Lose It! vs Calsa: Free Basic Plan or Sourced Entries

Lose It! vs Calsa comes down to which features you want to pay for. Lose It! has a Basic plan with calorie tracking, a weight loss plan and a community, but the App Store listing puts the barcode scanner, photo logging and AI voice logging in Premium. Calsa is a subscription with a trial, and the same three features are included in every plan, along with export. The pages I used were all public.

Lose It! vs Calsa: how do they compare in one table?

I write for the blog of Calsa, so I have a stake in this comparison, and the linked pages are there for you to check me. The Lose It! column comes from its App Store listings and help center. I never opened its paid screens. Calsa’s side is limited to what its published feature list says, with no prices.

	Lose It!	Calsa
Price	Premium and a Lifetime purchase, with App Store rows for four countries in the pricing section	Three plans, with price, trial length, first charge date and how to cancel shown before anything else
Free version	Basic: calorie tracking, a weight loss plan and community support	No free version. Trial length and first charge date show before you pay
Trial	Seven days for new users who haven’t tried Premium	Length shown before the first question
Barcode scanner	Premium	Every plan, UK and Australian products included
Photo logging	Premium	Every plan: names the foods, suggests grams, you confirm the portion
Voice	AI voice logging, Premium	Type or say it, every plan
Database	“56+ million items and recipes” in the App Store text	Each entry shows where its calories come from and the math
Fasting and meal planning	Premium	No weekly meal plans; no fasting on Calsa’s public list
AI chat	None found on the pages I read	Every plan, labeled as AI, with memory you can see and delete
Export	Full export from the website, Premium requirement not stated	Everything, on any plan
One-time purchase	Lifetime, non-refundable	None: monthly or yearly only
Cancel	On the platform where you bought it	The way you subscribed, in one tap
Where it runs	iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Android and web	Web, iPhone, iPad and Android, no watch app

The table marks Lose It!’s Premium-only features, and the sections below open each of them.

What does a normal day of logging look like in each app?

In Lose It!

On Basic you search the food database, log meals and exercise, and chart the data. The App Store text lists those under “Lose It! Free Basic Features”, next to a weight loss plan built from your body composition, activity level and habits, and community support through friends and support groups. Packaged food without a scanner means typing a name and picking a match.

Premium changes the input side. It adds Photo Meal Logging, AI voice logging and the barcode scanner. It also adds what the listing calls Advanced Tracking: macronutrients, vitamins, minerals, blood pressure, glucose, cholesterol, body measurements and sleep. Intermittent fasting, meal planning and targets, weight loss diet plans and syncs with fitness apps such as Fitbit, Garmin and Withings come with it.

The sign-up page says a free trial gives access to water tracking, macro tracking, wearable integration and personalized insights. So the trial lets you try the paid side. When it ends, the scanner and photo logging lock again.

In Calsa

Calsa has no tiers for input. Type or say what you ate with grams, and several foods can share one line. Snap a photo and the foods get named with grams suggested, then you confirm the portion. Oil and dressing get a line of their own, so a salad doesn’t hide its dressing.

Scanning covers packaged food, including UK and Australian products. If a barcode has no match, you photograph the nutrition label. Search lets you add several foods at once, with your usual foods for that meal on top. A quick add takes just the calories you type, with no AI involved.

Tap “Copy to today” on any past day to repeat a meal, the whole day or only some foods. Each entry lands in the meal that fits its time. Logging works offline, and your last seven days open offline as well.

Where do the numbers come from?

Lose It!’s App Store text describes a “global food database of 56+ million items and recipes”. That gives a size and no source, and I found no page in my reading that says where a given entry comes from. Size is useful for finding obscure items. It says little about whether the first match is the right one, so compare a few entries with the label.

Each Calsa entry shows the source of its calories and the math, the per-100-gram value times your grams. Amounts you haven’t confirmed are marked “estimate”. Restaurant dishes come with the numbers the chain itself publishes. Spot a wrong shared food and you can report it, and the entry changes after review.

How much does Lose It! cost, and what stays free?

Prices in four countries

I couldn’t open Lose It!’s own membership and pricing article, so I have no website price list. What I have is the App Store. The names below are exactly what each storefront listed, and Apple shows ten purchases per page without a billing period. Which row is monthly, yearly or a discounted renewal can’t be read from the list.

Storefront	“Lose It! Premium Features”	“Lose It! Premium” rows	“Lose It! Premium Lifetime”
United States	$39.99	$9.99, $11.99, $19.99, $23.99, $29.99, $39.99, $79.99	$49.99 and $59.99
United Kingdom	£34.99	£9.99, £11.99, £14.99, £22.99, £29.99, £75.99	£59.99
Canada	$51.99	$13.49, $14.99, $27.99, $29.99, $39.99, $54.99, $107.99	$69.99 and $79.99
Australia	$7.99 and $56.99	$16.49, $24.99, $30.99, $46.99, $62.99, $124.99	$79.99 and $99.99

That’s seven US rows under one name. The support article offers a partial explanation: the Premium help page says Lose It! adjusts prices by season and app use, and that free users can get a discounted annual rate. So the price you see may differ from the ones in my table. Open the purchase sheet in the app and read the period and the renewal date before you pay.

The trial and the lifetime option

The same help page says new users who haven’t tried Premium before can get a 7-day free trial. The trial can be cancelled from the platform where you started it, and on iOS the menu says “Cancel Free Trial”.

Lifetime is a separate purchase, and the cancellation page says lifetime purchases are non-refundable. Calsa has nothing like it. Its plans are monthly or yearly only, and the first period costs the same as the ones after it. A lifetime price can make sense if you’ll use the app for years, but I can’t tell you how long Lose It! will sell it at that price.

Free and paid side by side

Feature	Basic	Premium
Search the food database and recipes	Yes	—
Log meals and exercise, chart the data	Yes	—
Weight loss plan from your details	Yes	—
Community support, friends and groups	Yes	—
Barcode scanner	No	Yes
Photo meal logging, AI voice logging	No	Yes
Macros, vitamins, minerals, blood pressure, glucose, cholesterol, sleep	No	Yes
Intermittent fasting	No	Yes
Meal planning, diet plans	No	Yes
Fitness app syncs	No	Yes

A dash means the App Store listing doesn’t name that feature for Premium. The Basic column comes from the same listing and the sign-up page. I found no help-center table of free versus Premium, so the split is the store’s, not Lose It!’s own chart. The same listing mentions over 25 health goals. It also mentions GLP-1 support, where you log medication and view estimated GLP-1 levels, though it never says which plan holds either.

One more fact matters if you’re thinking of leaving. After you cancel, the account reverts to the free version. Logged foods, weight history, custom recipes and past data stay. Custom goals, nutrient targets, calorie scheduling and customized settings are lost, according to the cancellation page.

Where is Calsa stronger than Lose It!?

The widest gap is what a paid plan includes. A Calsa plan covers the scanner, photo logging and typed or spoken entries, where Lose It! keeps the scanner, photo logging and AI voice logging in Premium. You also get all the tracking in every plan. What changes between plans is the AI chat.

Goals follow the same pattern. Calsa lets any plan give different days different goals and mark a training day with one tap. A short quiz sets your first calorie goal, a goal below the safe floor isn’t saved, and you see why. Units are your choice, kcal or kJ, grams or ounces, kg, lb or stone.

Chat is the third difference. I found no AI chat or coach on the Lose It! pages I opened. Calsa’s chat is in every plan, labeled as AI, and it sees your diary, goal and weight trend. It takes its numbers from the food database. Ask for a recipe that fits what’s left of your day, or fix an entry by typing a correction. What it remembers is yours to see, edit or delete.

Leaving is simpler, too. When a Calsa subscription ends, you can still read, export and delete everything, and your history waits if you return. Cancelling works the way you subscribed, with no screen trying to talk you out of it. Lose It! asks you to cancel where you bought, and its cancellation page warns that deleting the app or the account doesn’t cancel the subscription.

Last, Calsa uses no ad networks, tracking SDKs or pixels, and it has no streaks. Miss a week and the reminders go quiet.

Where is Calsa weaker, and who should stay with Lose It!?

Where Calsa is weaker: Lose It!’s Basic plan covers calorie tracking, a weight loss plan and a community, and Calsa starts with a trial and then a paid plan. Calsa has no social feed, no watch app and no manual workout entry. It has no weekly meal plans and no lifetime purchase. Lose It! lists Fitbit, Garmin and Withings syncs, while Calsa has no direct Garmin or Fitbit link and gets watch data through Apple Health or Health Connect. Lose It! also lists GLP-1 medication logging, which Calsa doesn’t offer: it gives no diagnoses, medication doses or GLP-1 regimens.

Choose something else if you want a calorie tracker with a community at no cost, an Apple Watch app, a fasting timer, meal plans, a medication log or a one-time purchase. Lose It! lists all of those.

Here are some readers I’d send to Lose It!. If you log by search, like friends and support groups, and have no use for a scanner, Basic fits. A Fitbit or Garmin wearer who wants workouts synced without hopping through Apple Health will like the Premium syncs. And someone who’d rather pay once than monitor renewals has the Lifetime purchase.

A different reader suits Calsa. You scan, photograph or dictate most of what you eat, and a locked scanner would be a dealbreaker. You want to see where each number comes from. Perhaps a streak ruined an earlier attempt, and you want an app that lets a bad week pass without a verdict.

If you can’t decide, scan five packaged foods you eat each week in both apps and compare each result with its label. The other checks I’d run work on any tracker, and Lose It vs MyFitnessPal covers a third option.

How do you move from Lose It! to Calsa?

Get your data out first. The export article says the website, loseit.com, offers a full export of account history and data. Weight history can’t be downloaded on its own. Custom-goal data is exported goal by goal, and the article doesn’t say whether any of it needs Premium, so try the export before you cancel. Lose It! itself can’t import data, which only matters if you ever come back.

Then cancel where you bought. On the web, log in at loseit.com, open the Settings gear, then Subscription, then Cancel Auto-Renewal. On iOS it’s Settings, your name, Subscriptions, Lose It!, then Cancel Subscription or Cancel Free Trial. On Google Play, use your profile icon, Payments and subscriptions, Subscriptions, Lose It!. Deleting the app doesn’t cancel anything.

Write down your custom goals and nutrient targets before the plan ends, because the cancellation page says they’re lost when the account reverts. Past entries and weight history stay. A Lifetime purchase has no renewal to cancel, and the page says it can’t be refunded.

Importing a CSV into Calsa shows a preview first, so nothing is saved until you’ve checked it. I haven’t opened a Lose It! export, so I can’t say what the preview will read from it. Try it on your real file. More comparisons are on the choosing a calorie app page, and the Lose It! app article covers its plans on their own.

Run both apps for a week on the same meals before you cancel anything.