Chowdown vs Cal AI: Free Photo Tracking vs a $30 Subscription

TL;DR

• Cal AI has no free tier. You get a 3-day trial, then the App Store listing shows in-app purchases from $9.99 to $29.99, roughly £8 to £24, with pricing that varies by region and device.
• Chowdown has no premium tier at all, so there is nothing to trial and nothing to cancel.
• On accuracy they are close. Cal AI’s own FAQ puts the app at “about 80% accurate”, which is an honest number and roughly what every photo scanner manages on real food.
• Cal AI is a native app with depth-sensor portion estimation. Chowdown runs in a browser, so there is no install and no app-store account involved.
• The real question is not which scanner is better. It is whether you want your food log behind a renewing subscription.

The Pricing, Stated Plainly

Cal AI runs a 3-day free trial, then charges. The App Store listing for Cal AI Calorie Tracker shows several in-app purchase tiers: $9.99, $19.99 and $29.99, plus a $0.99 “Streak Restore”. Which one you see depends on your region, your device and where you land in their onboarding quiz. Reported annual pricing clusters around $29.99 to $39.99 a year, roughly £24 to £32.

That is not expensive for a year of anything. It is also not free, and the marketing does not make that obvious until you have answered fifteen onboarding questions and taken your first photo.

Chowdown costs £0. Not £0 with a limit of three meals a day, not £0 with ads, not £0 until the feature you need turns out to be premium. There is no paid tier in the product, which means there is no commercial reason to make the free experience annoying. This is the same pattern we cover in why free macro tracking apps aren’t really free: most “free” trackers gate the features you actually need.

The cancellation tax

Cal AI’s own FAQ has a section explaining that you cannot cancel from inside the app, and a warning in bold that deleting the app does not stop the charges. You have to go through Settings on iOS or Google Play on Android.

Every subscription app has this. It is worth naming because it is a real cost of choosing a paid tracker: a trial you forget to cancel is £24 to £32 you did not mean to spend, and the app is designed so that uninstalling does not save you.

Accuracy: Closer Than Either Side’s Marketing Suggests

If you want the mechanics behind why photo scanners get things wrong at all, our explainer on how AI food scanning actually works covers the computer vision side. Cal AI markets itself as “insanely accurate”. Its support FAQ says the app is “about 80% accurate” and that “no food tracking app is perfect”. The second number is the useful one, and it is credible.

Here is what actually determines accuracy in photo tracking, for both apps:

• Single, recognisable foods are handled well by everyone. A chicken breast, a bowl of porridge, a banana. Expect to land within 10-15% of the truth.
• Mixed and homemade dishes are where it falls apart. A curry, a stew, a tray bake. The AI cannot see the 40 g of oil in the pan or the cream stirred in at the end. Errors of 30% or more are normal here, in both apps.
• Density you cannot see is the hard limit. Two plates of rice that look identical can differ by 200 kcal depending on how tightly it is packed.

Cal AI has one genuine technical advantage: it uses the phone’s depth sensor to estimate food volume, which gives it a better shot at portion size than a flat 2D photo. That helps on things like a heaped bowl versus a shallow one. It does not help with hidden fat, which is the bigger error source.

What 80% accuracy actually means for you

If you are 15% out on a 2,400 kcal day, that is 360 kcal, which is enough to stall fat loss. This is why the consistency of your logging matters more than the cleverness of your scanner. A tracker you use every day at 80% accuracy beats one you abandon in week three at 90%.

That framing is the whole argument for a free tool. Accuracy differences between the leading scanners are small. Adherence differences between a free app and one that asks for your card details are not.

Friction: App Store vs Browser

Cal AI is a native iOS and Android app. You download it, sign in with Apple or Google, complete onboarding, and it can talk to Apple Health or Google Fit to pull in your step count. The native install gives it the depth sensor and better camera access.

Chowdown runs in your browser. There is nothing to install, it works the same on a laptop and a phone, and you can start logging in under a minute without going anywhere near an app store. The trade-off is honest: no native app means no depth sensor and no Apple Health sync.

Which matters more depends on you. If you log from your phone in the kitchen and want step data folded in automatically, the native app wins. If you want to start today without installing anything, or you log some meals from a desk at work, the browser wins.

Features That Are Not the Scanner

Both apps scan photos. The differences show up around the edges.

Chowdown includes at no cost:

• Barcode scanning for packaged food, where the label beats any photo estimate
• Fibre tracking alongside protein, carbs and fat, which most trackers skip
• Robin, an AI coach you can ask questions about your own logged data
• Social groups, so you can track alongside friends and see each other’s days

Cal AI includes:

• Photo, barcode and text-description logging
• Depth-sensor portion estimation
• Apple Health and Google Fit integration for steps and activity
• A polished native experience with weekly feature updates

Cal AI’s list is a good paid product. Chowdown’s list is the same category of tool with the price removed and a browser instead of an install.

Who Should Pick Which

Pick Cal AI if: you want a native app, you care about Apple Health syncing your steps into your calorie target, and a £24 to £32 annual subscription is genuinely irrelevant to you. It is a competent product and the depth-sensor volume estimate is a real, if modest, edge.

Pick Chowdown if: you want to start now without an install, you do not want a renewing charge attached to your food diary, or you have been burned before by an app that was free until the moment you needed it. Fibre tracking and barcode scanning being included rather than gated is the practical difference you will feel in week two.

If subscription fatigue is the real issue rather than Cal AI specifically, the same logic applies to our Chowdown vs MyFitnessPal comparison: a free tracker you actually keep using beats a paid one you cancel in month two.

Pick neither if: you are eating mostly homemade food with hidden cooking fat. In that case, weighing ingredients before they go in the pan will beat any photo scanner by a wide margin. See our guide to raw vs cooked weight tracking for how to do it without it taking over your life.

If you want the wider field rather than a head-to-head, our roundup of the best free AI food photo scanner apps in 2026 covers seven of them, including SnapCalorie and FoodVisor.

Try Chowdown free →

Pricing checked September 2026. Subscription apps change their tiers frequently and Cal AI’s pricing is known to vary by region and device, so check the current figure in your own app store before deciding.