About

The site

Self-Hosted Nutrition is a small, opinionated, one-person publication that started in late 2024 as a personal blog and grew because the existing FOSS-tracker writeups online were either out-of-date or written by people who hadn't actually compiled the apps. It covers four overlapping things:

• Comparisons. Side-by-side reviews of FOSS and commercial nutrition trackers — feature matrices, barcode-scanner accuracy, database depth, last-commit health, license terms.
• Self-hosting guides. Docker, Caddy, k3s, Tailscale, Borg/restic. How to actually run an open-source tracker on your own hardware.
• Privacy. What the commercial apps collect, who they share it with, how to read a privacy policy without your eyes glazing over — and, since 2026, whether you can get your data back out and read it with your own tools.
• APIs. USDA FoodData Central, Open Food Facts, Nutritionix — for people building their own tools.

The editor

Alex Brennan, Editor.

Alex Brennan is a software engineer with a decade in distributed-systems work and a long-standing self-hosting habit. Self-Hosted Nutrition started in 2024 as a personal blog about routing personal health data through a homelab instead of through someone else's metrics pipeline. It expanded as it became clear there was no good single resource on FOSS food trackers, USDA-API plumbing, or threat-modelling consumer nutrition apps. No nutrition credentials — when nutrition science enters a piece, the references go to the literature, not to the editor.

$ homelab.describe
> Proxmox + 3-node k3s + a UPS that should have been replaced two years ago

What this site is not

• It is not nutrition advice. There are no nutrition credentials behind this masthead. When nutrition science is referenced, the references go to the literature, not to the editor.
• It is not a recommender. We do not endorse a particular tracker. The position is "self-host if you can; if you can't, here are the trade-offs."
• It is not affiliated. There are no affiliate links anywhere on this site. There are no sponsored posts. There is no advertising.
• It is not telemetry-instrumented. You are reading static HTML served from S3+CloudFront. No analytics, no fingerprinting, no third-party JS. (Verify in devtools.)

Editorial policy

• Every commercial app gets an honest privacy and feature audit, including ones we personally use.
• Every commercial app also gets the exit test: can you take your full history out without filing a legal request, and can software you control read your own diary? Portability is scored as a first-class property here, not a footnote.
• FOSS apps are evaluated by actually compiling and running them, not by reading the README.
• We do not publish "app X can't do Y" because a marketing page failed to mention Y. A negative capability claim needs an explicit statement from the operator or a failed test on a live account. We got this wrong once and the rule exists because of it.
• When a proprietary app does something better than the open-source alternatives, we say so. A publication that can only reach one conclusion is not doing evaluation, it is doing advocacy — and the position here is "self-host if you can", which is an argument that survives contact with the facts.
• Corrections are dated and listed at the bottom of the affected piece.
• Anyone who emails editor@selfhostednutrition.org with a verifiable factual correction gets it published, attributed if they want, anonymous if they want.

Methodology

For full details on how comparisons and audits are conducted, see the methodology page.

License

All written content is released under CC BY-SA 4.0. Code samples are released under MIT unless otherwise noted in the post. Reproduce, fork, translate, mirror — go ahead.