What do I do if my MenuLens photo is blurry or recognition is wrong?

Move closer so menu text fills the viewfinder rather than zooming, adjust the angle so light is not reflecting off the menu, hold with two hands, and use multi-shot mode to capture each page of a large menu clearly. If the read is clean but the answer still looks wrong, re-shooting beats editing.

Does MenuLens support handwritten menus?

Yes, but accuracy depends on legibility. Handwriting is typically less accurate than print, so use good lighting and clear handwriting.

Can I rely on MenuLens AI output for allergies or religious dietary law?

No. MenuLens infers ingredients from the words printed on the menu, and that output is informational. It does not constitute medical or allergy advice. For allergies, religious dietary law such as halal or kosher, or personal health restrictions, ask restaurant staff directly and rely on the actual ingredients.

Is MenuLens free, and what does Premium actually unlock?

Menu recognition is free for your first 10 scans. Premium removes the scan count and unlocks AI ordering for you, the recommendation flow that builds a table from party size, budget, and what you avoid. Order chat, menu history, dish details, and dining preferences stay free. There is also a consumable 7-day day pass for a single trip.

How do I cancel a MenuLens subscription or get a refund?

Subscriptions are managed by Apple: iOS Settings → Apple ID → Subscriptions, find MenuLens and cancel at least 24 hours before the period ends to avoid renewal. You keep access until the current billing cycle ends. Refunds go through Apple at reportaproblem.apple.com.

How do I delete my MenuLens account, and what happens to my data?

Go to Me → Delete Account. Deleting signs you out and revokes your server-side session. Menu photos were never retained server-side, so there is nothing stored to remove there; to request erasure of any remaining account-associated records, or to opt out of anonymized usage analytics, email support@agentsmesh.ai.

MenuLens FAQ: Free Scans, Photos, Billing, and What AI Must Not Decide

The short answer

MenuLens photographs a restaurant menu and returns each dish in your language with its ingredients, how it is typically cooked, and its flavor profile. You get 10 free scans; Premium then removes the scan counter and adds AI ordering for you. Order chat, history, dish details, and dining preferences never paywall.

Three things settle most of the questions people arrive with here. Your menu photo is not kept on the server — it is compressed on your device, sent encrypted, forwarded to a third-party AI provider, and dropped; only anonymized usage metadata survives. Billing runs entirely through Apple, so cancellation and refunds are Apple operations, not support tickets. And the AI output is informational, never a safety verdict: for allergies, intolerances, and religious dietary law, you ask the staff. MenuLens is an iPhone and iPad app for iOS 17 or later, and the rest of this page is where it stops and what it costs.

Why you are reading an FAQ before a meal abroad

The query behind this page is rarely "how do I install an app." It is a specific unease: you are sitting in a restaurant in a city you have never visited, the waiter has put a page of unfamiliar script in front of you, and you are about to make three decisions with almost no information.

What is this dish? Name translation alone does not answer it. A word-for-word rendering can tell you the name and nothing about whether it is a soup, a grilled fish, or a stew heavy with chili.
What is in it? The one that frightens people, because a serious allergy makes a wrong guess expensive.
How do I order it? Pointing at a photograph feels risky when the answer is no, and pointing at text you cannot read is worse.

Most menu translators answer the first and leave the other two to nerve. That gap — plus the boring questions about what a subscription does to your photos and your card — is what this page is for.

What the free tier gives you, and where billing actually lives

Ten free scans is enough to find out whether the app is any good, and the shape of what is behind the counter is narrow:

Menu scans: 10 free. Counted per scan, not per menu, so a four-page menu photographed with multi-shot stitching costs more than one does.
Premium removes the counter. The paywall's own phrasing is blunt — scans stop counting, so splitting a long menu or re-shooting a blurry page no longer costs anything.
AI ordering is Premium from the first tap, not after the free scans run out. It is the one capability with no free tier.
Order chat, menu history, dish details, and dining preferences stay free, unlimited, and are never counted against the quota.

Three ways to pay, and the difference matters on a short trip. A 7-day day pass is a consumable purchase — it does not renew and never becomes a subscription. A monthly plan and a yearly plan are auto-renewing subscriptions grouped under MenuLens Premium. At US base prices the day pass and the monthly plan are $4.99 and the yearly plan is $24.99; other territories differ, and the live price Apple shows in-app is the one that applies.

Subscriptions renew unless you cancel at least 24 hours before the period ends, at iOS Settings → Apple ID → Subscriptions → MenuLens. Cancelling leaves access intact until the current cycle ends rather than cutting it off on the spot. Refunds are Apple's decision, not MenuLens's — they go through reportaproblem.apple.com. Nothing here needs a support reply.

Photographing a menu means photographing a restaurant, and restaurants contain other people. What happens, in order:

On your device, the image is compressed before anything leaves the phone.
In transit, it goes over HTTPS/TLS to the backend, which forwards the image and its text to a third-party AI model provider that performs recognition, translation, and dish descriptions. Depending on routing, that provider may be in mainland China or the United States — the privacy policy says so plainly, and it is worth knowing before you point the camera in a country with strict data rules.
On the server, your menu photos are not stored. What is retained is anonymized usage metadata: a request identifier, which model ran, token counts, latency, and whether an image was included. Your menu sessions and the photos themselves live on your device, and you delete them.
For training, your photos are not used to train AI models without an explicit, separate opt-in.

Smaller things worth knowing. Voice translation in the waiter chat runs through Apple's Speech framework. Location is optional, network-derived rather than GPS, and reduced to a country-level region hint you can turn off. Analytics are anonymized to a per-installation identifier.

The one thing AI output must never decide

MenuLens output is informational. It does not constitute medical, allergy, or dietary advice. That is not boilerplate over a real risk. The ingredients on a dish page are inferred by a model from the text printed on the menu, not read from the kitchen's recipe. A menu may not list the cooking oil, the stock, or a cross-contamination risk, and a translation of a regional dish name may land on the wrong familiar dish entirely.

So the rule is blunt: for allergies, intolerances, halal, kosher, vegetarian requirements, or any personal health restriction, the answer comes from the restaurant staff or the actual ingredients — never from a photo of a page. A generated reference image for a dish the menu does not illustrate is likewise an illustration from the description, not a photograph of what will arrive.

The same caution applies more mildly to recommendations. AI ordering assembles a table from party size, budget, and preferences you set. It is a grounded suggestion drawn from what is printed in front of you — not a safety check, and it has no knowledge of what is in the kitchen.

When recognition goes wrong, and what the app does about it

The capture geometry is covered in the getting-started guide; this is what happens to the result once the shutter has fired.

A bad read is corrected by re-shooting, not editing. A second capture under better light is faster than reasoning about a garbled transcription, and on a free scan it costs you one of ten.
Dish names are always kept beside the original. When the ordering goes sideways, what resolves it is being able to point at the printed characters rather than attempt a pronunciation.
Prices are preserved in the original currency rather than converted, so a converted number never quietly becomes the number you are handed at the bill.
Unknown things are marked unknown. The recognizer reports an undetermined currency or region rather than guessing. Cuisine style, price range, restaurant type and footer text are optional, so a missing price range is a normal state, not a failed scan.
No internet means no app. Every AI, OCR, and translation step runs over the network. Offline, MenuLens does nothing at all.

Because recognition runs server-side, an account is required, and sign-in is Apple-only — which is why the menu screens never reach your contacts or your other photos. Credentials sit in the Keychain. The app is rated 4+; the terms set 13 as the minimum age to use it.

Deleting your account is Me → Delete Account, which signs you out and revokes your server-side session. Because photos were never stored server-side, there is nothing retained to delete there; to request erasure of any remaining account records, or to opt out of anonymized usage analytics, email [email protected] — opt-out is by request, the one place self-service stops. For anything else: in-app Me → Help & Feedback, or the same address, which typically answers within 24 hours.

What MenuLens does differently

The differentiator here is not a better translation — it is that the boundaries are stated where you will actually hit them, and the commercial ones are narrow.

Premium is two things, not twenty. Unlimited scans and AI ordering; chat, history, dish details, and preferences stay free, and there are no ads, no user-generated content, and no unrestricted web access.
The reasoning stays visible. Picks are filtered using the tastes, restrictions, and allergens you provide, and the basis is shown rather than hidden — a filter you cannot inspect is one you cannot correct.
A day pass exists for a trip, so a two-week holiday needs no subscription you must remember to cancel.
Photos stay local. The server keeps usage metadata, not your menus.
And the honest limit: none of this makes an inferred ingredient list trustworthy. It makes the guessing legible, which is a smaller claim.

The decision you can now make

You do not need to trust MenuLens with the one question that matters. Use it for what it is good at — turning a page of unfamiliar script into dishes you can picture, with ingredients, method, and flavor — and ask the staff for anything health-critical. Ten free scans is enough to find out whether that division of labor works for you; after that, a $4.99 day pass is there precisely for someone who does not want a subscription hanging over a two-week trip.

Then photograph the menu.