The food tracker that needs no account is finally here.

Most food tracker apps ask you to create an account before you can do anything. You sign up, verify your email, set a password, go through an onboarding flow, and then finally get to the thing you wanted: tracking your groceries.

Stoq skips all of that. You open the app, scan your first item, and you are tracking. No email, no account, no password. Your data lives on your phone, not on someone else's server.

Today, after months of development and testing, Stoq is live on the App Store.

What Stoq actually does

The idea behind Stoq is simple: your kitchen is a store, and you should know what is in it. Not a rough mental estimate, not a glance at the fridge. An actual inventory, updated in real time, with alerts when things are running low or about to expire.

Here is how it works in practice.

Scan your groceries when you get home

You come back from the supermarket with a bag of groceries. Instead of putting everything away and forgetting about it, you spend 90 seconds scanning barcodes. Stoq looks up each product in Open Food Facts, fills in the name and category automatically, and adds it to your inventory with a date stamp.

If a product is not in the database, you can add it manually in about 10 seconds. Name, category, quantity, expiry date. Done.

Let AI do the heavy lifting

Scanning individual barcodes is fast. But Stoq also has two AI-powered shortcuts that make the whole process even quicker.

The first is label scanning. Point your camera at a product label, and Apple's Vision framework reads the text and fills in the product name automatically. This works offline, on your device, with no cost and no limit.

The second is AI receipt and shelf scanning (PRO feature). Take a photo of a grocery receipt or your fridge shelf, and Stoq identifies multiple products at once. A receipt with 12 items becomes 12 inventory entries in one tap. A photo of your pantry shelf adds everything visible to your stock. This uses Claude AI to interpret the image, and it works in both English and Polish.

Track quantities with batches

Stoq uses a batch system that mirrors how you actually shop. When you buy milk twice in a week, those are two separate batches: different purchase dates, potentially different expiry dates. Stoq tracks both. When you use the milk, it removes from the oldest batch first (first in, first out), which means the expiry date shown is always accurate.

This sounds like a small detail, but it makes a significant difference. Without batch tracking, an app might show "Milk: 2 units, expires June 15" when you actually have one that expires June 14 and one that expires June 18. The distinction matters when you are trying to use things before they go bad.

Get alerts before food expires

Every morning, Stoq checks your inventory and sends a push notification if anything is expiring within the next 24 hours. You choose the time. You can also set low-stock alerts: if yogurt drops below 1 unit, Stoq adds it to your shopping list automatically.

These notifications are generated locally on your device. They work offline. And unlike most apps, they are actually useful because Stoq knows you have 200ml of milk left in a carton that expires tomorrow, not just that you have "Milk" in your inventory.

The feature that changes everything: financial tracking

Knowing what you have is useful. Knowing what you are wasting in euros or dollars is motivating.

Stoq lets you add a price to any product. When you mark something as wasted (a separate action from using it up), Stoq records the financial loss. Over time, the Stats screen shows you a breakdown: how much you bought, how much you used, and how much you threw away.

For most households, the first month of tracking produces a number that surprises them. Research from the USDA puts average household food waste at around $1,600 per year in the US, or roughly $130 per month. Stoq shows you your actual number, not an average.

"Households are the largest source of food waste in the US. The average family of four loses approximately $1,500 to $2,000 worth of food each year."

USDA Economic Research Service, Household Food Security in the United States

The bar chart above shows US averages. Your actual numbers will differ based on your household size and shopping habits. The point is not the specific figures: it is that Stoq makes the invisible visible. You cannot fix what you cannot measure.

Privacy as a design decision, not an afterthought

Most apps treat privacy as a compliance checkbox. Stoq was designed around it from the start.

Your pantry data never leaves your phone. Stoq uses a local SQLite database, which means your product names, quantities, prices, and habits are stored on your device and nowhere else. There is no Stoq server that knows what you have in your fridge.

The only time data leaves your device is for two specific features: barcode lookups (a query to Open Food Facts with just the barcode number, no personal data attached) and AI receipt scanning (a photo sent to Anthropic's Claude API, processed and immediately discarded). Neither feature requires an account. Neither stores anything server-side.

This is the reason Stoq does not require an email or account to use. There is simply no account needed. Your data is yours.

FREE vs PRO: what you get without paying

Stoq has a free tier that is genuinely useful, not just a bait-and-switch. Here is what you get without spending anything:

Feature	FREE	PRO ($4.99/mo)
Full pantry inventory (unlimited products)	Yes	Yes
Barcode scanning	Yes	Yes
Apple Vision label scanning (local, no cost)	Yes	Yes
Expiry date alerts (push notifications)	Yes	Yes
Low-stock alerts and auto shopping list	Yes	Yes
1 free AI receipt or shelf scan (trial)	Yes	Yes
Statistics and charts (usage, waste trends)	No	Yes
Financial waste tracking (how much you lost)	No	Yes
AI receipt and shelf scan (100 per month)	No	Yes

PRO also comes as a one-time lifetime purchase at $59.99, which is worth it if you plan to use Stoq long term. There is also a 7-day free trial on the monthly and annual plans, so you can try everything before deciding.

How Stoq compares to alternatives

There are other pantry apps in the App Store. Most of them share a common approach: they require an account, sync data to a cloud server, and charge a monthly fee for features that should be basic.

Stoq takes the opposite position on most of these decisions.

• NoWaste requires account creation and stores your data on their servers. Stoq stores nothing server-side.
• Pantry Check has no AI scanning. Stoq has both label scanning (local) and full AI receipt and shelf scanning.
• KitchenPal focuses on recipes, not inventory accuracy. Stoq is built around inventory first.
• Fridgely is US-centric with no local language support. Stoq auto-detects your language (English or Polish) and adapts accordingly.

The combination of no-account setup, local storage, AI scanning, and financial waste tracking is not available in any other single app on the App Store today.

Five things to do in your first 10 minutes with Stoq

Getting started is fast. Here is what to do when you first open the app:

1. Open your fridge and scan the items you use most. Start with 5 to 10 products. Do not try to add your entire kitchen on day one.
2. Add quantities and expiry dates as you go. The form pre-fills most data from the barcode. You just confirm and add a date.
3. Try the AI label scan on one product. Point your camera at the label without a barcode. Watch it read the product name automatically.
4. Set your notification time. Go to Info, then Settings. Pick the time you want daily expiry alerts delivered.
5. Enable minimum stock levels for the products you always need. Milk, eggs, bread. When they drop below your minimum, Stoq generates a shopping list automatically.

After one week of consistent use, you will have a clear picture of how quickly your household goes through different products. After one month, you will have data on what you are wasting and how much it costs.

What comes next

Stoq launched today with a focused set of features. The roadmap includes additions that will expand what the app can do for you and your household:

• Family sharing: A home admin manages the pantry, family members can scan purchases and removals from their own phones. All data stays on the admin's device. No cloud sync required.
• Recipe suggestions: Based on what you actually have at home, especially items expiring soon, Stoq will suggest meals you can make without going shopping.
• Shopping cart integration: Send your Stoq shopping list to a grocery delivery service with one tap. Carrefour, local stores, and others are planned.
• Android: An Android version is planned after the iOS launch stabilizes.

These features will be added based on what users actually ask for. If you try the app and have a request, use the in-app contact form (Info, then Contact) to send it directly.

The bottom line

The average household wastes around $1,600 worth of food per year, according to WRAP's household food waste research. That figure comes from not knowing what you have, buying duplicates, and losing track of expiry dates.

Stoq was built to solve that problem without asking you to create an account, agree to data collection, or pay before you have seen any value. Download it, scan a few things, and see how it feels. The first AI scan is free. The core features are free. And your data never leaves your phone.

That is the version 1.0. Everything from here is additional.