Why it refuses
A warning you can tap past is not a safeguard.
Type an aggressive goal into almost any calorie app and it hands you the number. Some show a caution first. Plate treats the limit as a limit, because the alternative is an app that helps you do the thing it just told you not to do.
The cap moves with you
Not a flat two pounds a week for everyone. Roughly one percent of your bodyweight, which means a bigger person gets a bigger deficit and a smaller person gets protected. The number changes as you do.
A floor underneath it
1,500 calories for men, 1,200 for women, regardless of the maths above. Plate holds the line there and tells you it did.
Pregnant or nursing means no deficit
Optional field, off by default. Switch it on and Plate holds you at maintenance and hands the decision to your doctor, where it belongs.
Shows its work
Every number on the screen, and where it came from.
Plate has a methodology screen inside the app. It names the equation, the activity multipliers, the protein basis, the floors and the pace cap, plus every data source it draws on. You can check the arithmetic yourself, in the product, without hunting through a help centre.
Eating out
Restaurant numbers, straight from the restaurant.
Eating out is where tracking usually falls apart. You pick the closest sounding entry, somebody typed it in from memory, and your whole day is fiction. Plate takes its restaurant figures from each chain's own published nutrition and checks that the macros and the calories actually agree before the item ships.
menu items, each one from the chain's own nutrition
chains, national and Southern California
entries copied from crowd sourced listings
Side by side
Checked against their own published pages.
Only things that can be read on a competitor's own website or help centre. Where Plate has no advantage, there is no row. Spanish is not listed here because MyFitnessPal and Noom both do it properly too.
| Plate | MyFitnessPal | Noom | Cronometer | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ask to lose faster than is safe | Refuses, and says so | Caps selection at 2 lb a week | Adjusts the target quietly | Warns, tick a box to proceed |
| Shares data with advertising networks | No ad networks, no ad identifier | States it engages in targeted advertising and collects the mobile ad identifier | Lists advertising as a purpose of use | Ad and analytics cookies on the website |
| Cookie or ad consent banner on this page | None. Nothing to consent to | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Where the methodology lives | On a screen inside the app | In a help article | In a help article | In a help article |
Verified 10 August 2026 against each company's own support pages and privacy policies. These companies change their products often, so if you find something out of date here, email support and it will be corrected rather than argued about.
Privacy
You did not have to dismiss anything to read this.
No cookie banner appeared, because there are no advertising cookies to ask you about. There are no ad networks and no analytics vendors in the app either. Three companies touch your data and all three are listed by name on the privacy page. You can delete your account and everything in it from inside the app, without emailing anyone.
Fair questions
The things people actually ask.
Is this going to tell me to starve myself?
The opposite, and that is the entire design. Plate caps your rate of loss at roughly one percent of bodyweight per week, holds a hard calorie floor underneath that, and refuses rather than warns. If you are pregnant or nursing it will not set a deficit at all. There is no setting anywhere to switch this off.
Where does the restaurant data come from?
Each chain's own published nutrition, a PDF or a first party page, never MyFitnessPal or a crowd sourced listing or a calorie blog. Every row is then checked so protein, carbs and fat reconcile with the stated calories within twenty percent, and anything that fails is dropped. Some chains are missing entirely because they no longer publish real figures.
Is the Spanish version a real translation?
Yes, including the safety screens, the methodology screen and the crisis resources, which is where machine translation usually falls apart. It is not an afterthought bolted onto an English app.
What does it cost?
Pricing is being finalised and will be published here before anyone is asked to pay. What is already decided: nothing about safety will ever sit behind a paywall. The pace cap, the calorie floor, the methodology screen and the support resources stay available to everyone, whatever tier you are on.
Who is actually building this?
One person. When you email support you are emailing the person who wrote the code, which is why replies usually land the same day and why a missing restaurant tends to get added within a week.
Does it work without signal?
Yes. Add it to your home screen and it keeps logging in a gym basement. Your session does not expire while you are down there, which is a specific decision rather than an accident.