Best Free Meal Planning Apps (With a Real Grocery List)
See it adapt to allergies, servings & swaps.
If you're searching for a free meal planning app, you probably aren't just looking for more recipes. You have the internet. You have access to all the recipes. What you're looking for is something that takes the actual planning work off your plate: builds the grocery list, sizes the meals to how many people you're feeding, and saves you the forty minutes of cross-referencing on Sunday.
That's a specific thing. Not all "free" apps deliver it.
What actually matters
A recipe app and a meal planning app solve different problems. Recipe apps give you meals to make. A meal planning app takes a week's worth of meals and builds one combined grocery list from all of them, sorted by aisle, so you walk into the store knowing exactly what to get without checking three different recipe tabs on your phone.
The grocery list is where the time savings actually live. Without it, you still have to scale each recipe to your household size, combine duplicate ingredients across multiple meals, and build the list yourself. That's the part that takes forty minutes. A "free" app that gives you recipes but leaves the list-building to you hasn't solved the problem.
What a meal planning app actually does covers the planning vs. recipe distinction in more depth if you want to know what to look for before downloading.
Apps people use for free meal planning
A few come up consistently when people look for free options in this category.
Mealime has a free tier with weekly meal plans and a shopping list. The free version covers the basics; its Pro tier ($5.99/month or $49.99/year) unlocks the full recipe library, custom recipe import, and nutrition filters. It's a real option if cost is the main constraint and you need something with an actual list.
Samsung Food (formerly Whisk) is a free app centered on recipe saving and organization. It includes a shopping list feature, though the meal planning side is less structured than dedicated planner apps, and the personalized weekly plans sit behind a paid tier.
AnyList is primarily a grocery list app that also lets you attach meals to a weekly calendar. Worth trying if the list is the main thing you need and you're willing to add meals manually.
Paprika is not technically free. It's a recipe manager with a one-time purchase price on mobile (about $5) rather than a subscription. Mentioned here because it comes up in comparisons often, but it works more like a recipe organizer than a meal planner.
For a full breakdown comparing the category, the best meal planning app guide goes through the options honestly, including where each one falls short.
What most free apps leave out
The gap in most free meal planning apps isn't recipe count. It's scaling and personalization.
If you're cooking for two, a recipe built for four means waste you didn't plan for. If you're cooking for five people with a dairy allergy in the mix, a generic meal plan won't fit without manual adjustments. The grocery list that builds from an unscaled recipe gives you the wrong amounts.
Most free apps leave that work on you: sizing each recipe to your household, filtering out ingredients that don't work, and correcting the list before you shop. That's still a significant chunk of the work you were trying to hand off.
How a meal planning app and grocery list should work together is worth reading if the list-building is the specific part you want automated.
Eatsë: free for two weeks
Eatsë costs $9.99/month or $79.99/year after a 14-day free trial. The trial is the full product, not a limited version.
During the two weeks, you get recipes sized to your serving count — cooking for two doesn't mean a four-serving recipe and leftovers you didn't want, nothing wasted — plus one grocery list built from the entire week's meals, sorted by aisle. The dinners are suggested based on what you and your household actually eat. You choose which suggestions to keep, and the list builds automatically from whatever you pick.
If the grocery list is the piece that's been missing, two weeks is enough time to find out whether having it already built changes how Sunday afternoons feel. Start at eatse.app.
Dinner, figured out.
Eatsë is free on the App Store. It plans the week, scales every recipe to your house, and builds the grocery list by aisle — you pick and cook.
Download Eatsë free
Two weeks free.