CalScan - AI Calorie Tracker

What it does

CalScan is an AI-powered calorie and nutrition tracker designed to simplify food logging and help users achieve their weight goals. The app creates a personalized daily plan based on a detailed onboarding quiz. Its core feature is a multi-modal logging system that allows users to track meals by describing them with text, scanning them with their camera, or reading a product barcode.

Where it shines

The app's strength lies in its intelligent and user-friendly data input methods. The onboarding quiz provides immediate, insightful feedback, such as a real-time BMI calculation (00:25) that educates the user as they enter their weight. After setup, the food logging is exceptionally flexible. The AI-powered text analysis (02:48) and camera scan (03:37) significantly reduce the friction of manually searching for ingredients, making the core habit of tracking easier to maintain.

UX highlights

Interactive Onboarding: Instead of static forms, sliders for height and weight provide a more engaging way to input data. The goal-setting screen (00:27) dynamically updates with motivational text as the user adjusts their target weight.
Multi-Modal Input: The main action button (02:47) cleanly offers three logging options: describing a meal, using AI camera scanning, or scanning a barcode. This caters to various situations and user preferences.
Detailed Nutritional Analysis: When a food is logged, the app provides a comprehensive breakdown far beyond just calories. It includes a health rating, glycemic load, macronutrient percentages, and a full list of vitamins and minerals (03:15).
Clear Daily Dashboard: The main screen (01:59) offers a clean, at-a-glance view of remaining calories, macronutrient progress, and shortcuts to log meals, exercise, and water.
Editable AI Results: After an AI scan identifies ingredients in a meal (04:01), the user can easily edit, remove, or add items (04:07), giving them final control over the accuracy of the log.

Monetization & growth

The app uses a soft paywall strategy, presenting a subscription screen (01:37) after the user has completed the onboarding quiz and seen their personalized plan. This makes the value proposition clear before asking for payment. The paywall offers a 3-day free trial for the yearly plan, which is highlighted with a "60% OFF" tag. The app also presents monthly and lifetime purchase options, accessible via a swipeable carousel. Before the paywall, the app builds social proof with a screen featuring user testimonials and star ratings (01:07).

Who it’s for

CalScan is for individuals looking for a modern, tech-forward approach to calorie counting and weight management. It appeals to users who have found traditional food logging apps tedious and are looking for faster, more automated methods like photo and text analysis. The detailed nutritional data also makes it suitable for health-conscious users interested in micronutrients and overall food quality, not just calories.

Notes & opportunities

The onboarding flow is comprehensive but long, featuring nearly 20 steps before the user reaches the main dashboard. This could lead to some drop-off. While the warm-up screens for permissions are good practice, the app requests four separate permissions (Tracking, Health, Rating, Notifications) in quick succession, which might feel overwhelming. Finally, the ability to copy or move a logged meal to another day or mealtime (e.g., moving a breakfast item to lunch) could further enhance the app's flexibility.