Health & wellness
Plate Check — Low-FODMAP Stack Coach
A low-cost app that tells IBS sufferers whether an entire meal, not just each food, is still low-FODMAP.
In plain English
- What category is this?
- Clinics, coaches, and consumers buy for care, fitness, or wellbeing workflows. Here the focus is consumer health subscription.
- The idea, briefly
Build a portion-aware meal stacker that totals FODMAP load across a whole plate using serving-size data. The novel surface is meal-level aggregation only: Monash already guides reintroduction through its Diary, and Fig is per-product scanning. Caveat: Monash does not publish gram totals (so 'no one totals a meal' is based on its design, not from a quoted denial), and Fig users explicitly request a FODMAP intake tracker.
More ▾- What buyers expect
People comparing tools like Monash University FODMAP Diet, Cara Care, Fig: Food Scanner & Discovery expect the basics to work without surprise fees or missing pieces. The loud complaints are: Monash shows a traffic light per food but does not provide FODMAP gram totals, so users building a plate of several green foods cannot tell if the combination is still low-FODMAP; and users explicitly ask Monash to add a build-your-plate meal check. Verbatim review by Cynthia Vandamas (Aug 5 2026).
More ▾
- Sources
- 9
- Checked
- 8
- Competitors
- 4
- Gaps
- 5
- Page checked
- 8 · 89%
- Snippet only
- 1 · 11%
- Documented
- 8 · 80%
- Interpreted
- 2 · 20%
- pricing3
- complaint3
- playbook1
- revenue1
- market1
Competitors
4- Cara CareFree
- Fig: Food Scanner & Discovery$7.49/mo
- NervaFree
Parsed from public pricing blurbs (entry paid tier when available). Max in set: $7.49/mo.
| Competitor | From | Free tier | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monash University FODMAP Diet | Free | Yes | monashfodmap.com✓ |
| Cara Care | Free | Yes | apps.apple.com✓ |
| Fig: Food Scanner & Discovery | $7.49/mo | Yes | apps.apple.com✓ |
| Nerva | Free | Yes | nervahealth.com✓ |
What customers complain about
5| Gap | Src |
|---|---|
Monash shows a traffic light per food but does not provide FODMAP gram totals, so users building a plate of several green foods cannot tell if the combination is still low-FODMAP. | |
Users explicitly ask Monash to add a build-your-plate meal check. Verbatim review by Cynthia Vandamas (Aug 5 2026). | |
Fig scans single products and lacks a FODMAP intake tracker, so a low-FODMAP user still does the stacking math by hand. Verbatim App Store review (flowering_grapevine, Jan 2025). | |
Monash's food guide search and sensitivity filter are reported as frustrating and serving sizes can be unrealistically small. Verbatim review by Tam Hamilton (Aug 27 2026). | |
Cara Care prices its dietitian-guided program at a $89.99 in-app premium bundled with a 12-week program plus unlimited dietitian chat, |
Documented Interpreted
How competitors find customers
3| Tactic | Src |
|---|---|
| Recruit gastroenterologists and dietitians and give patients a referral discount — copy Nerva's clinician webform that grants 25% off and sends progress reports back to the clinic… | nervahealth.com✓ |
| Seed through the dietitian channel: clinicians already recommend FODMAP apps to clients, so a free clinician dashboard turns dietitians into a repeatable acquisition source. | nervahealth.com✓ |
| Give away the single-product scan for free and charge for the meal-level stack check, mirroring Fig's free-scanner acquisition hook and paid Fig+ (unlimited scans) tier. | apps.apple.com✓ |
Your angle & pricing wedge
| Piece | Claim | Src |
|---|---|---|
| Angle | A portion-aware meal stacker that totals FODMAP load across a whole plate using serving-size data. | monashfodmap.com✓ |
| Wedge | Sell the software-only portion math at $29/year or $3.99/month with a free tier, positioned below Cara Care's $89.99 dietitian programme and Fig's $34.99-$69.9… | apps.apple.com✓ |
How others got traction
3| Move | Why | Src |
|---|---|---|
| Monash built its app from the same research team that created the low-FODMAP diet, | Founder-attributed cause: the Play listing states the app 'comes directly from the research team at Monash', | play.google.com✓ |
| Nerva recruits gastroenterologists and dietitians who refer patients through a secure form for 25%… | Founder-attributed cause: Nerva positions the program as guideline-recognised and referable, | nervahealth.com✓ |
| Fig pairs a free barcode scanner with a paid Fig+ tier (Restaurants, Multiple Figs, | The free scanner is the acquisition hook and the scan/feature limits are the paywall. | apps.apple.com✓ |
Market heat
The Monash low-FODMAP app shows 500K+ downloads and '#1 top paid medical' on the India Google Play storefront (documented), which is consistent with a large paid appetite for FODMAP food data; the 'large paid appetite' reading is my inference.
More ▾Health and fitness apps lose roughly 70% of users within the first 100 days, so a daily-use job like meal checking matters more than a one-off reference purchase.
More ▾
Revenue signals
3| Signal | Src |
|---|---|
Nerva says it has helped 300,000+ people and works with 8,000 active US providers . | nervahealth.com✓ |
Monash's one-time $7.99 app shows 500K+ Google Play downloads and the '#1 top paid medical' rank on the India storefront (source 5, self-reported); | play.google.com✓ |
Fig reports 1M+ members and a free-plus-Fig+ model; it publishes no revenue figure, and the cited Sensor Tower page returned no content. | apps.apple.com✓ |
Should you build this?
Who pays: adults doing a low-FODMAP diet for IBS, who today juggle a $7.99 per-food list (Monash), a free/FODMAP-capable scanner with paid tiers (Fig), and a $199/year hypnotherapy app (Nerva). What job they need done: know whether a whole plate of individually-green foods is still safe. That job is genuinely open — Monash publishes no FODMAP gram totals and says tracking grams 'is not necessary', users are asking Monash for a 'build your plate' button, Fig users request a FODMAP intake tracker, and no source shows any incumbent totalling a meal. The reintroduction half of the original pitch is NOT open: Monash's Diary already guides reintroduction, so the differentiator must be meal-level stacking alone. Charge a low monthly fee ($3.99) or $29/year for that, with a real free tier, and sell through dietitians and GIs the way Nerva does.
More ▾
All sources
9| Source | Kind | Status | Accessed |
|---|---|---|---|
Monash University FODMAP Diet App help monashfodmap.com | pricing | page checked | 2026-10-04 |
Cara Care: IBS, FODMAP Tracker — App Store apps.apple.com | pricing | page checked | 2026-10-04 |
| pricing | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
Nerva for Clinicians — referral program and pricing nervahealth.com | playbook | page checked | 2026-10-04 |
| complaint | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
| complaint | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
| complaint | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
| revenue | snippet only | 2026-10-04 | |
| market | page checked | 2026-10-04 |