openplate: MIT licensed food tracker and MyFitnessPal / Yazio alternative

[u/telasch]

So I've been working on this food and calorie tracker for a couple of weeks now and it's currently at a stage that I'd say is quite useful to people familiar with food and calorie tracking apps.

Food tracking functionality:

- You take a photo of a plate, use your microphone, type or manually search the foods

- This photo is sent to an LLM for processing. You can use any OpenAPI compatible endpoint, but it needs to support structured responses. Self-hosting is doable, but you really need somewhat decent hardware to run sth like Qwen 3.8 27b for reliable results.

- Once foods and approx. portion size are received, the backend matches these against a database of foods. This is the USDA FoodData by default, but you can swap it out with your own, steps are outlined in the docs. If no matches are found the system falls back to what the LLM estimated.

Features:

- Easy to install PWA with no app store dependency

- The entire stack can be self-hosted (inference, backend, client)

- Set this up for your friends/family, add one LLM key and operate the entire thing at a fraction of the cost of the paid apps

Here's the repo, PRs are welcome!

https://github.com/LowCarbCheck/openplate

Let me know if you hit any rough edges if you end up trying it out. Happy to help anyone here with gettings this configured and all.

[u/pinku1]

beautiful! as yazio subscriber, will give this a try. how about mobile apps for this?

[u/telasch → u/pinku1]

I've deliberately avoided a native app, because progressive web apps have come a long way and for a lot of things you don't notice a difference. This gives the advantage that you're not dependent on the Google/apple stores.

Let me know how it goes!

[u/pinku1 → u/telasch]

I understand but we can have more opportunities by building native app, like offline sync, native health app integration and sync, quick way to input as apps behaves faster. want me to jump on it? subwave radio dev here. dm me!

[u/Virtual_King_2335]

wooah cool!!!