The short answer#
Lose It! has been doing this since 2008 and does it well: complete your profile, get a personalised calorie budget and a weight-loss schedule, then log food, exercise, macros and progress in one place. It has a substantial free tier, a community, challenges and intermittent fasting.
The difference worth caring about is where the budget comes from. Lose It! calculates yours from your profile. SmartCrunch treats a profile-based figure as the fallback and prefers to work out your actual maintenance from what you logged against where your weight actually went.
What that difference means in practice#
A profile-derived budget is set in the first minute and does not update itself, because nothing in it was measured. If the underlying estimate was 300 kcal off — which is ordinary, given how wide the error on an activity multiplier is — you will find out slowly, from the scale, and you will have to correct it by hand.
SmartCrunch runs the correction as arithmetic. Once you have enough logged days and a long enough run of weigh-ins, it solves for the maintenance figure that explains both series, and it publishes the four conditions that all have to hold before it will. When they do not hold, it falls back and says which rung it fell to.
Where Lose It! is better#
- Platforms. Android and web; we are iPhone only.
- Community and challenges. Ours has no social layer at all, by design.
- Exercise logging and net calories. We deliberately do not let activity appear as a bonus to spend.
- Intermittent fasting. Not in SmartCrunch.
- Database size, particularly restaurants.
Where SmartCrunch differs#
- No account, and the diary stays on your phone rather than on a server.
- No advertising, no analytics.
- The free tier is the entire engine — no daily caps, no locked history. The paid tier is one feature that changes no computed number.
- Four micronutrients with coverage shown next to them rather than totals that quietly count missing data as zero.
Price#
Measured on the US App Store on . Lose It!‘s in-app list shows a wide spread of current and legacy items — seven different prices carry the name “Premium” — so this is a range, not a quote.
| Lose It! | SmartCrunch | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | yes | yes, no caps |
| Annual | ~$39.99 (range $19.99–$79.99 listed) | $49.99 |
| Lifetime | ~$49.99–$59.99 listed | not offered |
| What Premium buys | macros, extra goals, meal planning, no ads | one feature: photo and sentence estimation |
Which to choose#
Choose Lose It! if you want the wider product — other platforms, a community, exercise logging, fasting — and are comfortable with a budget you will adjust yourself.
Choose SmartCrunch if you want the budget to keep correcting itself from your own data, on one screen, without an account.
Claims about Lose It! 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 Lose It!; the name is used only to identify the product discussed. Corrections: support@smartcrunch.org.
Read next
- Maintenance calories, explained Maintenance is the intake at which your weight holds. Every calculator predicts it from a population; your own logged weeks can measure it instead.
- How often should you weigh yourself? Daily weighing gives the best signal and the worst individual readings. The fix is arithmetic, not willpower: read the average, never the morning.