Pensum vs Cal AI

Cal AI is free to download, and that is where the free part mostly ends. Onboarding is a long quiz about your body and goals that finishes on a paywall offering a 3-day free trial. The trial asks for a payment method up front and renews into a paid plan unless you cancel before it ends. Deleting the app does not cancel the subscription; you cancel in Google Play or in your Apple ID settings.

Decline, and you are left with barcode scanning, manual food search and typed meal descriptions. The photo scan, the feature every Cal AI ad shows, is subscription only.

The price you see depends on when and where you look, because Cal AI tests its paywall heavily. The US App Store lists its "Unlimited Plan" purchases between $2.99 and $29.99. Reported US prices in 2026 run about $2.99 a week, $5.99 to $19.99 a month, and $19.99 to $49.99 a year, with $29.99 a year the most common yearly figure and a family plan around $59.99 a year. The App Store also lists a $0.99 "Streak Restore" purchase.

In April 2026 Apple pulled Cal AI from the App Store for a few days over its paywall design. MacRumors reported that the screen showed the weekly-equivalent price more prominently than the amount actually billed and that the free-trial toggle did not clearly communicate automatic renewal. Cal AI changed the flow and the app was reinstated.

Pensum works the other way round. The tracker is the product and it is free, photo logging included, with no ads on any tier and no account. Pensum Plus is optional. It pays for what costs money to run: unlimited AI, micronutrients that fill in on their own as you log, and a daily cloud backup. Nothing you need to track sits behind it.

Cal AI's own website says it is "about 80% accurate" and that no food tracking app is perfect. That matches what we measured when we tested photo estimation ourselves.

We did not benchmark the Cal AI app. We benchmarked the problem it solves. We photographed real meals, weighed every item on a kitchen scale, and scored current vision models against the true grams. The full research is published. What we found:

• Photo alone, the better models missed the grams by roughly 20 to 30 percent on average per plate. Across our cached set the average was about 29 percent.
• The food's shape matters more than the model. Folded cold cuts read within about 10 to 15 percent. Heaped cottage cheese was read at up to roughly 2.3 times its real weight. A lone sweet-potato wedge was over-read by 50 to 200 percent.
• Premium models did not fix it. Frontier models with extended thinking did not beat the lighter ones on gram accuracy. One flat photo does not carry the depth needed to recover volume.
• A known weight did. Giving the model the plate's total weight cut the average error from about 29 percent to about 17 percent, and on one fresh plate from roughly 27 percent to about 13 percent.

In calories, a 20 percent miss on a 700 kcal dinner is 140 kcal. That is small against a day of guessing and large against a 300 to 500 kcal deficit. Cal AI says its phone's depth sensor helps it estimate volume; we have not tested that, so we make no claim either way. Any photo number is an estimate, and the useful question is how easy the app makes it to correct. Pensum lets you type the weight you know and edit every line.

• You want photo logging without a subscription, trial or card.
• You want photo estimates you can steer with a weight and correct line by line.
• You want a free calorie and macro tracker with barcode scanning and no ads.
• You cook at home and want generic foods first, recipes and repeat meals.
• You want targets that adapt to your measured expenditure.
• You want your diary on your phone, with no account.
• You are on Android, including phones without Google services.

We used Cal AI's website, its App Store listing and published reporting on its pricing, paywall and ownership, checked on 25 September 2026. Cal AI's prices vary by region and paywall variant and change often. The accuracy figures are from our own benchmark of vision models against a kitchen scale; we did not test the Cal AI app. If something here is out of date, tell us at [email protected].