The short answer#
Lifesum is a large, polished nutrition product — photo, voice, text and barcode logging, recipes, plans, coaching and a claimed 65 million users. If you want the whole apparatus, take it.
The contrast worth drawing is which half of the product each app charges for.
The paywall, drawn two ways#
Every tracker in this category has an engine that computes numbers and a set of conveniences for getting food into it. The two apps split them differently.
Lifesum puts the polish, the plans, the recipes and much of the analysis behind Premium.
SmartCrunch charges for exactly one thing: turning a photo or a sentence into a first estimate of a meal. Everything the engine computes — the budget, the adaptive maintenance, the trend, the forecast, the micronutrients, the entire history — is free, with no daily caps. And the paid feature changes no computed number: the model proposes what a meal was, you correct it before saving, and from the moment it is saved the same engines do the same arithmetic as on the free tier.
That is a deliberate position rather than a pricing accident. The part we think is worth trusting is the part we do not charge for.
Where Lifesum is better#
- Ways to log. Voice, photo and text are all in their product; two of those three are our paid tier.
- Recipes and plans. They supply both; we supply neither. We save the dishes you build yourself, which is a smaller promise and a different one.
- Android and web.
- Coaching and habit framing, which is a real product and not one we offer.
Where SmartCrunch differs#
- The daily number comes from your own weeks, not a profile form — with the thresholds published and a refusal when they are not met.
- No account, no server holding the diary.
- No advertising and no analytics.
- Gaps reported as gaps. Coverage next to every micronutrient total, and no total at all below half.
Price#
Measured on the US App Store on . Lifesum’s list carries several concurrent plans, so this is a range.
| Lifesum | SmartCrunch | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | yes, limited | yes, the whole engine |
| 3 months | ~$29.99–$39.99 | — |
| 12 months | ~$99.99–$119.99 | $49.99 |
| What Premium buys | recipes, plans, deeper tracking, coaching | one feature: photo and sentence estimation |
Which to choose#
Choose Lifesum if you want an app that suggests what to eat and coaches you through it, and the price is not the deciding factor.
Choose SmartCrunch if you want the arithmetic free, the number derived from your own data, and nothing else attached.
Claims about Lifesum were checked against its public pages on and are not warranted to stay current — prices and features change without notice, and the vendor's own site is authoritative. SmartCrunch is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Lifesum; the name is used only to identify the product discussed. Corrections: support@smartcrunch.org.
Read next
- How to count calories without it taking over your life Weigh things, log before you eat, accept that you are under-recording. Precision on the parts that matter beats precision everywhere.
- Why a nutrition app should say “I don’t know” Counting a missing value as zero makes a day of packaged food look cleaner the less you know about it. The fix is to report how much of the day the number covers.