Why Carbsnap Exists
A family, a diagnosis, and free carb counting.When our daughter Julieta was 12, she was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.
Anyone who's lived through that diagnosis knows what the first months are like. Overnight, every meal became a math problem: how many carbs are on this plate? Not roughly — precisely enough to dose insulin. We counted at breakfast, at school, at restaurants, at birthday parties. We were often wrong, and being wrong had consequences measured in blood sugar.
We couldn't fix the diagnosis. So we did what our family knew how to do: we built something.
The first Carbsnap wasn't an app — it was a website, built in 2018, where anyone could practice estimating carbs on photos of real meals and compare their answers against registered dietitians. Thousands of estimates later, we'd learned two things. First, practice works. Second, human carb estimation fails in systematic ways: people underestimate the carbs in fruits and vegetables by half, overestimate them in meats, and are surprisingly good at pasta. Our son Benicio analyzed that data and published the findings on our blog.
That dataset — real meals, rated by dietitians — turned out to be exactly what was needed to test a new generation of AI. In 2025, we rebuilt Carbsnap around a camera: photograph the plate, get the carbs in about three seconds. We presented the accuracy methodology at the 2025 ADA Scientific Sessions: on our evaluation photos, Carbsnap's estimates are comparable to dietitian consensus.
Julieta is 23 now. She's been Carbsnap's product manager since she was 14, and first author on our ADA poster. Carbsnap is what we wish someone had handed us in that first month.
That's also why carb counting in Carbsnap is free, forever — no signup, no payment method, no trial that quietly converts. A newly diagnosed family shouldn't have to subscribe to figure out dinner. The optional subscription (meal history and trends) and our practitioner dashboard for dietitians keep the lights on.
— Flo Mazzoldi, founder · Minnesota
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