A food app with no calorie counting.
The short answer
Is there a food app that doesn’t count calories?
Yes. Just Add is a meal builder rather than a tracker: you say what you are eating and it hands back a whole plate — your own food, plus one or two things that make it more filling. There is nothing to log, no calories, macros or scores anywhere in it, and it can only ever suggest adding.
Why can’t a tracker just hide the numbers?
Because the number is the product. A tracker exists to compare what you ate against a target, and every screen in it — the daily total, the ring, the weekly graph — is a way of telling you how that comparison went. Hiding the figure does not remove the comparison; it just makes it harder to argue with.
Just Add is built the other way round. It has no target, so there is nothing to compare you to. It has no history of what you ate, so there is nothing to accumulate. And it can only add, so there is no version of an answer here that reads as “you should have had less of that”.
That is a structural difference rather than a gentler tone. A friendly tracker is still counting; this simply is not a counter.
So what do you get instead?
One question, answered properly, in about a second. Then it gets out of the way.
A named plate, not a verdict on what you ate
Every answer is a meal with your own food in it — “pesto pasta with a fried egg and a handful of spinach” — and a line for each addition saying both what it brings and why you will enjoy eating it. How many items you get comes from the dish, not from a setting.
One box, three ways in, nothing to fill out
Type it, say it out loud, or photograph the plate. Speech is transcribed on your phone and never leaves it. Photos go straight to the model and are dropped — no bucket, no disk, no history of your dinners.
Change your mind as often as you like
Swap any part of the plate for free, or say what you want in your own words. Every version is kept and named by what changed, so going back to the one you preferred never destroys anything.
It can cook for the whole table
Add the people you feed and their allergies, and one plate clears all of them. The mental load of remembering who can eat what is the part that actually wears people out, and it is the part this takes.
Here’s what rounds it out —
Pesto pasta with a fried egg and wilted spinach
The egg goes glossy over the top and the spinach wilts down to almost nothing.
Four things it will never do to you
It can only ever add. Subtraction is not switched off — it was never built.
You will never see a number. No calories, no macros, no servings, no score, no day you can fail.
Allergens are a hard line. Not a preference, not a weighting, not a judgement call left to a model. Anything you cannot eat is filtered out before a suggestion is written, and every finished answer is read again before you see it.
It knows when not to answer. If what you type suggests you are struggling, it stops being a food app: a warm message and real professional resources come back instead of a meal.
These are not promises in a manifesto. They are enforced in code, they have tests, and any one of them breaking stops a release.
Is it safe if food has been hard for you?
That question is the reason the app is shaped like this. In 2023 a US eating-disorder charity took down its own chatbot days after announcing it would stand in for a human helpline, because of the advice it turned out to be giving. Independent testing across six AI platforms that same year found roughly a third to two fifths of responses contained harmful restriction or body-image content. Asking a model nicely is documented to be insufficient.
So nothing here depends on the model behaving. Anything you tell us you cannot eat is removed before a suggestion is generated. Every finished answer is scanned again — for your allergens, for diet-culture vocabulary, for health claims, for anything that quantifies what you ate — and an answer that fails is regenerated and then declined. It is never quietly edited into shape.
And if the words you type suggest restriction or distress, the food question is not answered at all. That check runs to completion before anything about a meal is generated, on the first message and on every one after it.
Just Add is a meal builder, not a clinician. No diagnoses, no meal plans, no treatment claims — and never a word about your weight.
Questions about counting, and not counting
The ones people ask before they trust another food app.
No, and it cannot become one. There are no calories, macros, grams, servings, percentages, points or scores anywhere in the app — not in the answer, not in a settings screen, not in a weekly summary. The only amounts you will ever meet are cooking amounts in a recipe, like a cup of rice or two tablespoons of oil.
Nothing. There is no diary, no daily total and no streak to keep up. You ask a question on the evenings you have one, the app answers it, and nothing accumulates in the background while you are not looking. Missing a day is not a state the app can be in.
It cannot. There is no code path for removal, reduction, portion shrinking or swapping something for a version the app prefers — the system only ever proposes adding. If you ask it directly to make a meal lighter, it says so warmly and offers to make the meal more filling instead.
Never. Setup asks four things — your allergies, your dietary pattern, foods you love and foods to skip — and every one of them is framed as “so I never suggest something that doesn't fit”. Nothing about weight, body or goals is asked at setup or afterwards, and there is no diagnosis field.
It works from a simple, well-established idea: a meal that brings protein, fibre and healthy fat together tends to hold you for longer than one that brings only one of them. What counts as a good source of protein or fibre uses the same official thresholds printed on food packaging, so a dietitian can check the reasoning. It is a sound rule of thumb and it is not dressed up as more than that.
A model that knows food, working from what you said and what you told us about yourself — so it can name labneh or a decent Red Leicester rather than picking from a short list somebody typed up once. What keeps that safe is the check afterwards: every finished answer is re-read for your allergens, for banned language and for anything that sounds like a health claim, and an answer that fails is regenerated and then refused. It is never edited into shape.
A real daily allowance of meals is free forever, with every way in and every situation included. A subscription covers unlimited checks, your saved plates and the memory that makes suggestions personal. What is paid for is convenience and memory, never access to a decent dinner.
Dinner, sorted in about a second
Out now on iPhone, and free forever for a real daily allowance of meals, every way in and every situation — nobody is ever locked out of working out what to have tonight.