We built the calorie tracker we kept failing to use.
Nouri is made by Jacks Labs LLC, a very small team, for people who have downloaded a calorie tracker, used it for three weeks, and quietly stopped opening it. That was us first.
The short version
I started with MyFitnessPal. The numbers were never the problem. Logging a normal dinner took several minutes of searching a database, picking between forty versions of "chicken breast," and setting portions, and after a long day I simply would not do it. By week three I had stopped opening the app, and a tracker you do not open has an accuracy of exactly zero.
So I switched to AI photo trackers. Faster, and I still was not losing weight. When I started checking their estimates against what the ingredients actually added up to, the photo numbers came in consistently low. One plate the camera called around 400 calories worked out closer to 700 once I priced its components. That is not a bug in one app; it is what happens when you ask a lens to see the oil in a pan, the butter in a sauce, or the second layer under a garnish.
Those two failures are the whole product thesis. Tracking dies from friction, and photos cannot see the calories that matter most. What survives both problems is the thing you already do effortlessly: describing your food in words.
What Nouri actually is
You open it and there is a line and a cursor, like a note. You write what you ate, "chicken stir fry with rice, cooked in oil, a beer," or say it to Siri with your phone still locked, and it comes back with calories and macros broken out item by item. Every number is editable, and the assumptions are visible, so when the estimate is off you correct a portion in one tap instead of starting over. Your daily totals sync to Apple Health next to your steps and sleep.
Two longer pieces explain the thinking behind it: If Apple Made a Calorie Tracking App, on the design standard we hold ourselves to, and The Most Frictionless Calorie Tracker in the World, where we count the actual steps between finishing a meal and having it logged.
What we believe
Coverage beats precision. Every tracker inherits the same errors: labels can legally run 20 percent over, portions vary, and no app can see your cooking oil. A log that is consistently a little off still tells you the truth about your trend. A log with three missing days a week tells you nothing, because the missing meals are never the small ones.
An estimate you can argue with is more honest than a confident number. That is why Nouri shows its reasoning per item rather than handing you a total and asking for faith.
Publish the math. The formula that sets your calorie and macro targets is written out in full in TDEE Explained, and you can run the identical calculations in our free tools without installing anything. We would rather you check us than trust us.
Say what is not true. We do not publish accuracy percentages for Nouri or anyone else, because we have not run a benchmark and neither has anyone quoting one at you. Our honest guide to tracking accuracy argues against our own marketing interest, on purpose.
What Nouri is not
It is iPhone only, with no Android or web version. It has no barcode scanner, by design, because describing packaged food is fast enough and a scanner would pull the product back toward a database. There is no free tier beyond a three-day trial. It is a young app from a small team, not a decade-old platform with forty integrations. If you want any of those things, our comparison of eight calorie trackers will honestly point you somewhere else.
Who makes it
Nouri is built and run by Jacks Labs LLC. It is not affiliated with Apple or any other company mentioned on this site. The research on these pages comes from primary sources, restaurant chains' own published nutrition data, USDA FoodData Central, NIAAA, and peer-reviewed papers, all cited with the date checked, because a food blog that makes numbers up is worse than no food blog at all.
If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it: support@nouriapp.co. A human reads every message.