I built a free AI nutrition tracker as a solo dev — here's what I learned

G K — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 06:24:09 +0000

What I built
goNutriTrack is a free multilingual PWA nutrition tracker. The idea was simple: make meal logging so fast that people actually stick with it.
You can log meals by:

📸 Photo — Claude Vision identifies ingredients automatically
🎤 Voice — say "200g chicken and rice", AI parses it
📷 Barcode scan — OpenFoodFacts database
🔍 Text search — OpenFoodFacts + USDA

Plus: AI Coach, workout tracking, weight tracking, water tracking, PDF export. Works in 5 languages (Greek, English, German, French, Spanish).
The stack

Frontend: React + Vite PWA
Backend: Cloudflare Workers (proxy for Anthropic API)
Database: Supabase
AI: Anthropic Claude (Vision + Haiku for voice parsing)
Hosting: Cloudflare Pages

No server, no Docker, no DevOps. Everything serverless.
Technical challenges

iOS PWA white screen The hardest bug. When users add the app to Home Screen on iOS, sometimes it opens to a blank white page. The fix was switching the Service Worker navigation handler from network-first to cache-first (stale-while-revalidate), so iOS always has something to show immediately.
Offline queue Supabase calls fail when offline. I built a localStorage queue that stores pending inserts/deletes and syncs automatically when the connection returns — without the user noticing anything.
Vite + PWA build pipeline The Service Worker cache name needs to change on every deploy to force updates. I wrote a Vite plugin that patches the SW file during config() (not buildStart) to avoid race conditions with vite-plugin-pwa.
AI meal recognition accuracy Claude Vision is good but not perfect. The solution was making every recognized item editable before saving — users can adjust portions and correct names. This turned a potential frustration into a feature. What I learned Ship early. I spent weeks polishing before showing anyone. The first real users found issues in 10 minutes that I had missed for months. PWA on iOS is still painful. Safe area insets, white screens, push notifications not working — Apple makes this hard on purpose. Solo means every decision is yours. That's both the best and worst part. What's next Looking for honest feedback — especially on the AI logging accuracy and anything that feels broken. Try it free: gonutritrack.com

DEV Community: G K

I built a free AI nutrition tracker as a solo dev — here's what I learned