About Frulo
Frulo is an independent iPhone app built by Alessandro Bortoluzzi, a developer based in Italy. It is not backed by a company, an advertising network or an investor with a growth target — which is the reason several of the decisions below were possible.
Why it works the way it does
Calorie tracking is a solved problem arithmetically and an unsolved one behaviourally. The maths has been settled for a century; the reason people stop is that entering food into a database three times a day is tedious enough that most give up within weeks.
So Frulo was built the other way round: start from the fastest possible action — take one photograph — and make the tracking fit around that. Everything else in the app exists to cover the cases a photo does not: a barcode scanner for packaged food, Siri for repeat meals, typed entry for precision, and a coach that can read your own history when you want to understand what the numbers mean.
On privacy
Health and food data is unusually personal, and the standard business model for free health apps is to monetise exactly that. Frulo does not. There is no advertising SDK in the app, it never requests the tracking permission, and nothing is sold or shared for advertising. Meal photos are analyzed and discarded rather than stored.
The app is paid for by subscription, which is what makes that sustainable. The full detail of what is stored, who processes it and how to delete it is set out in the privacy policy — written to be read, not to be skipped.
Contact
Email support@frulo.app. It goes to the person who writes the app, so bug reports, feature requests and data requests all arrive in the same place.
See also: features, FAQ, and the AI calorie counter explainer.