Update: Changes to Spoonful Free & Guest Accounts

Soon, we’ll be making some important changes to the Spoonful app. Starting December 1st, free and guest accounts will be allotted 5 scans each month. For unlimited scans and searches, we ask that you upgrade to Spoonful Premium.

If you decide to upgrade before December 1, 2021, you will receive Premium for $2.99 USD per month versus $4.99 USD per month or $29.99 USD per year if you sign up after that date.

First off, we’re really sorry to have to do this. We know it makes things more difficult for you. Our goal has always been to keep the app free, but many of the ideas we pursued to offset costs of maintaining the app just weren’t feasible.

In relaying this news, we wanted to provide a bit more transparency on how proceeds from the app are being spent. Here is a quick breakdown of our costs:

• Servers: We now have tens of thousands of users making hundreds of thousands of scans each month, which means our costs for hosting and serving content has gone significantly up.
• Product data: In order to provide adequate coverage of products, we pull from dozens of sources, many of which cost money to access.
• Dietitian oversight: We pay licensed dietitians to ensure our scan results are as accurate and consistent as possible. We’ll never cut corners on this as we know how important it is to get things right.
• Product submissions: Each time you submit a product, we pay someone to input the information. We get ~2,000 submissions each week, which is up from ~400 this time last year.
• Team salaries: We have 3 full-time employees and 1 part-timer.
• Marketing costs: Whatever we have left over, we usually put into marketing. That could be anything from the content you see on our blog to recipe posts on Facebook and Instagram. We don’t put a lot into marketing, but do what we can to stay relevant.

Again, we know this isn’t what you wanted to hear, but we hope you understand. If you find the app valuable and would like to continue supporting us, we encourage you to open a premium account. As always, we’re around to hear your thoughts, concerns, and feedback. Just shoot us an email: support@spoonfulapp.com.

-Sam & Deepa
Spoonful Co-Founders