Why Açaí isn’t free
Açaí costs $9.99 a month. We get asked regularly why it’s not free. The honest answer is boring: every photo scan runs through an AI pipeline that costs us real money, and we’d rather charge a fair price than run ads or sell your nutrition data to the highest bidder.
Every photo scan costs us money
Running a food image through our vision pipeline costs real cents per scan. Multiply by three meals a day and you get the actual per-user infrastructure cost. A free tier that matches a paying user's usage is operationally impossible for an indie studio our size.
Ads would compromise the product
Our strongest differentiator is the 245-micronutrient data we write to Apple Health. Running ads means selling that data to someone. We don't want to, and you wouldn't want us to. The subscription is what lets us not.
Subscriptions fund the roadmap
Most features you see on the homepage existed because a subscription paid for a sprint that built them. No subscription, no Apple Health bidirectional sync, no real-time deficit ticker, no weekly deficiency engine. The pattern compounds.
Nine dollars a month is below the category median
MyFitnessPal Premium is $19.99. MacroFactor is $11.99. Cronometer Gold is $8.33 if you pay annually. Cal AI Premium is $12.99. Açaí at $9.99 monthly is priced at the low end of what the category actually costs.
A typical user, a typical month
A committed user scans roughly 90 meals in a month. Each scan runs through a vision model and a nutrition estimation model. The compute cost lands around $3 to $4 per user per month on the backend alone, before storage, before Apple Developer fees, before servers, before one human being working on the app.
That’s why apps that offer unlimited AI scanning for free almost always either introduce ads, sell the data, or quietly start throttling scan quality after a few weeks. The unit economics only work three ways.
We chose the fourth way: charge less than the category median and don’t do the other three. If that math shifts (cheaper inference, better on-device models), we’ll pass the savings on. For now, $9.99 is what the app actually costs to run responsibly.
The best $9.99 you’ll spend this month.
245 micronutrients, real-time deficit modeling, full Apple Health sync, no ads, no selling your data.