Health, home and travel decision
FitCal
A capable developer can build a useful calorie tracker and diary (photo/voice/text logging) using open-source prior art and third-party model APIs, but reproducing FitCal's full paid product—AI coach, community, and polished iOS features—would require more effort and data than a small DIY replacement reasonably provides.
Visit website↗Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All FitCal alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Capture a meal (photo / voice / text) → run inference to identify foods and portions → calculate calories/macros → save entry in a diary → show daily progress.
What it still won’t have
- AI Coach that answers based on your diary
- Public community groups and streak leaderboard
- Built-in Live Activity and polished App Store UX
- Any proprietary/undisclosed training data or models used by the vendor
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
No published price
FitCal does not publish a price we could read, so there is nothing to compare against. What building costs is below.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal iPhone calorie-tracking app in SwiftUI with a small backend (FastAPI + Postgres) hosted on a single VPS. In scope: (1) iOS SwiftUI app with camera/photo upload, voice dictation input, and text entry; (2) user profile and daily calorie/macro targets; (3) food database (Postgres) with create/search/edit and barcode-scanning import; (4) integration with an external inference API for image-to-food and text/voice parsing; (5) saving meals to a diary, viewing daily totals, and exporting a PDF report for a selected date range; (6) Apple Health weight/water sync and a Today widget. Out of scope: social/community features, leaderboard, commercial subscription handling, and training custom ML models. Require: error handling on network/API failures, unit tests for backend endpoints, basic end-to-end UI tests for core diary flows, and documentation for deployment (Dockerfiles, systemd/unit, and migration steps).
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 2 cited sources+1
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Evidence score62
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 2
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productFitCal: Calorie Counter - App Store
- open sourcesimonoppowa/OpenNutriTracker
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
