I built a calorie tracker. It's called ForkCount. It's free. There's no card, no trial, no "start your 7-day free trial" wall, and no premium tier hiding the barcode scanner behind $12.99/month.
I'm 13. I can't write JavaScript from memory. I built it using Google AI Studio — describing what I wanted, testing what came back, fixing what broke. Two weeks of debugging. It's live now.
What it does
Shows you the math. Most apps give you a number. ForkCount gives you the number and the formula behind it — your BMR, your TDEE, your activity multiplier, your goal adjustment. Every step is visible. If you want to know why your target is 1,400 and not 2,000, the app tells you.
Calculates from your body, not an average. Mifflin-St Jeor for BMR, Katch-McArdle if you know your body fat percentage. Then activity level, then goal. The target is yours, not a default.
Logs food by typing. "200g chicken and 150g rice" parses to two items with macros. No searching a database for each ingredient. Type it, log it.
Weekly meal plans that use your target. Not a generic 2000 kcal plan. Your calorie target. Your dietary preference. If you're vegetarian, the plan is vegetarian.
Tracks water, weight, and exercise. Water in glasses, weight in trends, exercise with kcal burned.
Runs in your phone browser. No download. No app store. Open the link, sign up, done.
What it doesn't do
- No food photo scan (in progress)
- No barcode scanner (removed after it kept misfiring — it's coming back when it works)
- No Apple Health / Google Fit sync
- No verified nutrition data for anything not in the built-in list
- No premium tier, because there's no business model. It's just free.
Why I built it
Every calorie app I tried wanted a card before it showed me anything useful. The math was always hidden. The target was always a black box. The "free" version was always a trial, or an ad-supported version of a paid app, or a version that locked the one feature you actually needed behind a subscription.
So I built one that doesn't do that. The math is visible. The target is yours. The app is free.
Why I'm posting
I want to know if the calorie math is right. If you've tracked long enough to know your real TDEE, run the onboarding and compare. If the number ForkCount gives you is off by more than 100 kcal, tell me how and I'll fix it. If it's right, tell me that too — I need to know the calculator works before I trust it.
I also want to know what's missing. What feature do you use in MyFitnessPal that you can't live without? What would make you switch? Not "add every feature" — what's the one thing?
Try it
Free. No card. No trial. Works on any phone browser. Two weeks old, so there will be bugs — but every bug I hear about gets fixed within a day.
If you try it and something breaks, tell me what you were doing and what phone you're on. I read every message.
Built with React, Vite, Supabase, and a lot of patience. Deployed on GitHub Pages. If you're building something similar and want to know how the Supabase migration went, ask in the comments — I'll write it up.
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