Mealime is shutting down: the best alternatives

What is actually happening

Straight from Mealime's own closing notice: the app is discontinued as of 21 October 2026. Albertsons Companies bought Mealime back in 2021, and the recipes and planning tools are being folded into Meals Hub, which lives inside the Albertsons grocery apps: Albertsons, Safeway, Vons, Jewel-Osco and the rest of that family.

Three details from the same notice matter more than the headline does.

• Paid subscriptions are already wound down. Pro subscribers will not be charged again before the app closes, and every Pro recipe and feature is now open to everyone. Free lobster for the last month of the voyage.
• All personal data will be deleted when the app shuts down. Not archived. Not waiting in a zip file. Deleted.
• Your account does not travel. Meals Hub runs on an Albertsons store account, and the notice says certain preferences and settings have to be set up again from scratch.

So the recipes survive, because they were always Mealime's recipes. The version of your kitchen that Mealime learned, the plans, the preferences, the six dinners you kept going back to, does not.

Do this before 21 October. It takes five minutes

1. Open the app and look at your saved and recent meals. There are probably six you cook on repeat and one you would genuinely mourn. That is the list that matters, not all two hundred.
2. Get those out by hand. There is no bulk export button and the closing notice does not add one. Screenshot them, email them to yourself, or paste them straight into whatever you pick next. Boring, quick, permanent.
3. Check the subscription anyway. Mealime says Pro will not bill again, and a store subscription you set up three phones ago is still worth a thirty second look. Ours is a trusting species. Our banks are not.
4. Pick the next app now, not on 20 October. Every closure goes the same way: everyone migrates in the final week, in a panic, and ends up with whatever sat at the top of the search results. You have a month. Spend a fortnight of it actually cooking from something.

The six, compared

Prices are the publishers' own list prices at the time of writing and they move about by region and by sale. Check before committing.

Meals Hub: the official answer, with a postcode attached

If you shop at an Albertsons Companies store, this is the smoothest move on the page. Same recipe team, the same recipes plus thousands more, free, and the shopping list points at the shop you were driving to anyway. Tap More in the store app, then Meals Hub, and you are broadly back where you started.

The catch is geography. Albertsons Companies is a United States grocery chain, so "install my supermarket's app" is a fine plan in Boise and a strange one in Bristol. Mealime's FAQ says you can still browse, plan and build lists without a store nearby, but you would be running your kitchen inside a grocery chain's app, and it will keep gesturing at the aisle. Worth knowing before you commit.

Samsung Food: the closest free swap

Formerly Whisk, and no, you do not need a Samsung phone, which is the question everybody asks first. It saves recipes from any website, drops them onto a week, and rolls the ingredients into one shopping list, which is the exact shape of the thing you are losing. The free tier is unusually generous, and Food+ adds the extras for a subscription.

If you want one recommendation with no money and no thinking attached, on both phones, this is it.

Paprika: buy it once, keep it forever

Paprika is the anti-shutdown app. You pay once per platform, $4.99 on a phone and $29.99 on Mac or Windows (Paprika's own pricing page, and yes, each version is sold separately), your recipes live on your device, and it has been quietly doing this for over a decade. Its built-in browser clips recipes off almost any site, the grocery list merges duplicate ingredients and sorts them by aisle, and nothing about it is trying to become a marketplace.

It is the least like Mealime in spirit, because Mealime handed you the recipes and Paprika expects you to bring your own. If what you actually liked was "tell me what to cook", start with Samsung Food. If what you liked was "keep my cooking in one place", buy Paprika and stop thinking about this category for ten years.

Plan to Eat: for the person who plans on purpose

No free tier past the trial, which makes it an odd landing spot for people arriving from a free app, and it is still the strongest pure planner here. Drag recipes onto a calendar, watch the shopping list assemble itself, and use the recipe clipper to haul your old favourites across. Their pricing page lists $49 a year or $5.95 a month direct, and $54.99 a year through the App Store, because Apple takes a cut and somebody has to pay it.

AnyList: if the list was the point

Plenty of people used Mealime mostly for the shopping list. If that is you, AnyList is the specialist. Shared lists group into aisles, items remember which shop they belong to, and a recipe can push its ingredients straight in. $9.99 a year, or $14.99 for a household, which is cheap for how much of your week it quietly fixes. The whole category is in the best shared shopping list apps.

Cria Planner: when dinner was never the only problem

I build this one, so read the next paragraph with a suspicious eyebrow raised and go and poke the free tier yourself.

Cria starts from the week rather than from the recipe. Plan the dinners in the Food tab and the ingredients roll into one shared shopping list grouped by shop, so the butcher's row is not tangled up with the supermarket's. Tick something off and it disappears on the other person's phone while they are still in the queue. The same app holds the calendar, the tasks and who paid for the big shop, which is the real pitch: most households do not have a meal planning problem, they have four apps and somebody stopped opening one of them in March.

This week's meals, the shared list, the calendar and the costs are free for two people. Meal history, saved week templates and a recipe library past five recipes are the paid part. If all you ever wanted was somebody to tell you what to make on Tuesday, this is more app than you need and Samsung Food is the better answer. The alpaca can afford to be honest. It has no sales quota.

How to pick, in one question

Forget the feature lists. Answer this: did Mealime tell you what to cook, or did it remember what you cook?

If it told you, you want a recipe catalogue: Meals Hub if you shop at those stores, Samsung Food if you do not. If it remembered, you want a recipe box: buy Paprika or subscribe to Plan to Eat. And if the honest answer is "it made the shopping list", pick AnyList or Cria Planner and skip the recipe theatre entirely.

The short answer

You shop at Albertsons, Safeway, Vons or Jewel-Osco: Meals Hub. You want free, on any phone, anywhere else on earth: Samsung Food. You never want an app to do this to you again: Paprika. You plan the week properly and will pay for it: Plan to Eat. The list was the point: AnyList. Dinner was only the fifth thing going wrong this week: Cria Planner.

Whichever you land on, the habit matters more than the app. The routine that makes any of them work is in how to plan a week of meals (and actually cook them), and it takes about fifteen minutes.