Free meal planner app with recipes and a grocery list

How does the meal planner app work?

1. Add your recipes

   Paste a recipe from a website, a message or an e-book into “Paste a recipe or a link”, paste the address of a recipe page, or scan a cookbook photo. You check every ingredient before it is saved. If you want to try the planner first, load the twelve starter recipes, from lagman and plov to pancakes.

2. Put them on days

   Tap + on a day and pick a recipe. Every day starts with dinner; add breakfast, lunch or a snack where you need them. On a computer you can drag a recipe from the side panel onto a day and drag planned meals from one day to another.

3. Open the shopping list

   The list adds up the ingredients of every planned meal, scaled to the servings you set, and sorts them by aisle. What you already have at home is kept apart.

4. Shop and tick off

   In-store mode gives big checkboxes and moves ticked items down. If someone else does the shopping, send the list with Share or WhatsApp.

Meal planner with grocery list: how the list adds up

The same ingredient from several recipes becomes one line. Two onions for the chili and one large onion for the soup show as 3 onions; 500 g of ground beef and 1 lb of ground beef become one amount in grams or pounds. Units of the same kind are converted and added: grams, kilograms, ounces and pounds by weight, milliliters, liters, spoons and cups by volume. When two recipes measure the same thing in different ways, both stay on the line, for example “200 g + 1 cup” of rice, because weight cannot be turned into volume without guessing.

Tap the arrow on a line to see which meals need it and how much each one uses. The list is sorted into nine aisles: Produce, Meat & fish, Dairy & eggs, Bakery, Pantry (dry goods), Spices & sauces, Frozen, Drinks and Other. If your store keeps something elsewhere, change its aisle once; the planner remembers it for that ingredient. In Settings you choose metric or US units for the totals.

How do I stop buying things I already have?

Two features compare the list with your kitchen. The Pantry view holds what you always have, such as salt, oil, rice or cumin: tick them once and they never appear on the shopping list again. They wait under “Already at home”, and Put back returns one for a single list when you run low.

For everything else there is “I have it” on every line. Half a bag of carrots in the fridge? Tap it and the carrots move to “Already at home” for this week’s list only. Tap water is never on the list to buy.

Weekly meal planner recipes: paste, link or cookbook photo

Most recipes reach the planner by copy and paste. The reader looks for the title, the servings (“Serves 4”, “für 4 Personen”) and the ingredient lines, and skips headings, ads, ratings and numbered steps. It understands recipes in English, German, French and Spanish, with amounts such as 1 ½ cups, 1/2 tsp, 2–3 cloves, 1,5 kg, EL, c. à soupe or cda. If a line comes out wrong, fix it in the check step before saving.

A link works when the recipe page includes recipe data for search engines, as many recipe sites do. Our server fetches that page and reads only this data; if a page has none or blocks the request, the planner says so and you paste the text instead. For a printed cookbook, Scan a cookbook photo reads the page with the engine of our AI Text Scanner, right in your browser.

Meal plan generator: let it suggest a week

Not sure what to cook? Suggest a week fills only the days without a dinner in the week you are looking at with recipes from your own book. It avoids repeating a dish within the week and, where your book allows, dishes from the week before. Meals you already planned stay as they are, and you can move, swap or remove any suggestion.

It is a free meal plan generator in the honest sense: it picks from what you like to cook. It does not count calories, follow diets or invent recipes.

Weekly meal planner for a family or for two

Set your household size in Settings, and every new meal is planned for that many servings. Each planned meal has its own stepper, so you can cook a double batch on Sunday and plan the leftovers for Monday. The shopping list scales every recipe to the servings you set, and the recipe view does the same with its scaler. That works for a weekly meal planner for a family of five as well as for two people who cook every other day.

Busy weeks need fewer decisions: plan three or four dinners, leave the other days empty or write a note such as “Leftovers” or “Eating out”, and let the list do the counting.

Is there a free meal planner app without an account?

This one is free, with no account, no subscription and no premium version. Your recipes, plans and lists are saved in your browser on this device and not on our server. Because nothing is stored online, your planner is not synced between devices: to move it from your computer to your phone, save a backup file in Settings, send it to yourself and restore it on the phone.

After the first visit the planner opens without internet, and you can add it to your home screen in most browsers. On Android with Chrome, an installed Meal Planner also appears in the share menu, so you can send it a recipe link from any app; on iPhone, copy and paste the link instead.

Prefer a printed plan?

Print turns the shopping list into a clean page without buttons. Prefer paper for the whole week? Planner Studio’s printable meal planner makes a weekly menu to fill in by hand and print as a PDF.

More Meal Planner pages

• Recipe to grocery list: paste a recipe, get the list
• Recipe organizer: your recipe book
• Shopping list app: sorted by aisle