Not just another calorie tracker

Hi, I'm Markus, creator of Ampsu.

There are already approximately 847 calorie trackers at the time of writing this post.

I used a bunch of them, probably more than needed. They all had roughly the same problem: logging food was weirdly.. more annoying than it needed to be?

Logging something with a barcode shouldn't take six taps, three screens and a small administrative ceremony.

It's what slowly started to eat me while trying to lose weight myself. Usually it's not that you suddenly stop caring. It's that you can't be bothered to do the tiny amount of work required to log a sandwich. Then you don't log the sandwich. Then you don't log the handful of crisps. And eventually you don't log anything. It's a story that I've had to go through quite a lot, and my own progress always suffered.

So when I started building Ampsu, the brief was basically:

Make logging ridiculously easy. Everything else came after.

I can at least confidently say that Ampsu has some of the fastest logging out there currently, with the bottom action bar being reserved mostly for just that.

European shelves

The other thing that drove me slightly mad was barcodes.

Scan an own-brand yoghurt from a European supermarket in a lot of apps and you'll get absolutely nothing.

It turns out there's a perfectly boring reason for this. GS1 reserves a range of barcode numbers for restricted distribution, which retailers can use for products they sell themselves. So an own-brand product can have a perfectly valid barcode printed on the packet without that barcode existing in some giant global food database.

Which is a problem if your database mostly knows about American products. Speaking of, the internal food database in Ampsu is already much better than many other apps, especially because of the strict focus on our local European products.

There are also the lovely little stickers printed at deli counters and butcher shops, pastry counters (the Lidl pastry section especially dangerous on a cut!) where the barcode can include the price. Same cheese, different barcode every time. Every chain does it slightly differently, and the barcode itself doesn't tell you what the thing actually is.

Ampsu handles those a bit differently: you teach it once, and it'll recognise it next time. So if you try scanning a pastry that you weighed, and happen to know the macros/calories of it, next time you buy the same thing it's simply a matter of scanning it again!

The metabolism bit

Most calorie apps give you a target on day one.

You enter your height, weight, age and a dropdown asking how active you are, a formula does some maths, and congratulations: apparently your body burns exactly 2,137 calories a day.

Obviously it's an estimate. Your activity is also an estimate, and it's not the same every day, and you don't want to constantly change it (I didn't!)

Ampsu can start from an estimate too, but then it watches what you actually log and what your weight does over time, and adjusts the target from there.

The first couple of weeks are basically data collection. After that, there's something real to work with.

It's the same general idea as MacroFactor's adaptive approach, which was one of the things that convinced me this was worth building. The results have been surprisingly close, but it does depend on actually logging your food and weight consistently. The app can't learn much from two sandwiches and a vague memory of Tuesday. A tip on this: you can either log a Quick meal and estimate the calories, or simply tell the coach what happened!

However, it's quite a neat approach in a sense that you do not inherently need to track the calories burned by workouts. Simply let the maths work out what you eat and how your body responds to it (by weighing yourself and logging that in the app). Stress free and one less thing to think about.

If you want the nerdy version, I wrote up how metabolism mode works: what it does with your log and your weigh-ins, and where it still falls short.

If you're getting started, I wrote a guide to tracking calories without weighing every cucumber. It covers the first target, the day you go over it, and the shortcuts that make logging less of a chore.

A coach that actually reads your diary

You already logged the food. Well, might as well get something useful back from it.

The coach looks at what's in your diary and picks out a couple of things worth noticing. Maybe your protein has been a bit low lately. Maybe you've been eating later than usual. Maybe.. nothing particularly interesting happened at all?

Open it in the morning and it'll look at the day ahead. Open it in the evening and it'll look at how the day went, or perhaps there's a new pattern emerging.

And because it's tied to your diary, the more you use Ampsu, the more context it has. I wrote more about how the coach reads your day, if you're curious.

There's also an MCP server if you'd rather have a proper conversation with an AI about your data, or answers to specific questions. More about it down below.

Some other bits that are also useful

Goals are stupidly flexible.

Want a different target on training days? Every other day? Every third day? A different number on each day of the week? You can do that. Hell, you can even use the Metabolism mode on those certain days, and some Fixed goal on another day.

Recipes can scale by weight too, which sounds like a tiny feature until you make soup or put any kind of slop (e.g a lasagna) into the oven, where the weight of the food shrinks and the calorie density increases.

You can cook 2 kg of something, lose 400 g of water, add some more water back, and Ampsu can keep the maths tied to the actual finished weight instead of pretending a portion is a magical fixed object.

There's also an MCP server, so you can connect Ampsu to something like Claude or Codex and let it look at your own data.

You can ask about your habits, ask how your week looked, or just tell it what you ate and have it add it to the diary.

Calories, protein, carbs and fat are all there, plus the essential vitamins and minerals.

The AI photo thing

There is a photo estimator for meals.

I'm not making this the star of the app because these systems can get things spectacularly wrong. I also believe that an app whose whole selling point is some output spit out by AI slop, well, not a great selling point for a tracker you want to depend on daily, and even long-term?

Restaurant plate? Someone else's home cooking? No barcode, no label, no idea what half the dish even is?

Take a photo, get an estimate, adjust it.

It's useful. It's just not magic. And it's all logged in your diary.

If there's a barcode available or you can search for it, that's better of course.

Price

It's free while I'm getting everything broken in, but will be freemium in the future.

Everyone using it now will get a permanent grandfathered upgrade later, as a thank-you for dealing with the rough edges and helping me find the weird stuff.

It's on the Play Store, and there's a PWA for iPhone users for now.

Made in Europe.. 🇪🇺 🇪🇪

It's made in Estonia, hosted in the EU, and your diary isn't for sale. Take it this way: if you already prefer to buy local, why not also use locally-made stuff made in this amazing region :). For productivity, I've already switched to many other European providers and apps myself.

..and with love 💚

I'm one person building this, and I'm a software engineer by trade who's gotten a little too interested in this stuff.

So if something's off, let me know. There's a feedback email in Settings, or just write to feedback@ampsu.eu. I'll fix it.

Same is true for any other feedback or ideas. If it's something that you'd find useful, please do write, and eventually this might be something that's available on Ampsu. The more personal it feels for you, the better.

This is my baby after all, a useful one at that. So I hope it helps you as much as it helped me with your body's progress :)

That's all!