.19 |
| CalNote Pro Weekly | $3.99 |
| CalNote Pro Weekly | $3.99 |
| CalNote Pro Monthly | $7.99 |
| CalNote Pro Monthly | $9.99 |
| CalNote Pro Monthly | $12.99 |
| CalNote Yearly Subscription | $39.99 |
| CalNote Yearly Pro | $49.99 |
| CalNote Pro Yearly | $59.99 |
| CalNote Pro Annual | $69.99 |
Four annual prices, three monthly prices, two weekly prices, with one of the weekly products listed twice. The written description on the same listing quotes a single figure, "PREMIUM: $9.99/month", which sits in the middle of the monthly range and matches none of the annual options.
Figure 1: Four annual products for one app. The most expensive costs 75 percent more than the cheapest, and the listing gives no rule for who sees which.
Why one app shows ten different prices
This is not a bug and it is not a scam. Apple lets a developer create multiple products at different price points and decide in code which paywall each user sees. Small studios use it to run price tests: half the new installs see $39.99 a year, half see $59.99, and whichever converts better becomes the default.
Two things follow from that, and both cost real money:
- The price you see is not the price your friend sees. A 75 percent spread between the cheapest annual plan ($39.99) and the most expensive ($69.99) is one of the widest we have found on a single calorie app listing.
- Retail comparisons are unreliable. Any roundup that lists one CalNote annual price is quoting the paywall its writer happened to be served.
The listing changes between visits
When we first pulled this listing on 27 August 2026 it carried a fifth annual product at $47.99. By 10 September that product had gone and a second $3.99 weekly product had appeared in its place. Treat any CalNote price you read, including ours, as a snapshot.
Four annual prices for the same app will do that to a person.
If you want to know what you will actually pay, open the paywall inside the app and read the number there, then check it again on the App Store subscription confirmation screen before you tap Subscribe. There is a slightly faster version of that check, and it is the reveal at the end of this piece.
IMPORTANT
Checkpoint: midway progress update.
You're halfway - decisions get easier here.
⏱️ Progress 2/4 • ~4 minutes in • Keep going
✅ Step 1: Which CalNote you are looking at (done)
✅ Step 2: Every price on the listing (done)
👉 Step 3: Trial, free version, accuracy and rivals (current)
⏳ The 30-second real-price check (next)
What the 3-day free trial covers
The trial arrived in version 1.7.0 in January 2026, described in the release notes as "NEW: 3-Day Free Trial. Experience the full power of CalNote with our new 3-day trial."
Three days is short. Every other app in this category gives you longer: Cal AI and Fitia also run 3-day trials, but MyFitnessPal, Lose It and YAZIO all run 7 days, and Fastic runs 14. Three days covers about one normal weekday and one weekend day before you have to decide.
A three-day trial leaves one useful day to test the app and one to decide. Circle the second day before you start.
That matters more than it sounds, because three days is not enough time to find out whether you will keep logging. A 2024 JMIR meta-analysis pooling 18 studies and 525,824 participants found that roughly 70% of people stop using a health app within its first 100 days (Kidman et al., 2024). The trial ends long before the point where most people quit.
What you get without paying
Almost nothing that lasts. The App Store description assigns the whole feature list to Premium: unlimited AI camera and menu scans, unlimited entries, next-meal AI recommendations, advanced insights and weekly reports, full meal history, weight progress tracking and Apple Health integration.
Reading that list against the free download, there is no documented free allowance for photo scans, text logging or history. The developer's own writing is the clearest confirmation available, and it appears in an unexpected place: a CalNote blog post about free calorie trackers, where the founder excludes his own app from the list and explains why.
"Disclosure: I built CalNote. It's not included above because it doesn't currently offer a permanent free tier, it's a paid subscription with a 3-day trial, not a free-forever plan." (CalNote blog, August 2026)
That is a rare thing to publish about your own product, and it settles the question better than any third-party review.
How reliable are the calorie numbers?
Both CalNote sites quote accuracy figures. The iOS FAQ says the AI is "around 90%" accurate for common foods. The Android FAQ says every meal carries a confidence score "usually 90% or higher."
A confidence score is the model's own estimate of certainty, which is not the same as measured accuracy against a weighed reference. Independent testing puts the real range much wider. A 2024 Nutrients review of AI food recognition across apps found accuracy running from 46% to 97% depending on the app, and named mixed dishes as the weak point that needs better training (Li et al., 2024). A separate 2025 evaluation of large language models estimating nutrients from meal photographs recorded a 26.9 percent mean absolute error, with agreement against dietitians ranging from an intraclass correlation of 0.31 to 0.67 (O'Hara et al., 2025).
CalNote's own model is not in either study, so neither result is a verdict on this app. What they do establish is that "around 90%" is at the optimistic end of what published testing has found for photo and text estimation, and that a curry or a casserole is where the number slips. Both CalNote versions let you correct the grams after the estimate, which is the feature that matters most here.
Does paying for it help you lose weight?
The research is fairly consistent that logging works when you keep doing it, and that the app you choose matters less than whether you open it.
Consistent self-monitoring is associated with greater odds of losing 5 percent or more of starting body weight within 6 months (Burke et al., 2025, Obesity), and a 2022 systematic review found dietary self-monitoring associated with short-term weight loss (Payne et al., 2022). The benefit fades when people disengage after about six months (Pujia et al., 2025), and a 2026 JMIR mHealth review found logging frequency in mainstream trackers falling steeply, with MyFitnessPal and Lose It users dropping to about 4 days a week by week 12 (Dugas et al., JMIR mHealth 2026).
CalNote's pitch targets that friction directly. Typing "half big mac, small fries" is faster than searching a database and picking between a screen of near-identical entries. A 2025 review found perceived usefulness and ease of use were the strongest predictors of continued engagement with health apps (Mohd et al., 2025), which is the argument for paying for a faster logger rather than tolerating a free slow one.
Whether it is worth $59.99 a year is a different question, and it depends entirely on whether you were going to log at all.
How CalNote's price compares
Annual prices for the apps people usually weigh against it, US pricing in 2026:
| App | Annual price | Free tier |
|---|---|---|
| CalNote (iOS) | $39.99 to $69.99 depending on offer | None, 3-day trial only |
| Cal AI | $29.99 | None, trial only |
| MyFitnessPal Premium | $79.99 | Manual logging, no barcode |
| Cronometer Gold | $59.99 | Basic, free forever, ads |
| MyNetDiary Premium | $59.99 | Barcode and macros, no ads |
| FatSecret Premium | Varies by country | Nearly everything free |
Figure 2: CalNote is the only app on this list that appears twice. Where it lands depends on which paywall you are served.
CalNote's cheapest annual offer undercuts most of this list. Its most expensive one costs $10 more than Cronometer Gold and only $10 less than MyFitnessPal Premium. That is the practical problem with an unpublished price ladder. You cannot tell in advance which price you will be offered.
If a permanent free tier is your requirement rather than a cheap paid one, the apps that still have one are covered in our best free AI calorie tracking apps roundup. NutriScan sits in that group with 5 free photo meal scans a week before Premium, and unlimited scanning on Premium at about $59 a year. Every scan, free or paid, returns the full macro breakdown and a NutriScore for the meal.
Third-party pricing pages are guessing
One more reason to read the App Store listing yourself. A CalNote review page published on 26 August 2026 by the AI directory Stork.ai lists exactly one pricing plan, "Free Trial", and states in its cons section that "specific pricing details for paid tiers are not transparently published on the main website." The same page then confuses CalNote with CalcNote, an unrelated notepad calculator app, describing spreadsheet variables as a CalNote feature.
Ten seconds on Apple's In-App Purchases block beats ten minutes on a review site that has never opened the app.
The pricing detail those directories cannot find is sitting in the In-App Purchases block of Apple's own product page, which is public and takes ten seconds to read. Any time an app's marketing site skips a pricing page, that block is where the real numbers are.
How to cancel before you get charged
CalNote's subscription is billed by Apple, so cancelling inside the app does nothing. Use the system route:
- Open Settings on your iPhone and tap your name at the top.
- Tap Subscriptions.
- Select CalNote.
- Tap Cancel Subscription and confirm.
Do this at least 24 hours before the 3-day trial ends, because Apple processes renewals up to a day early. Cancelling does not end the trial immediately: you keep access until the original end date, then it stops. If a charge has already gone through and you want it reversed, request a refund at reportaproblem.apple.com, where Apple reviews each request individually rather than applying a blanket policy.
Day two of the trial is the cancel-or-keep day. Write it down somewhere you will see it.
Set the reminder before you start the trial
Put "decide on CalNote" in your calendar for the morning of day two, not day three. A three-day window plus a 24-hour early renewal leaves no margin for forgetting, and Apple's Subscriptions screen shows the exact renewal date so you can check the reminder against it.
Who CalNote actually fits
Worth the money if you have quit two or three trackers already because searching a food database is the part you hate, you eat out often enough that menu scanning saves you real guesswork, and you are on iPhone. The natural-language logging is the genuine differentiator, and the reviews that mention it say the same thing: it is the first tracker they stuck with.
Skip it if you need a free tier, if you are on Android and expecting the iOS feature set, if you track micronutrients rather than the four headline numbers, or if you want to know your renewal price before you install. On the last point, an app with one published price is easier to plan around than one with four.
IMPORTANT
Checkpoint: final stretch before the reveal.
One last nudge - the reveal is next.
⏱️ Progress 3/4 • ~7 minutes in • Keep going
✅ Step 1: Which CalNote you are looking at
✅ Step 2: Every price on the listing
✅ Step 3: Trial, free version, accuracy and rivals
✨ The 30-second real-price check (about to reveal)
Frequently asked questions
Is CalNote free? No. It is free to download and includes a 3-day free trial, but there is no permanent free tier. The developer states this on the CalNote blog. After the trial, a subscription is required, priced between $3.19 a week and $69.99 a year depending on the offer you are shown.
How much does CalNote cost per month? The App Store listing carries three monthly prices for the same app: $7.99, $9.99 and $12.99. The app description quotes $9.99 a month. Which one appears depends on the price test running when you reach the paywall.
Is there a CalNote you pay for once? Yes, but it is a different app by a different developer. The Android tracker at mycalnote.com gives you 20 free meal estimates, then asks for a single payment for unlimited logging. The amount is not published on the site.
Does CalNote work on Android? The iOS CalNote does not. Its own FAQ says the app is iOS only. The Android app of the same name is a separate product with its own pricing and a smaller feature set, with no photo or menu scanning documented.
How accurate is CalNote? Both CalNote sites claim around 90%. Independent reviews of AI food recognition report accuracy from 46% to 97% across apps (Li et al., 2024), with mixed dishes the weakest case. Treat the estimate as a starting point and correct the grams when a meal looks off.
Can I get a refund after the trial charges me? Apple handles CalNote refunds, not the developer. Submit the request at reportaproblem.apple.com within 90 days of the charge. Billing reasons, such as an unintended renewal, are handled more consistently than dissatisfaction with accuracy.
Does CalNote sync with Apple Health? Yes, on the paid iOS plan. Apple Health integration is listed as a Premium feature in the App Store description and arrived in version 1.7.0 alongside the trial.
The 30-second check that tells you your real price ✨
Here is the check the rest of this piece has been building toward, and it works for any subscription app with an unpublished price ladder, not only CalNote.
- Install the app and start the trial when the paywall appears. Do not tap Subscribe yet.
- Immediately open iPhone Settings ➡️ your name ➡️ Subscriptions ➡️ CalNote.
- Read two lines on that screen: the renewal date and the renewal price. That price is the one Apple will charge you, whatever the marketing copy or a review site says.
That screen is the only place where your personal test group is written down in plain numbers. If it shows $69.99 and you know a $39.99 product exists on the same listing, you have your answer: cancel from that same screen, wait for the trial to lapse, and reinstall later or pick a rival with one published price. If it shows $39.99, you are on the cheapest annual offer this app sells.
CalNote's pricing question has a clean answer and a messy one. The clean answer: the app is not free, the developer says so himself, and the trial is three days. The messy answer: what you will pay is one of four annual prices, and the only reliable way to learn which is the Subscriptions screen above.
Check the App Store in-app purchase list before you install, take the trial on a day you will actually cook and eat out, and set the cancellation reminder for day two. Prices in this piece are US App Store figures verified on 10 September 2026 and will differ by country and by whichever test you are placed in.
IMPORTANT
Recap: everything you completed this round.
You finished the run - save this for next time.
⏱️ Progress 4/4 • ~9 minutes in • Nicely done
✅ Step 1: Two apps share the name; the iOS one is the subscription
✅ Step 2: Ten purchases, four annual prices, none published on the website
✅ Step 3: 3-day trial, no lasting free features, accuracy claims run optimistic
✅ The 30-second check: Settings ➡️ Subscriptions ➡️ CalNote shows your real renewal price (revealed)
If you would rather see the price before you see the paywall, download NutriScan and use your 5 free scans this week on the meals you most want to get right.
