The short version
- Most free tiers are a paid product with a narrower door: one week, five imports, one other person.
- If you are leaving Mealime, Meals Hub gives away the most. Starting from nothing, Samsung Food has the broadest free account.
- Plan to Eat is a 14 day trial and Paprika is bought once, so neither is free.
- Simmerset's free tier has no time limit and covers one active week, five imports a week and two adults.
Free almost never means a free product. In meal planning it usually means a paid product with a narrower door. You can plan, but one week at a time. You can import recipes, but five of them. You can share the list, but with one person. The apps that look most generous in a store listing are often the ones that put the cap somewhere you will not reach for a month.
This guide says what each free tier actually hands you, and where it stops.
If you are leaving Mealime, Meals Hub gives away the most: it is free, it carries the Mealime recipe catalog, and it works even with no Albertsons store near you. If you are starting from nothing and want one free account that covers the widest range of jobs, Samsung Food is the most generous general free tier here. Simmerset, which we build, has a narrower free tier than either of them, and the Simmerset section says exactly how narrow.
Everything below about somebody else’s app comes from that company’s own pages, read on September 20, 2026. Where a price is not published on the pages we read, this guide says so instead of guessing.
How Free Meal Planning Apps Usually Work
This category has four kinds of free, and one that only looks free. It helps to know which one you are looking at before you read a single feature list.
A free tier is a permanent account with caps. It never expires and it never asks for a card. Most of the apps here work this way.
A free trial is the whole product for a fixed number of days. Plan to Eat is the example in this guide: fourteen days, then it stops. That is a fine way to evaluate an app and a bad way to plan meals for a year.
Free because somebody else pays is the Meals Hub model. It sits inside a grocery company’s own apps and asks you for nothing.
Free because you run it is Mealie. There is no subscription at all, and the price is a server you look after.
The one that only looks free is pay once, use forever. Paprika sells that way. It is cheap over five years and it is not free on day one.
Within the free tier group, the caps land on the same five things almost every time. Once you can name them, you can read any pricing page in a minute.
- Saved weeks. The cheapest thing to limit and the one that bites first. A free tier that holds one active week is useful for shopping and useless for looking back at what you cooked in March. Reusable weeks and plan history are the most common paid upgrade in this category.
- Recipe imports. Pulling a recipe off a web page costs the vendor real money, because somebody has to parse the page and keep the parser working as sites change. So imports get metered: five a week, some number a month, an allowance that is fine until you spend one evening collecting recipes and hit the wall.
- Nutrition. Calories, macros and per serving breakdowns are expensive to produce and easy to fence off. Free usually gets you a recipe. Paid gets you the numbers underneath it.
- People. The list is worth more when two people can see it, so sharing gets capped by headcount. One extra adult free, more for money. Household plans are where several of these apps make their margin.
- Automation. Anything that thinks for you: proposing a week, swapping a dinner, handling leftovers, honoring a budget. This is the expensive part to build and the first thing to go behind a paywall.
Two things are almost never capped, and should not be: getting your data out, and safety. If an app will not let you export, or asks you to pay before it will take an allergy seriously, that tells you something about the company that no feature table will.
Meals Hub
What the Free Tier Includes
Meals Hub is where the Mealime recipes went. It is free, it carries the Mealime catalog across, and it lives inside the Albertsons family of grocery apps and websites. Albertsons operates under a lot of banner names, so there is a fair chance one of those apps is already on your phone and you have never thought of it as a meal planner.
It also works for households with no Albertsons store anywhere near them, which catches people out. You are not required to shop there to plan there.
For anyone who spent two years inside Mealime, that is about as soft a landing as this category offers. Same recipes, same path from plan to list, no price.
Where It Stops
The first limit is geography. This is a United States product tied to a United States grocery company. If you are reading this in Germany, France, Spain, Portugal or Italy, it is not your answer, however generous it is.
The second is that the catalog is the draw. You are picking an app around recipes somebody else curates, which is exactly what Mealime users signed up for and exactly wrong for people who arrive with a folder of their own.
There is also a gap in what we can tell you. The closing FAQ we read covers what moves over and where the app lives. It does not publish a table of feature caps, so we do not know whether saved weeks, imports or sharing are limited, and we are not going to make numbers up to fill the row. Install it, plan two weeks, and you will know more than any article can tell you.
Pricing
Free. No paid tier is named on the pages we read.
Samsung Food
What the Free Tier Includes
Samsung Food is the broadest product in this guide. The United States App Store listing advertises importing recipes from websites, sharing meal plans and lists with other people, detailed nutrition, and integrations with retailers. You can open an account and use it without paying.
That combination is unusual. Most apps here are good at one of those four things. Samsung Food is the one that puts imports, sharing and nutrition in the same account, which is why we call it the most generous general free tier, and why it is the right starting point if you do not yet know what you need.
Where It Stops
There is a paid tier called Food+, and the listing shows its price. What the listing does not do is itemize which features sit behind it. We read the same page you would read, and it does not draw the line.
We do not know exactly where Samsung Food’s free tier stops, and neither does anybody writing an article who has not been told. Treat the free account as generous, expect to meet Food+ somewhere, and find out where by using it. Breadth has a second cost that has nothing to do with money: this is the app with the most setup before your first useful week.
Pricing
The United States App Store listing shows Food+ at USD 6.99 a month or USD 59.99 a year.
Plan to Eat
What the Free Tier Includes
Nothing, and Plan to Eat is upfront about it. What you get is a 14 day trial of the whole product: one click recipe collection, a planning calendar, and shopping lists organized by aisle.
Take the trial even if you have no intention of paying, because Plan to Eat is the clearest example in this category of the library first model. You bring the recipes. It schedules them and turns them into an aisle sorted list. If two weeks of that feels like relief, go looking for a free app that works the same way. If it feels like homework, you have learned the same thing from the other direction, and you can stop reading about library apps entirely.
Where It Stops
At the end of the trial. There is no reduced free plan underneath it and no permanently free list.
That is a defensible product decision and a real constraint for anyone who is here because they cannot or will not pay. If your budget for this is zero and it will stay zero, take the trial, learn what you like, and spend your effort somewhere else.
Pricing
USD 5.95 a month or USD 49 a year, after the trial.
Paprika
What the Free Tier Includes
Also nothing. Paprika is in this guide because people looking for a free meal planning app keep landing on it, and leaving it out would dodge the question.
Paprika captures recipes from websites, adds up ingredients across the menus you build into one grocery list, and keeps everything on the device so the list opens with no signal. The offline part matters more than it sounds. It is the one app here that is guaranteed to work in a shop with bad reception, because nothing has to be fetched.
Where It Stops
It stops at the purchase, because there is no free version to stop.
Each platform is sold separately, so buying it on your phone does not put it on your laptop. For a household where one person plans on a computer and shops from a phone, that is two purchases.
What you get in exchange is the absence of a subscription. Over five years, paying once is cheaper than every paid tier in this guide. Against zero dollars, it is more expensive than most of them.
Pricing
USD 4.99 on iOS and USD 29.99 on Windows, paid once per platform.
AnyList
What the Free Tier Includes
AnyList free is a shared grocery list, and it is very good at being one. Two people, one list, updates on both phones. That is the whole thing, and for a large number of households it is also the whole problem.
If you already know what you are cooking this week and the only friction is that one of you is standing in the shop guessing, the free AnyList account solves that and costs nothing, ever. It answers a question a lot of people phrase as meal planning when what they actually need is a list that stays right on two devices.
Where It Stops
It stops where planning begins. The paid tier, AnyList Complete, is what adds recipe collection, meal planning and store specific filters. So collecting recipes, putting them on a calendar and filtering the list down to the aisle you are standing in are all on the paid side of the line.
The good news is that the line is drawn clearly on the vendor’s own page, which is more than several apps in this guide manage, and the price on the other side of it is the lowest here by a distance.
Pricing
AnyList Complete is USD 9.99 a year for one person and USD 14.99 a year for a household.
Eat This Much
What the Free Tier Includes
Eat This Much starts from numbers instead of recipes. You give it calorie and macro targets and it generates meals that hit them. The free account does that generation, which is the part everyone comes for.
If you are tracking intake for a reason, whether that is training, a medical instruction or plain curiosity, this is the one app in this guide built that way round. Everything else asks what you want to eat and works out the nutrition afterwards, if at all.
Where It Stops
At the week, which is an awkward place for a meal planner to stop.
Premium is what adds weekly planning, automatic leftovers, custom daily schedules and reusable weeks. With the free tier in mind, that list reads differently: planning a whole week at once, having yesterday’s extra portions land in tomorrow, shaping meals around your actual schedule and reusing a week that worked are all paid. Budgets and pantry priority feed the generator too, and the pricing page groups the planning features on the Premium side.
So the free tier is a day generator. The week is the part that costs money.
Pricing
Premium is advertised at USD 5 a month, billed annually.
Cooklist
What the Free Tier Includes
Cooklist works from what is already in your kitchen. The United States store listing advertises importing your purchases from grocery loyalty cards, tracking a pantry with expiry information, matching recipes to what you already have, generating lists of the missing ingredients, and syncing all of that across a household.
For households that throw food away and feel bad about it, that inventory first approach is genuinely different from everything else here. No other app in this guide starts by asking what you already own.
Where It Stops
We do not know. The listing describes a product with free and paid use, and it does not say which features sit on which side, so we cannot tell you where the free tier ends.
There is a second thing to weigh that has nothing to do with features. Purchase import works by connecting your supermarket loyalty account, which means handing an app your grocery buying history. That may be a fair trade for never writing a pantry inventory by hand again. It is worth deciding on purpose, before an onboarding screen decides for you.
Pricing
Not published on the pages we read. The store listing describes free and paid use without naming a current consumer price, so we are not going to print one.
ReciMe
What the Free Tier Includes
ReciMe exists for the way people actually collect recipes now, which is a screenshot of a video. It imports from Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube and photos, and sorts the resulting shopping list by aisle or by recipe.
If your recipe folder is a camera roll and a pile of saved reels, nothing else in this guide is aimed at you as precisely. The free tier includes five imports a week, which is a real allowance. Five new recipes every week is more than most households actually add.
Where It Stops
At the fifth import of the week, and the shape of that cap matters more than the number. It is a weekly allowance, not a lifetime one, so it refills. A household that adds one or two recipes a week will never notice it. A person who sits down on a Sunday to clear out a backlog of saved videos will hit it in ten minutes and wait seven days.
So the question to ask yourself is whether your collecting is steady or bursty.
Pricing
The free tier and its five weekly imports are advertised on the product page. The price of the paid tier is not published on the pages we read, so we are not printing a number for it.
Mealie
What the Free Tier Includes
Mealie is the outlier: free software you run yourself. The documentation covers recipe imports, calendar planning, shopping lists, groups and households, backups, exports and a REST API. There is no subscription and no account with a vendor, because the vendor is you.
For a household with somebody technical in it, this is the most complete free option in the guide by a wide margin, and it is the one where nobody can change the terms on you later. The export and backup story alone puts it ahead of most paid products.
Where It Stops
It stops at the server. Somebody has to install it, keep it updated, back it up, and fix it on the evening it breaks while two people are standing in a shop. Self hosting moves the cost from a subscription line to your own time, which is cheaper for some households and much more expensive for others.
The docs describe the software, not what it costs to run. What a server costs you depends on whether you already have one, which is why we are not putting a monthly figure next to Mealie’s name.
Pricing
No subscription. The running cost is your own hardware or hosting, and the documentation does not price it.
Simmerset
What the Free Tier Includes
Simmerset is ours, so here is the whole free tier written out with no soft edges. It has no time limit and it never asks for a card.
- One week at a time. You answer a few questions and it proposes dinners for the week, with swaps when a proposal does not suit. The automation is in the free tier, which is unusual in this category.
- Allergies and diets, with no exceptions. They are asked separately from dislikes. An allergy or a diet takes a recipe out of the plan, even when few recipes are left; a dislike only moves it down the ranking.
- One grocery list, merged and grouped. Quantities are added up across dinners where the units allow it, every line sits under an aisle, and every line names the dinners that need it. Drop Wednesday and you can see what to leave on the shelf.
- Nutrition for every dinner. Every recipe and every dinner of the week shows calories, fat, saturated fat, carbs, sugar, fiber, protein and salt, and you also get the week’s average per dinner. We estimate the numbers from the ingredients. Vitamins and minerals are on Plus.
- Your own recipes, and five imports a week. You can keep as many favorites as you like and type in up to fifty recipes a week. Pulling a recipe off a web page is capped at five a week on the free tier.
- One other adult, and the current week offline. You can share the grocery list with one other person, and read the current week with no signal. Access to the current list is never paywalled.
- Export and deletion, always free. Export everything as JSON whenever you like and delete your own account without asking us. There is no retailer account and no store to pick, so the list is yours to shop anywhere.
Where It Stops
Plainly: Meals Hub and Samsung Food both give more away for free than we do.
The free tier holds one active week. There is no plan history and no reusing a week that worked. Imports stop at five a week. Sharing stops at two adults. There is no pantry. Free nutrition stops at the label values. Vitamins and minerals need Plus, and so do goals per dinner (at least 30 g of protein, say), which the app holds up against the week’s average. No tier tracks a whole day or builds a week to hit a calorie or protein number, so if numbers are why you are opening a planner then Eat This Much is a better use of your evening. And there is no native iOS or Android app yet. What there is is an installable web app, which is a real thing that works and is still not the same as an icon from the App Store.
If any one of those is a dealbreaker, one of the nine apps above fits you better today, and we would rather you found that out here than after signing up.
Pricing
Free forever with the limits above. Plus is USD 4.99 a month or USD 39.99 a year, tax included, and it adds unlimited saved weeks, vitamin and mineral values, goals per dinner, thirty imports a week, and up to six adults on one household. You can plan three dinners before you create an account.
If You Are Leaving Mealime: Which Free App Fits You
Mealime is discontinued on October 21, 2026. Its own closing FAQ says personal data is deleted at shutdown, and Mealime never offered an export feature, so there is no file to carry out. Whatever you saved in there, you are rebuilding it somewhere.
That changes the question. You are not migrating, you are choosing again, and what you should choose depends on which part of Mealime you actually used.
If you were there for the recipes, go to Meals Hub. It carries the Mealime catalog, it is free, and it works with no Albertsons store nearby. Nothing else in this guide can offer you the same recipes.
If you were there for the personalization, Mealime advertised more than 200 personalization options, which is what kept a lot of households loyal. Simmerset’s free tier is narrower overall and treats exclusions as absolute, which is the part of personalization that matters when somebody in the house has a nut allergy. Samsung Food gives you more room to shape a plan by hand.
If you were there for the fast dinners, Mealime built its recipes to cook in about 30 minutes. That constraint does not transfer as a setting anywhere, so you will be filtering by cook time yourself in whatever you pick.
If you were there for the list, Mealime sorted its grocery lists by category. If that is the feature you would miss, AnyList free does the shared list better than Mealime did and costs nothing.
Our switching guide for Mealime covers what carries over and what does not in more detail, including the parts that are nobody’s fault and still annoying.
Free Tiers at a Glance
- Leaving Mealime, keeping the recipesMeals HubRead the section: Meals Hub
- Not sure yet what you needSamsung FoodRead the section: Samsung Food
- The list is the whole problemAnyListRead the section: AnyList
- Recipes in your camera rollReciMeRead the section: ReciMe
| App | Kind of free | What you get free | Main limitation | Paid price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Meals Hub | Free app | Mealime catalog, plan to list, works with no Albertsons store nearby | United States only, and feature caps are not published | None named |
| Samsung Food | Free tier and paid | Web imports, shared plans and lists, detailed nutrition | The listing does not say what Food+ gates | Food+ at USD 6.99 a month or USD 59.99 a year |
| Plan to Eat | Trial only | The whole product for 14 days | It ends, with no free plan underneath | USD 5.95 a month or USD 49 a year |
| Paprika | Not free | Recipe capture, ingredient totals, fully offline | You pay per platform | USD 4.99 on iOS, USD 29.99 on Windows, once |
| AnyList | Free tier and paid | The shared list itself, on two phones | Recipe collection, planning and store filters need Complete | USD 9.99 a year, or USD 14.99 for a household |
| Eat This Much | Free tier and paid | Meal generation from calorie and macro targets | Weekly planning, leftovers, schedules and reusable weeks need Premium | USD 5 a month, billed annually |
| Cooklist | Free tier and paid | Purchase import, pantry with expiry, recipe matching, household sync | Which features are free is not published | Not published on the pages we read |
| ReciMe | Free tier and paid | Imports from social platforms and photos, lists by aisle or recipe | Five imports a week | Not published on the pages we read |
| Mealie | Free to self host | Imports, planning, lists, households, backups, exports, an API | You run and maintain the server | No subscription, and the docs do not price hosting |
| SimmersetOurs | Free tier and paid | One proposed week, hard exclusions, favorites, own recipes, five imports a week, one other adult, calories and macros per dinner | One active week, two adults, no pantry, no planning to macro targets | USD 4.99 a month or USD 39.99 a year, tax included |
Facts checked September 20, 2026
Which Should You Start With
Pick by whatever is actually breaking in your week.
- You are leaving Mealime and liked the recipes. Meals Hub. Free, the same catalog, no store required.
- You do not know what you need yet. Samsung Food. The widest free account here, so it is the cheapest way to find out which features you reach for.
- The list is the whole problem. AnyList free. Two phones, one list, nothing to pay.
- Your recipes live in your camera roll. ReciMe. Five imports a week is enough for steady collecting.
- You want the week decided for you and you will not pay. This is the thin spot in the free market. Meals Hub proposes from a catalog, and Simmerset’s free tier proposes and swaps a week with hard exclusions intact. Both are narrower than the paid planners.
If none of that lands, try the question from the other end and ask which grocery list you could actually shop from. We compared eight planners on that one job in our guide to meal planning apps that write the grocery list.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I Move My Mealime Recipes to Another App?
No, and it is worth being clear about why. Mealime never had an export feature, and its closing FAQ says personal data is deleted when the service shuts down on October 21, 2026. There is no file to download and nothing for another app to import.
The one thing that comes close is Meals Hub, which carries the Mealime recipe catalog across. That is the published recipes, not your plans, your saved favorites or your notes. If any of that matters to you, open Mealime and write it down somewhere before October 21.
Which Free Apps Work Without a Smartphone?
More than you would expect. Meals Hub, Samsung Food, Plan to Eat, AnyList, Eat This Much and ReciMe all list a web version alongside their phone apps, so a laptop or a tablet is enough. Mealie is web only by design, since you host it and open it in a browser. Simmerset is an installable web app with no native iOS or Android app yet, so it lands in the same group.
The exceptions are Paprika, which sells a desktop version separately from the phone ones, and Cooklist, which its store listing describes as an iOS and Android product.
If the real question is whether you can read or print a list in the shop without a phone, every web version here opens on whatever device you already own.
How Do Free Tiers Handle My Data?
Three questions are worth asking before you put a year of meals into anything free.
Can you get it out? Mealie documents backups and exports, and it runs on your own machine. Simmerset exports everything as JSON on the free tier and lets you delete your own account without contacting support. Paprika keeps your data on the device, which is its own kind of answer. Mealime is the cautionary tale: no export, ever, and personal data deleted at shutdown.
What are you handing over? Cooklist’s purchase import works by connecting a supermarket loyalty account, so it reads your grocery history. Several apps here integrate with retailers. Simmerset asks for no retailer account and no store at all.
Who pays for the free tier? When an app is free and lives inside a grocery company’s apps, that is worth reading the privacy policy over. Nothing is necessarily wrong with the arrangement, and you should still know what it is.
Is a Free Tier Enough for a Family Long Term?
Often yes, with one caveat about where families hit walls.
Free tiers cope reasonably well with families on sharing. Simmerset’s free tier shares the grocery list with one other adult, which covers two parents and stops there; six adults needs Plus. AnyList charges USD 14.99 a year for a household. Samsung Food advertises shared plans and lists. Cooklist syncs a household. Mealie has groups and households built in.
Where families run into the cap is plan history and repetition. Feeding several people for years means you want last February back, because you had a good run of dinners then and nobody can remember what they were. Saved weeks and reusable plans are the first thing nearly every app charges for, us included. A free tier that holds one active week is enough to shop from forever and not enough to build a rotation from.
Run free for two or three months. If you find yourself writing down what worked so you can find it again, that is the app telling you what its paid tier is for.
