Cronometer
👤 Aaron Davidson (CS grad and CRON-diet obsessive who built the tool for himself in 2005; his own pedantry became the product's moat.)🌐 siteLinkedIn
A 2005 hobby diet calculator that became the nutrition tracker biohackers, athletes, and dietitians actually trust.
Will it work? · our read
Accuracy won. No trick, just patience and rigor: he out-cared the giants on data quality for two decades and let a nutrition-nerd niche compound into millions.
01How the money moves
Free app with lab-verified data pulls in serious trackers
→
Free tier shows ads; power users hit feature limits
→
They upgrade to Gold (about $50/yr), plus Pro seats for clinics
02The numbers
$3.8M
revenue est. (2024)
Latka
3.5M
users
Latka
82+
nutrients/food
site
Bootstrapped, $0 outside funding. Latka
About $480K/yr self-reported in 2017; about $3.8M estimated by 2024.
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(demo: preview the full teardown)Sourcesupdated · daily
Indie Hackers — Davidson's own interview ($40K/mo, May 2017)Latka — $3.8M revenue estimate, 3.5M users, $0 raised (2024)Cronometer — lab-verified USDA and NCCDB data sourcesRevelstoke Review — hobby to million-dollar startupBoringCashCow — $40K/mo teardown
Bootstrapped and $0 raised is confirmed (Latka plus founder). The cleanest first-party revenue is Davidson's own 2017 Indie Hackers post: about $40K/mo (about $480K/yr). The $3.8M/2024 headline is not founder-reported -- it is Latka's own proprietary estimate; Latka's page states it has not interviewed the company's management and the figure "is an estimation." A second aggregator, KonaEquity, models revenue at roughly $5.3M for a similar period, and Cronometer's own marketing now claims 10M+ users against the 3.5M Latka cites -- all signs the post-2017 numbers are soft, model-based estimates, not confirmed figures. So sourced is EST and verified is false. The "deliberate opposite of MyFitnessPal" framing rests on Davidson's own words about a "pedantic focus on getting the data correct" [our read on the contrarian-bet angle]. No numbers invented. We never score you.