Google Play Store and Apple App Store are filled with thousands of health and fitness apps that claim to help you do everything from monitoring your sleep to losing belly fat in 21 days.
Most of these apps barely manage to acquire enough users to justify their existence, let alone become massively profitable. In this light, MyFitnessPal’s widespread popularity is admirable and inspiring.
MyFitnessPal is hardly an overnight success. It has taken decades of hard work and perseverance to cement the company’s status as one of the most used fitness apps in the world.
If you’ve ever wondered just how successful MyFitnessPal really is or what number of people use the app, you’ve come to the right place.
This article is going to analyze MyFitnessPal’s revenue and user statistics to help you understand the app’s journey from its early days to its current financial and market position.
MyFitnessPal History
MyFitnessPal is a health and fitness tracking website and smartphone app that helps people monitor their calorie intake, keep an eye on their hydration levels, and follow their workouts.
It is designed to enable people to achieve their fitness and health goals by making it easy for them to record and keep tabs on relevant data like how much they’re eating and where their nutrition is lacking.
The story of how the company came to be founded lends credence to the saying that necessity is the mother of invention. It all began nearly two decades ago when the app’s founder Mike Lee began planning a beach wedding with his fiancee.
They both wanted to shed a few pounds so they could look their best for their wedding. To this end, they engaged the services of a fitness trainer who gave them a book with nutritional values for over 3,000 food types and a notepad to track the calories they consume.
Keeping track of their nutrition manually was too inefficient for Mike so he went looking for a simpler, time-saving solution.
Finding nothing among the then-existing platforms that met his needs, Mike—who had been fiddling with code since he was ten years old—decided to build one himself.
He created the MyFitnessTracker website and later the app which he released in September 2005 to help other people take charge of their fitness journey. In 2008, Mike invited his brother Albert Lee, a finance expert, to join the company as co-founder.
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Since its launch, MyFitnessPal has matured from being just a calorie counter to an essential fitness app with an impressive range of features.
MyFitnessPal allows people to stay on top of their weight loss or weight gain goals by tracking both the calories they consume and the calories they burn via exercise.
What makes it stand out from other tools in its category is its vast food database containing over 14 million food data. It provides access to accurate nutrition information for a variety of meals including grocery store staples, chain-restaurant menus, and custom recipes from other users.
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Instead of spending time reading food labels and manually tallying the information, users can just scan them or search for them by name and enter their serving size.
MyFitnessPal also gives users the option to add foods that are not in its database, log the workouts they do, and record how much water they drink.
MyFitnessPal then uses this information to calculate how many calories they’re burning and accurately predict future weight loss or weight gain.
With all these benefits, it’s easy to see why people from all walks of life favor MyFitnessPal over other calorie-tracking and fitness tools.
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MyFitnessPal Revenue
The following revenue statistics for MyFitnessPal offer an overview of the app’s past and current financial standing to enable you to interpret the company’s worth and prospective value.
1. MyFitnessPal received its first external backing of $18 million in 2013
Unlike a lot of technology companies, MyFitnessPal does not owe its success to series funding and angel investments. When the company first launched operations in 2005, it was financed out of the pocket of its founder, Mike Lee.
This continued until the company began generating its own revenue from advertising and could afford to hire more staff and pay them while still remaining profitable. Mike wanted the company to succeed on its own merits and at its own pace without external pressures pulling it in one direction or the other.
Consequently, the company refused to take funding because it considered that kind of investment to be an obligation, rather than a victory. It wasn’t until 2013, eight years after its launch, that MyFitnessPal secured the backing of external investors.
The bootstrapped start-up led by brothers Mike and Albert Lee raised $18 million in a series A round, spearheaded by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
At the time of this raise, MyFitnessPal already had 40 million downloads so there was no question about its success. The funding was meant to help the company expand its operations and grow at a faster pace than it had in the past.
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2. Under Armour acquired MyFitnessPal for $475 million in 2015
By 2015, MyFitnessPal had doubled its user base to reach 80 million. It had hired data scientists and product engineers to help it make creative use of its data to improve its offerings.
The health and nutrition tracking app was also one of the most popular digital fitness-oriented websites and applications in the world.
These achievements were some of the supporting factors that led sports apparel brand Under Armour to buy MyFitnessPal for a whopping $475 million in February of that year.
At the time of the acquisition, Under Armour was looking to become a connected fitness company so it made sense to leverage MyFitnessPal’s software and exploding popularity to achieve its ambitions.
Although MyFitnessPal continued to enjoy steady usage and revenue growth, Under Armour never quite succeeded in realizing its connected fitness aspirations.
In 2020, under the directive of a new CEO, Patrik Frisk, Under Armour decided to scale back on its technology initiatives and refocus more of its resources on building the apparel arm of the company.
In line with this new vision, Under Armour sold MyFitnessPal in 2020 to Francisco Partners, a private equity firm, for $345 million—$130 million lower than the price it paid to acquire the company five years earlier.
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3. In 2021, MyFitnessPal pocketed $171 million in total revenue
MyFitnessPal brings in millions of dollars every year. The company’s revenue has been growing steadily since its launch. According to Business of Apps, the calorie and fitness tracker earned $171 million in annual revenue, most of which came from premium subscriptions.
This amounted to a 67% year-on-year increase for the company. As impressive as this feat is, it didn’t happen overnight. MyFitnessPal has quietly enjoyed several record-breaking years in terms of the amount of revenue it generates.
In 2016, the company was only bringing in $51 million. This number rose to $56 million in 2017 and climbed even higher in 2018 to reach $76 million. In 2019, MyFitnessPal broke its own revenue ceiling, ending the year with $86 million on its books.
The pandemic and subsequent social isolation in 2020 led to a jump in the number of new users signing up for the service and resulted in MyFitnessPal earning $102 million that year.
My FitnessPal also claimed the second place spot after Calm for highest grossing apps in the health and fitness category that same year. It brought in more than $6.5 million in gross revenue from user spending,
MyFitnessPal’s strong financial statements, particularly in recent years, is as a result of its multiple streams of revenue. Even though the website and app are available for free, the company also rolled out a premium subscription service, granting users access to additional features and resources for $9.99 monthly or $49.99 yearly.
In addition, MyFitnessPal offers in-app purchases for those who want to unlock certain premium features like custom meal plans and comprehensive nutrition information without committing to a paid subscription.
MyFitnessPal also generates revenue through advertising. Interested brands can promote their products and services on the company’s website or app via video ads, banner ads, interstitial ads, and sponsored posts.
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4. MyFitnessPal generated in-app revenues of about $12 million in March 2023
MyFitnessPal doesn’t seem to be running out of steam just yet. It was crowned the leading app in the fitness and sport category in March 2023 for generating almost $12 million in combined in-app revenues from both Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
Strava, the second-highest-earning app for that month, only managed to bring in 7.31 million in combined revenue.
At this pace, MyFitnessPal might be on track to surpass its previous annual revenue records.
MyFitnessPal User Statistics
Here are some key statistics that can give you a better understanding of MyFitnessPal’s growing user base.
1. In 2018, MyFitnessPal had 19.1 million monthly active users in the United States
Despite the fact that hundreds of health and fitness apps are being released every other day, MyFitnessPal has consistently ranked at the top of the niche.
As of May 2018, MyFitnessPal was the second most popular health and fitness-oriented app in the United States based on the number of monthly active users.
The service had amassed an audience of over 19.1 million users who actively used the app or website on a monthly basis. It was only surpassed by Fitbit which ranked first amongst its peers with 27.4 million users.
Keep in mind that this figure only accounts for active users and not the total number of registered users. Nevertheless, it’s still an impressive feat for any app.
2. As of 2020, MyFitnessPal had 200 million users
At the time that Under Armour sold MyFitnessPal to Francisco Partners, it stated that the nutrition tracking service had over 200 million registered users.
However, there was nothing meteoric about the growth of the platform. It simply grew gradually from year to year. By 2015, two years after MyFitnessPal received its Serie A funding, the app and website’s user base had grown to 50 million.
In 2016, the number climbed to 75 million, then 85 million in the following year. The service experienced a massive increase in its number of new signings in 2018, bringing its user count to 150 million.
By 2019, MyFitnessPal had garnered 30 million additional users. From there it was just a minor jump to the 200 million mark.
As astounding as this feat is, it took 15 years for the company to hit this milestone. MyFitnessPal’s journey is not one of overnight success but of grit, discipline, and the result of building a truly innovative product.
3. MyFitnessPal was downloaded over 19 million times in 2021
According to Business of Apps, MyFitnessPal was one of the most downloaded apps on Google Play and App Store in 2021. It ranked in fourth place with 19.4 million downloads.
However, MyFitnessPal generated the most user sessions—1.81 billion—compared to other health and fitness apps that year. The service was also shortlisted as one of Google Play’s Best of 2021 apps.
MyFitnessPal continued to maintain its status as one of the most popular apps on the block in the first half of 2022. It received 4.6 million downloads in the United States alone
Conclusion
Not every start-up’s story is destined to involve hyper-growth or seemingly viral success but that doesn’t make their achievements less praiseworthy. MyFitnessPal is proof that with the right idea, victory is around the corner; it might just take a while to find.
Despite being nearly two decades old, MyFitnessPal remains one of the top-ranking and grossing fitness and calorie trackers in the industry.
It has attained this feat by being a one-of-a-kind solution at the beginning and having one of the easiest-to-use and most comprehensive offerings available to date.
Since MyFitnessPal’s release, it has continued to grow in market size and profitability and there’s no reason to believe it will experience a revenue or user crunch anytime soon.
