Frequently asked questions

Yes. BareVue is free to use. That includes features other apps often lock behind a subscription: recipe importing, barcode scanning, full micronutrient tracking, adaptive TDEE, and much more.

The tradeoff that keeps this sustainable is simple: you can choose to watch one ad to unlock a feature for an hour. Your first week is completely ad-free. After that, you decide when to watch an ad and for which features. They are never forced on you, and the essentials of logging your food are never put behind one.

Any subscription removes ads everywhere, unlocks premium themes, and lets you turn on cloud sync across your devices so you never lose your data. The plans differ only in how many people they cover, and every profile supports ages 2 and up.

• Solo covers one profile.
• Duo covers two profiles under a single account.
• Family covers up to six: two profiles for any age, plus four for children under 18.

Whether you're tracking for a partner, your children, or just yourself, BareVue gives you the flexibility to make sure the people you care about get the nutrition they need.

TDEE is the total number of calories your body burns in a day. It's the foundation everything else sits on: if your calorie target is wrong, every goal built on it is wrong too. Most apps estimate yours with a single population-average formula, Mifflin-St Jeor, and never revisit it, which can miss an individual by hundreds of calories.

BareVue treats it as something to get right. It starts with a more accurate formula than that one (the Henry/Oxford equation, or Katch-McArdle if you know your body-fat percentage). But every formula is still a guess, so once you've logged enough, BareVue calculates your real maintenance from what you actually ate and how your weight actually moved.

Your nutrient needs genuinely differ by who you are. A teenager, a pregnant woman in her second trimester, and a 60-year-old man all need different things, so handing everyone one set of "daily values" is wrong for almost everyone.

There's no single world standard for nutrition. Health authorities in different regions set their own recommendations from their own research. BareVue carries the official guidance from the US and Canada, Europe, the Nordic countries, Australia and New Zealand, Korea, and Japan, to give you options that are more suited to you. Most apps only use US numbers, which leaves everyone else with targets that were never meant for them.

Watches and rings are good at heart rate and step counts, but calorie burn is different: the device can't measure it, only estimate it. Most apps take that number and add it straight to your daily food budget, which works against your goals.

BareVue won't do that. Your calorie target (which includes your physical activity level) comes from your measured TDEE, which is far more reliable than anything a wrist sensor or simple formula can estimate.

AI photo logging looks impressive because it can accurately identify visible foods. But accurately identifying food is not the same as accurately logging it.

A photo cannot accurately determine a meal's weight, exact portion, full recipe, or how much was actually eaten. It also cannot see cooking oil, butter, sauces, dressings, added sugar, or other ingredients hidden inside the food. Those missing details can substantially change both calories and nutrients.

The numbers photo logging gives you are estimates built on information the image cannot capture. That is not an accurate record of what you consumed. Treating it as one can work directly against your goals, and BareVue will not pretend a guess is accurate.

Whole and generic foods come from official government food composition databases, the same authoritative tables that dietitians and researchers use, covering more than a dozen countries. That accuracy flows through everything: your nutrient targets and the insight BareVue gives you into what your diet is actually providing are built on a foundation you can trust.

Packaged and barcoded products come from a few sources: a curated set of brand-name foods, the US National Institutes of Health database for supplements, and Open Food Facts, a large open project that catalogs products from around the world.

The tricky part with packaged food is that labels change often and vary by region, so even a good barcode database can fall behind the product in your hand. That's why BareVue lets you snap a photo of the actual label and build a custom item to log in seconds. No more mismatch between the label in front of you and what lands in your log.

Yes. BareVue doesn't sell your data, and that promise isn't just words: it's built into how the app pays for itself. The free version runs on non-tracking ads, so nothing is tracking you across the internet or building a profile to target you. The business doesn't depend on watching you, so it doesn't.

Where your data lives matters just as much. By default, everything you log stays on your device, not on BareVue's servers. Backing it up and syncing across devices is an opt-in option for subscribers, and it stays private to your account. And your data is always yours: anyone can export everything they've logged whenever they want, at no cost.

By default, the full history of everything you track in BareVue lives only on the device you use to log it. That keeps your data private, and helps to keep the app free, but it also means your data is only as safe as that device. If your phone is lost, broken, or replaced without a backup, that history can go with it. BareVue would rather be upfront about that than pretend it can't happen.

BareVue gives you ways to protect it. You can export a full backup whenever you want, at no cost, and the app reminds you to do it rather than leaving you to remember. Subscribers can turn on cloud sync, which keeps everything backed up and up to date across their devices automatically, so switching devices is as easy as signing in.