What Minthe actually does
Logging is free forever. The analysis is the paid part. Everything below is marked.
Getting it logged, fast enough that you keep doing it
The best tracking method is the one you are still using in three weeks, so there are four ways in and you pick per meal rather than committing to one.
Type it Free
Most meals are things you eat often.
Search the food database, or save a meal once and re-log it in a tap. The 349-food trigger database ships with the app and is also published free as the FODMAP food list.
Barcode lookup Free
A packaged product you buy every week should not need typing out.
Scan the barcode and the product resolves to its stored ingredient data. Where a barcode matches, that authored record wins over a model estimate, because a real ingredient list beats a guess.
AI meal photo Free to try
Typing out a restaurant plate is exactly the friction that ends most food diaries.
Photograph the meal and it is broken into components. The extraction is deliberately biased toward the things that matter for triggers and demotes incidental oils and condiments, so you get "onion, cream, wheat" rather than a garnish inventory. Every install gets 7 free scans to start, then 3 free a week. Premium raises that to 50 a week, Elite to 150.
Hidden-trigger label scan Free to try
"Natural flavors" can hide the thing that sets you off, and inulin is in half the protein bars on the shelf.
Point it at an ingredients list and the E-number and alias dictionary flags dairy, FODMAP sources, fermented and histamine-liberating ingredients, gums and sweeteners. It carries a plant-milk false-positive guard, because naive matching flags oat milk for things that are not in it. It draws on the same scan allowance as meal photos.
Composite foods Free
A flat white is coffee and milk, and counting it as one thing loses half the information.
A drink or bowl logs as one item with its real macros, plus attribution-only parts beneath it. So a flat white counts as a caffeine exposure and a lactose exposure without double-counting the milk. Swappable parts are slots: set your usual milk once, override it on any single meal.
Recording how you actually feel
Bloating, in detail Free
"Bloated" covers a lot of different experiences.
Severity, timing and location. Severity reads as more or less, never as good or bad, and nothing here scores you.
Stool tracking Free
It is the most useful thing you can bring to a gastroenterologist and the easiest to forget by evening.
Bristol type 1 to 7, frequency, urgency, evacuation quality and color flags. The scale itself is explained on our free Bristol chart.
The rest of the symptom set Free
Gut symptoms rarely arrive alone.
Gas, pain, burping, nausea, reflux, fatigue and brain fog, each logged in a few taps.
IBS-SSS severity scoring Free
You need a way to tell whether things are actually improving over months, not just today.
The IBS Severity Scoring System (Francis et al., 1997): a five-item check-in, a banded score, and a prompt after 28 days. It is a published instrument your clinician may already recognize, which is the reason we use it rather than a score of our own.
Red-flag triage Free
Some symptoms mean stop tracking and get assessed.
A one-time check for the symptoms that need a clinician rather than a diary. A positive answer pauses insights, shows a clinician banner and blocks intensive protocols, because continuing to hunt for trigger foods on top of those is the wrong thing to be doing. Only the resulting flag is stored, never which symptoms you ticked. See the red flag list.
The drivers that are not food
This is where most food diaries fall down. Stress, sleep and your cycle are treated as drivers in their own right rather than as noise to filter out, because for a lot of people they explain more than the food does.
Apple Health overlays Free
You already have this data and re-typing it is how tracking dies.
Sleep including deep-sleep stages, resting heart rate, steps as an activity proxy, and menstrual cycle, pulled in automatically. Why the cycle matters so much is covered in bloating and your menstrual cycle.
Stress and daily context Free
A food eaten in a terrible week is not the same exposure as the same food in a calm one.
A quick daily rating, alongside water intake. This is what lets the analysis tell a trigger apart from a marker for bad weeks, which is a distinction a food-only diary cannot make. See stress and gut symptoms.
Meal timing and gut rest Free
When you eat is a variable under test, not just what.
Inter-meal gaps, eating window, overnight rest and grazing frequency, with the familiar 12:12, 14:10 and 16:8 presets and an optional usual start time. You set which days the schedule applies, and off-schedule days are skipped in trends rather than counted against you. A 30-day card shows nightly rest against your goal.
Working out what is actually going on
This is the part that separates a diary from an answer, and it is the paid half of the product. The whole method is published.
The correlation engine Premium
A diary tells you what happened. It does not tell you what is causing it.
Each food is compared against your own base rate, not against a population average, and reported as a risk ratio with a Wilson confidence interval. A suspect only surfaces once it clears four gates: enough separate exposures, a large enough effect, an interval that excludes no effect, and a real contrast against your baseline.
Correction for testing many foods at once Premium
Examine fifty foods and two will look significant by pure chance. That is arithmetic, not bad luck.
A Benjamini-Yekutieli false discovery rate correction is applied. Without it, any app examining a long food list will hand you confident false positives, and you will remove foods you did not need to remove.
Delayed reactions Premium
A reaction four hours after lunch gets blamed on dinner.
Four onset windows: 0 to 2 hours, 2 to 6 hours, same day and next day. GOS and fructans in particular are commonly delayed, which is why a single same-day window misattributes a large share of reactions.
FODMAP exposure counted by dose Premium
A slice of apple and a bowl of cauliflower are not the same exposure.
A meal counts as an exposure to a FODMAP group only when the measured dose clears a threshold, rather than because a tag was applied. A dose can only ever demote an exposure, and only where there is an actual figure behind it.
Unlogged days treated as unknown Free
Scoring a missed day as symptom-free quietly biases every result you will ever get.
A day you did not log is excluded, never counted as a good day. This matters more than it sounds: gaps slow down how fast patterns emerge, but they do not corrupt them.
Proving it, instead of guessing
Guided with-and-without trials Premium
A correlation is a hypothesis. Cutting a food because of one bad week is not a test.
Minthe schedules repeated exposures with washout periods between them, then reports whether the effect held up. This is the step almost every other app skips, and it is the difference between narrowing your diet correctly and narrowing it on a hunch.
Timing tests Premium
Sometimes the problem is not the food.
The same controlled structure applied to meal timing and overnight rest, so you can find out whether spacing actually changes anything for you rather than assuming it does.
Structured programs Premium
Knowing you should do a reintroduction is not the same as doing one.
Guided multi-week protocols for the situations where food is not the whole story. Our free reintroduction planner covers the same structure on paper.
Test results, in context
Most people arrive with results already in hand, and a number on a PDF with no reference range is not much use.
Import your existing results Premium
A calprotectin result changes what you should be doing, and it should change what the app tells you.
Enter results from SIBO and IMO breath testing, fecal calprotectin, celiac serology and microbiome panels, with reference ranges applied. A GI-MAP import handles the panels people most often turn up with.
Tests rated by evidence, not by popularity Premium
The tests that market hardest are frequently the ones with the least behind them.
Results are tiered by how much the evidence actually supports them, so a validated marker carries more weight than one that does not. The same reasoning is published free at which gut tests are worth it and on IgG panels.
Results feed the analysis Premium
A positive result should re-order what gets investigated first.
Where a test result is relevant, it re-weights which suspects the engine prioritizes rather than sitting in a separate tab you never open.
Seeing it, and sharing it
Weekly digest and trends Free
You need to know whether this month is better than last, calmly.
A "this week" summary with week-over-week deltas and pattern summaries. Deltas read as more or less. There are no streaks, and a worse week is a datapoint rather than a failure.
CSV and clinician PDF export Free
A gastroenterologist has minutes, and screenshots of a dashboard are close to useless in an appointment.
A CSV of your raw logs and a PDF summary structured for a short consultation, including the IBS-SSS section. Both free, deliberately. See what your doctor actually needs.
Progress photos Free
Distension is visible, and memory of it is unreliable.
A grid and timeline with nearby trials and tests shown as context, side-by-side comparison, and optional face-blur before you share anything.
If you also want the numbers
Nutrition and macro mode Free
Some people came here to track intake deliberately, and hiding it helps nobody.
Calculated daily calorie and macro targets from your body metrics, with per-macro overrides, plus macro charts. It is a mode you choose at setup, not the default, and calorie estimates are a single dismissible secondary preference on the gut-focused setting. Nothing here scolds: over target is not a failure state.
Water and recipes Free
Small things that keep the picture complete.
Water as a first-class card with an optional target rendered as a gentle progress bar and never a streak, plus a recipe bank filterable by meal slot and protein with a seasoning guide derived per protein.
What Minthe deliberately does not do
Worth being explicit, because several of these are things you might expect.
- No gut health score. A single daily number has to produce a value even when there is not enough data, cannot be checked by you, and hides which food and at what dose. We use IBS-SSS instead, which is published and externally recognized. The longer argument.
- No diagnosis. Minthe surfaces hypotheses to discuss with a clinician. It is a wellness and self-tracking tool, not a medical device, and it will not tell you that you have IBS, SIBO or an intolerance.
- No streaks, no guilt states. Missing a day is a gap in the data, which the analysis handles, not a failure you get told about.
- No Android, no web app. iPhone only. If you are on Android, several of the alternatives we review will serve you better.
- No ads, and your data is not sold. Logs live on your device and sync only to your own private iCloud. The only thing that leaves is an optional AI scan, and what is kept is the foods it identified rather than the photo. How that works.
What it costs
Manual logging, the gut-rest timer, trends, reminders, export and red-flag triage are free and unlimited, permanently. Premium is $6.99 a month or $39.99 a year and raises AI scans from 3 free a week to 50, the correlation engine, guided trials, timing tests, the structured programs and lab test insights. Elite is $59.99 a year and raises the scan ceiling to 150 a week; every other feature is identical. Full pricing.
Minthe is a wellness and self-tracking tool, not a medical device. It does not diagnose or treat any condition and isn't a substitute for professional medical advice. If you have red-flag symptoms such as blood in your stool, unintentional weight loss, difficulty swallowing, persistent vomiting or a fever alongside gut symptoms, see a clinician rather than tracking them.
Frequently asked
What can I do without paying?
Unlimited manual meal and symptom logging, the gut-rest timer, basic trends, reminders, CSV and clinician-PDF export plus the red-flag triage check. None of it is time-limited. You also get 7 AI scans to start and 3 free every week after that. Putting a paywall on basic logging would starve the data the analysis depends on, which would make the paid product worse, so the free tier exists for a practical reason rather than as a trial.
What does the AI scan actually do?
Two different things. A meal photo is broken into likely components, biased toward the ones that matter for triggers and away from incidental oils and condiments. A packaged label is read for hidden triggers: the ingredient and E-number dictionary flags dairy, FODMAP sources, fermented and histamine-liberating ingredients, gums and sweeteners, including the aliases manufacturers use. Scans are metered, at 50 a week on Premium and 150 on Elite.
Does it do barcodes?
Yes, barcode lookup is there alongside photo and label scanning and typed entry. Barcodes are the fastest route for a packaged product you buy regularly. Where a barcode returns a match, the stored ingredient data is used rather than a model reading the packet, because an authored record beats an estimate.
Can I get my data out?
Yes, and it is free. CSV of your raw logs, and a clinician-oriented PDF summary designed to be readable in a short appointment rather than a screenshot dump. Your history is the asset you are building and an app you cannot export from is one you cannot leave, so this is deliberately not a paid feature.
Is there a gut health score?
No, deliberately, and we do not intend to add one. A daily score has to produce a number even on the days when there is not enough data to justify one, it cannot be checked by you, and it compresses away the part you need, which is which food and at what dose. For symptom severity Minthe uses IBS-SSS, a published questionnaire your clinician may already recognize, rather than a scale we invented.