I built my own MenuFit app instead of paying 10 bucks a month

If you eat out a lot and you are trying to cut, bulk, or just hit your macros, the MenuFit app is genuinely a cool idea. You tell it your goals, and it tells you what to order at a restaurant so you stay on track. I downloaded it, I liked it, and then I saw the price.

Ten bucks a month. Every month. Forever. For a thing that is mostly a smart prompt wrapped in a nice screen.

So I built my own. It took an afternoon, it costs me about two bucks a month to run, and honestly it does more than theirs does. Here is exactly how.

What the MenuFit app actually does

The MenuFit reviews are right that it works. It pulls menus and nutrition info from restaurants and surfaces lower-calorie options based on your goals. Plenty of those reviews ask is MenuFit worth it and how much it is, and the price is what pushed me to build my own. You are renting a feature you can own.

The gap I kept hitting: it suggests options from what it knows, but it does not strategize around what I have already eaten today. That is the part I wanted.

What mine does differently

Mine is a basic health tracker on the surface. It logs carbs, protein, fat, and calories across the week. It pulls my burned calories straight from my Apple Watch through HealthKit, so my targets move with how active I was.

The fun part lives at the bottom. I type the restaurant I am walking into, pick breakfast, lunch, or dinner, and hit find me a meal. Then it looks at what I have already logged today and does the math backward from my goals. My limits are 2,300 calories, 50 grams of carbs, and 150 grams of protein. I ignore fat.

So if it is dinner and I have already used 40 grams of carbs, it knows I have 10 left and only hands me options that fit inside that 10. That is what MenuFit does not do for me.

The piece that makes it better than MenuFit

When I say Taco Bell, find me a meal, it runs a live web search with Claude Opus, finds the current menu and the real nutrition numbers, and strategizes three options that are highest in protein, lowest in carbs, and low on calories. Including custom builds, like swap this or add that.

But here is the part I am most proud of, and the real reason it beats MenuFit. It does not just Frankenstein the regular menu into the best meal it can. Because it is searching live, it can also go find viral menu hacks, the secret-menu builds and food trends blowing up on social media, and size those to my goals too. So it might hand me some off-menu combo that went viral last week, already checked against my day. MenuFit cannot touch that.

Because it searches the web, it works on anything. Some hole-in-the-wall taco shop no database has heard of? It finds the numbers and comes back. Under each option is a button. I tap one, it adds to my daily total. Done.

How I built it

I had Claude Code build it in Swift as a native iOS app. I described what I wanted, it wrote it, I put it on my phone. The app calls the Claude API for the web search and the meal strategy, and HealthKit handles the Apple Watch side.

No Apple Developer account? Build the same thing as a web app instead. Same logic, no app store, opens in your phone browser.

What it costs

This is the whole point. MenuFit is 10 bucks a month. My API calls run two to three dollars a month, and that is it. No subscription, no upsell, no referral codes. I own the thing. If I want it to track something new next week, I just ask Claude Code to add it.

Should you do this

If you just want to eat out healthy and not mess with any of this, MenuFit is fine. Pay the 10 bucks, no shame in it.

But if you are even a little technical, or you want something that plans around your day instead of just listing options, building your own is shockingly doable now. This is the kind of right-sized custom software I build for businesses all the time, except this time the business was me trying to order at Taco Bell without blowing my carbs.