Update November 3, 2025 : Rebuilt Food Logging from the Ground Up (And Made It Free)

Update: November 3, 2025

When I wrote our first blog post a month ago, I talked about why food logging is broken. Since then, something happened that made it even more clear: MyFitnessPal's recent update completely disappointed their user base. More paywalls. Broken features. The usual story.

Here's the thing—health apps are losing focus on what actually matters. They're not building tools to help people be happier and healthier. They're building tools to extract more money from frustrated users.

It's gotten so ridiculous that I made a decision: The entire food logging piece of Kygo is now free to use. No paywalls. No gotchas.

Natural Language Food Logging (Finally)

I've completely rebuilt how food logging works in Kygo, and it's exactly what I wished existed when I started this journey.

The app is now fully natural language based. You can either type or speak your meals exactly how you'd describe them to a friend. Something like: "today for lunch, I had a chicken and rice bowl with peppers and onions and a little bit of soy sauce."

That's it. The app maps this to your lunch, figures out reasonable portion sizes, breaks down each ingredient, and lets you confirm or adjust. The whole process takes 30-45 seconds for an entire day of logging.

I added an intelligence layer that does the heavy lifting. It understands different ways people describe the same food and eliminates the annoying duplicate entries that plague every other app. No more scrolling through 47 different "chicken breast" options.

Copy and paste meals to different days? Obviously included. Barcode scanning? Coming shortly. These features don't really increase costs, so there's no reason to lock them behind a paywall.

Why Make Food Logging Free?

There are obviously costs involved with running an app like this. Servers, databases, processing—none of it's free. But food logging alone isn't where the real value is.

The real value is in what we're building on top of it: the correlation engine that connects what you eat to how your body actually responds. That's where the magic happens, and that's where I'm hoping to charge a minimal monthly fee down the line for advanced users.

For now though, I want to make sure everyone has access to proper food logging. It shouldn't be this hard to track what you eat.

The Nutrition Tracking Nobody Else Provides

Most apps track the basics: calories, protein, carbs, fat. Maybe fiber if you're lucky. That's not nearly enough to understand how food actually affects your body.

Kygo tracks everything against daily values:

• Macronutrients: calories, protein, carbs, fat, fiber, sugar, saturatedFat, transFat, netCarbs, cholesterol

• Minerals: sodium, potassium, magnesium, calcium, iron, zinc, phosphorus, copper, manganese, selenium

• Vitamins: vitaminD, vitaminB12, folate, vitaminB6, vitaminB1, vitaminB2, vitaminB3, vitaminB5, vitaminC, vitaminA, vitaminE, vitaminK

• Special Compounds: caffeine, alcohol

This comprehensive tracking is what enables the correlation engine to work properly. When we tell you that your magnesium intake correlates with your recovery scores, we can back it up with actual data.

Where We Are Right Now

The beta is about a week away from opening up to users. The back end is solid and ready to go. I'm spending the final stretch making sure the front end is as smooth and intuitive as possible.

Full transparency: there will be a few bugs. I'm building this solo, and I'd rather get it in your hands quickly than wait for perfection. If you're okay with that trade-off, you'll be able to start logging food and seeing your comprehensive nutrition breakdown immediately.

Historical macro and micro details on a dedicated screen are coming shortly after launch. Right now you can view daily counts for past days, but I want to build out better visualization tools to help you spot patterns over time.

What's Coming After Launch

Once food logging is stable and users are consistently tracking meals, we'll start rolling out the correlation features. That's when Kygo becomes what it's meant to be: a closed-loop system showing you exactly how what you eat affects how you feel.

We're seeing incredibly promising results in testing. The caffeine and sleep latency example from my first post is just the beginning. Magnesium and recovery scores. Protein timing and muscle soreness. Fiber and energy levels. These connections exist, and we're building the tools to surface them for you personally.

The key difference is that we're not guessing. We're looking for statistically significant patterns in your data, factoring in outliers and time lags, and only surfacing insights when we're confident they're real.

A Quick Note on Pricing

I know I keep mentioning this, but I want to be completely transparent about it. Food logging will always be free. The advanced correlation features will likely have a minimal monthly charge to help cover costs—but only for users who want that level of insight.

My goal isn't to build a company that squeezes users for basic functionality. My goal is to build something that actually helps people understand their health.

Development keeps getting better every day, and I'm really excited about where this is headed. If you're as frustrated with the current options as I am, I hope you'll join me for the beta.

Ryan

Founder, Kygo Health

November 3, 2025

---

P.S. This is our second blog post and was written with talk-to-type. This is not AI generated content.