Free calorie tracker that is not upselling me a coach every third screen — what are people using?

I paid for a year of a well known tracker, logged for 11 days, and let it renew once out of pure inattention. Two things I would do differently: pay monthly for anything you intend to use temporarily, and decide up front what would make you stop. Eight weeks is a good plan precisely because it has an end, so put the end in your calendar now.

Cronometer's free tier is what I settled on and the trade off is clear: the food database is smaller and more curated, so fewer junk crowdsourced entries but more manual adding for own brand products, and the micronutrient detail is far better than anything else free. If your priority is that supermarket own brands scan reliably in the UK, look at anything built on Open Food Facts, since that database is open and community maintained and its coverage of European retail products is much better than the American focused apps. I ran both for a fortnight and kept the one with fewer wrong entries rather than the one with more entries.

The app barely matters, the database does, and that is entirely regional. Every recommendation you get from a mostly American audience will be an app whose database is full of products you cannot buy, and you will spend more time correcting entries than logging. Test one week in each candidate with your actual weekly shop before choosing, and count how many items you had to add by hand. That number is the only comparison that predicted my experience.

For an eight week recalibration I would genuinely consider a spreadsheet. I eat about 20 repeating foods, so I made a sheet with those and their per portion numbers once, and logging a day takes me under two minutes because it is mostly picking from a list. No subscription, no database gaps, exports itself by definition. It is a bad long term system and a very good short term one.

Whichever you pick, weigh things for the first two weeks rather than using cups or eyeballing. The app is not what makes the numbers wrong.