Questions
How the scanner works, how wrong it can be, what happens to your photos, and what it costs. If something isn't here, email us and we'll answer it properly.
You photograph your plate. BetterBite names each food it can see, estimates how much of each one is there, and fills in the calories, protein, carbohydrate and fat. The meal lands in your day and your targets update. No searching a database, no weighing, no typing.
A few seconds. Take the photo and keep going; the result appears in your log when it's ready.
It separates them. A plate of chicken, rice and broccoli comes back as three items with their own weights and their own numbers, and you can edit or remove any of them individually. It deliberately groups a dish into the fewest sensible items rather than listing every garnish and sprinkle of herbs as its own food.
Both, and for packaged food you should.
Barcode looks the product up rather than guessing from a picture. Nutrition label reads the printed values with your iPhone's own text recognition, so the numbers are exactly what the manufacturer printed. The label reader runs entirely on your device — no network, no AI, no estimation. It's the most accurate path in the app.
Yes. Photograph the menu and BetterBite reads the real dishes on it, estimates each as a restaurant portion — which means allowing for the oil, butter and sugar that restaurant cooking carries and home cooking often doesn't — and ranks them against the calories and protein you have left for the day. It also shows a few dishes that don't fit, with a one-line reason, because knowing the pasta is 1,100 calories is as useful as knowing the salmon is 540.
Photograph the inside of your fridge and BetterBite lists the ingredients it can identify, then suggests a few genuinely healthy recipes built mostly from what you already have. If you've set dietary restrictions, anything that breaks them is simply left out of the suggestions.
No. You can search a food database, speak what you ate, scan a barcode, or build your own recipes once and log them in a single tap afterwards. Foods you log four or more times appear as one-tap chips at the top of your home screen, so your usual breakfast takes one press.
It is an estimate, and we won't put a percentage on it, because we haven't measured one we'd be willing to defend.
Here is the real limitation: a photograph cannot show what it cannot see. It cannot show the oil in the pan, the sauce underneath, or what is buried below the top layer. Those are calories, and sometimes a lot of them. The estimate is designed to be close and immediately useful, not exact.
What it is good at is the thing that actually decides whether tracking works for you: it removes the ninety seconds of typing that made you stop last time.
It picks a scale reference in the picture — a dinner plate is about 26–28cm, a fork about 19cm, a standard can 355ml — estimates all three dimensions including the depth a photo hides, works out a volume, and multiplies by a density appropriate to that food. Cooked rice is not as dense as cheese, and leafy greens are barely dense at all.
It then checks itself against known weights: a medium apple is 180–220g, a chicken cutlet 150–220g, an egg about 50g. Where it's unsure it is instructed to choose the higher realistic figure and lower its confidence, because under-estimating is the systematic mistake in this kind of work.
Fix it in a tap, and the whole meal follows.
Every total, macro and daily ring recalculates immediately.
No. BetterBite is a nutrition and wellness tool. It is not a doctor, a dietitian or a diagnostic device, and its figures are automated approximations intended for general guidance. For anything that matters to your health, talk to a qualified professional.
They stay on your phone. Meal photos are stored in the app's own storage on your device and are never uploaded to our servers or included in your backup. Delete a meal and its photo goes with it. Delete the app and they all go.
The one exception is the moment of the scan itself: the photo you are scanning is sent for analysis, and then it is done. It isn't kept on our servers and it isn't attached to your account.
Anthropic, PBC, which runs the Claude models, acting as our processor. They receive the photo or text you are scanning and nothing else — not your name, email, account, weight, health data or device identifier — so the scan cannot be traced back to you. They do not use it to train their models and do not retain it after the request is answered.
We ask your explicit permission in the app before anything is sent, and nothing is sent until you grant it. You can withdraw that permission at any time in Settings, and everything except the AI features keeps working — manual logging, your targets, your whole history.
Yes, and you can do both yourself without emailing anyone. In the app: Profile → Privacy & data.
Download a copy gives you a file with your account details, subscription status, profile, meals, nutrition history, goals and weight. Delete my account and data removes your account, your synced log and your backup, and signs you out everywhere. That one cannot be undone.
A short list of providers who run parts of the service for us, each listed by name and by what they receive, in our Privacy Policy. We don't sell your information and we don't use it for advertising.
This is treated as more important than the calorie figure, because it is.
Beef, lamb, pork and veal are genuinely hard to tell apart in a photograph once cooked. So if BetterBite cannot clearly identify which red meat it is looking at, it returns the generic "red meat" or "steak" rather than guessing an animal, and lowers its confidence. It will not name pork, bacon, ham or shellfish unless they are unmistakable.
If you've told it you keep kosher or halal, that becomes a prior — someone keeping kosher is very unlikely to be photographing pork, so beef is the better inference. What it will never do is change the calories to suit a diet. It reports what is actually on the plate.
Yes, and the same caution applies in reverse: if you've said you don't eat meat, it checks carefully before naming any and prefers a plant-based reading where the photo is ambiguous. Recipe suggestions treat your restrictions as hard constraints rather than preferences.
There's a mode for it. On a GLP-1 the risk usually isn't overeating — it's not eating enough, and losing muscle along with fat. That mode shifts the emphasis onto protein and onto eating enough, rather than onto restriction.
Handled properly, which sounds obvious but often isn't. Alcohol carries about 7 calories per gram and isn't protein, carbohydrate or fat, so drinks legitimately have far more calories than their macros suggest. A glass of wine is around 125 calories and a beer around 150, and BetterBite is built not to return a glass of wine as a 40-calorie drink.
$9.99 a month, or $39.99 a year. Three days free first. You can cancel any time from your Apple ID subscription settings, and cancelling stops the next payment — it isn't a refund of one already taken.
Not to use it. An account exists so your log survives a new phone or a reinstall, and so it's there if you sign in on another device. Without one, everything stays on that phone and goes when the app does. You can sign in with Apple or with an email and password.
Tap Forgot your password? on the sign-in screen. We'll email you a six-digit code, you set a new password with it, and you land back in signed in. The code lasts fifteen minutes, and setting a new password signs out any other device that was using the old one.
Logging, editing and your whole history work offline. Photo scanning needs a connection, because the analysis doesn't happen on the phone — the nutrition label reader is the exception and works anywhere. Anything that couldn't reach our servers is backed up automatically next time you open the app with a signal.
With your permission, yes, both ways: it reads your weight and activity to keep your targets honest, and writes the calories and macros you log back to Health. It's optional and controlled in Settings.
BetterBite is in early access and we're letting people in a batch at a time, so the scanner stays fast while we tune it. Join the waitlist and we'll email you an access code when your spot opens.
Because a scan that takes thirty seconds is a worse product than one that takes three, and opening the doors all at once is how you get the thirty-second version. Batches let us keep it quick and keep fixing what the early group finds.
Not yet. If you'd like one, join the waitlist and pick Android — that's how we'll know when it's worth building, and we'll email you when there's something to open.
Email hello@trybiteai.com. A real person reads it, usually within a day or two. Include your account email and what happened, and we'll get to it faster. There's also a feature request form inside the app under Profile.