Show HN: An intuitive, no subscription, privacy-first calorie tracker for iPhone

8 points by mactunes 2 years ago | 7 comments
Hi all,

over the last 2 years I've been on and off building my app for iPhone.

Caloree is basically a freemium calorie tracker/food diary with the ability to only track calories. This sets it apart from the competition which usually allows logging a gazillion macros. This (hopefully) makes it easier for users to log their food. Feedback so far has been great.

The app launched today, which I am quite proud of. It's been 2 years next to raising 2 small kids which meant to often sacrifice the project when it was moving along nicely and spending way less time on it than I would have wanted to. It was a real test on my patience which is usually not that great :)

Let me know if you have any questions or feedback is also greatly appreciated!

- Rudy

  • thedevtoolsmith 2 years ago
    Congrats on the launch. I was looking for something exactly like this, I really love the offline first aspect and how it doesn't try to do anything except let me track my calories. I'm currently using Loseit and like the other commenter pointed out, the calorie limit seems a bit low. Also, are there plans to add more features such as setting a specific calorie limit and increasing the number of dishes in the database?
    • quickthrower2 2 years ago
      Thanks and congratulations on the launch. I am giving this app a try. The onboarding is smooth. I don’t think it asked for sex and height but I corrected those in the settings. 1649kcal a day to maintain weight for an average height and weight man seems a bit low though? How is it calculated?
      • sw104 2 years ago
        That sounds like the Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) as opposed to the TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure).

        Some people use BMR as a target for losing weight, but BMR is sort of like how much energy you'd burn being in a coma. TDEE (1.2 x BMR, ish) would include daily activities like walking around, so is generally more appropriate.

        • mactunes 2 years ago
          Apologies for the late reply. Somehow I didn't catch what was going on here :|

          Your are indeed correct, it is indeed an BMR calculation, specifically I use a revised Harris-Benedict equation.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harris–Benedict_equation#Calcu...

          Perhaps though I should by default use a TDEE calculation...

          • sw104 2 years ago
            It depends what the purpose is. I've been on a calorie-in-calorie-out weight loss journey since last August and for most of that time used BMR, as it subtracted a few hundred extra calories each day as a bonus.

            For weight loss, eating at BMR is about right generally. And I'd imagine most use cases for calorie tracking apps are about weight loss.

            To make it most accurate, I'd personally just add a basic multiplier for what sort of lifestyle people have (sedentary, small exercise like walking the dog, moderate exercise and hard exercise in the multipliers of 1.2x, 1.4x, 1.6x, 1.8x).

            I exercise a lot and that typically adds 1000-1500 calories onto my daily BMR of 1500 or so, so the multipliers a lot of BMR / TDEE calculator websites use seem to make sense.

            I'm more curious where the food database is sourced from. I tried something similar by getting data from British supermarkets (Sainsbury's, Tescos etc.) and none of them seemed to have APIs, so web scraping was the only possibility.

        • mactunes 2 years ago
          Hi quickthrower2, thanks for the feedback. Glad you like it and apologies for the late reply. I somehow totally missed that there were comments in this thread. I got a lot of feedback on producthunt and apparently that was enough to distract me.

          It should have definitely asked for height and sex, I just tried it and it "works on my iPhone". Perhaps you had to scroll down and that wasn't obvious? Good feedback though, I'll see what I can do there!

          As for the calculation: the child comment is right (see below), it's a BMR calculation. However, I think I should change it to a TDEE based as that takes daily movement into account. That should make it more realistic. Any thoughts?