Almost every calorie tracker has a free tier. MyFitnessPal's free tier carries ads and gates macro goals by gram behind Premium+. FatSecret's free tier is ad-supported. PlateLens gives you three photo scans and five coach messages a day for free, then asks you to upgrade. Arcal has none of that: one plan, $9.99 a month or $49.99 a year, everything included from the first day. Here is the actual reasoning, not the marketing version.
Free tiers are not free
A free tier has to be paid for somehow. In this category that is almost always one of two things: ads shown against your food diary, or a deliberately limited product designed to make the paid version feel necessary. Neither is evil. Both are business models. But both mean the free version of the product was built to be slightly worse on purpose, which is a strange thing to optimize for in an app whose entire job is getting you accurate information about what you eat.
What one plan actually removes
No ads means no incentive to hold your attention longer than the task requires. No gated tiers means the macro-goal precision, the insights, the Apple Health sync, all of it, work the same on day one as they do a year in. There is no feature sitting behind a paywall that quietly nudges you to upgrade while you use the "free" version.
The honest tradeoff
This cuts both ways. There is no free way to use Arcal indefinitely, and the annual plan's 7-day trial is the only way to try it before paying. If a permanently free tier matters more to you than a single plan with nothing gated, MyFitnessPal, Lose It, or FatSecret's free tiers are the better fit, and we would rather say that plainly than pretend the tradeoff does not exist. See pricing or join the waitlist.