What MealsList does, the two ways to fill it in, and what it costs.
Name your stores. Go to Account and add the places you actually shop, up to eight. Put your two main ones first, because that is the order the price columns appear in.
Then fill the list. There are two ways in, and they end up in the same place, so pick whichever sounds like less work to you.
Go to Meals and write down four or five dishes you cook most weeks. Paste a link to the recipe and the ingredients arrive on their own, or paste the ingredient list, or type them in.
Then open one of the dishes you have written, tick whatever you are out of, and send those items to the grocery list.
Find a recent receipt from any store. Go to Import, pick that store, copy the prompt, and paste it into any AI assistant with a photo of the receipt, or the digital receipt from the store's website. Paste the answer back.
A whole store's worth of items and prices arrives in one go.
Most people end up doing both eventually. Neither one is required.
Yes. Everything works without it. The AI import is a shortcut for entering a lot of prices quickly, and it is the only place an assistant is involved anywhere in MealsList.
If you skip it, you build the list the way you would expect to: type items in directly, or write down your dishes and let their ingredients populate the list for you. Nothing is greyed out and nothing nags you about it.
No, because the list builds itself out of your dishes. You write "Taco night" once, with its ingredients, and every time you are out of tortillas you tick one box rather than typing the word.
The Groceries page also has a button to start you off with sixteen common items, so you are not staring at an empty screen.
Prices are the part that takes real effort, and they are optional. See below.
The shared list is useful the first time two people in the house look at it. So is the meal planning.
Price comparison needs prices, so it arrives later. Once two of your stores have prices against the things you regularly buy, the totals bar starts telling you which one is cheaper for your actual basket.
A meal you cook, saved with its ingredients. Amounts and prep notes live on the dish, so "2 cups ziti pasta, cooked" reads properly when you are at the stove, but only "Ziti pasta" goes to the grocery list.
You can keep the cooking steps on it too, so the dish is the whole recipe rather than just a shopping trigger.
Sides, desserts and drinks work exactly the same way and have their own tabs on the Meals page. A side can be as simple as "Peas" with a single ingredient, or as involved as scalloped potatoes. When you add or edit any of them, the Serve as box says which it is.
Drinks you already buy take one tap each: on the Drinks tab, tap + From my grocery list and pick from everything on your list in Drinks or Alcohol.
Open the dish and tick anything you are out of. Ticked items collect under "Add to groceries" on the Meals page, and the button at the bottom sends them across in one go.
They arrive on the grocery list already ticked, sorted into categories and ready to shop. Anything already on your list is ticked rather than added twice. If you would rather they arrive unticked, so you can check the pantry first, change it on the Account page under Sending from Meals.
Sides, desserts and drinks do the same thing, so planning green beans with Thursday's dinner is how green beans reach your list.
No. Most of the time you paste something instead, and there are three things you can paste into the same box.
A link. Found the recipe on a website? Copy the web address at the top of the page, paste that on its own, and MealsList goes and reads the page for you. The dish name, every ingredient with its amount, and the cooking steps all arrive together. This works on most recipe sites. Recipes posted on Instagram, TikTok or Facebook cannot be read this way, and the odd website will refuse — you get a short message saying so, and you can fall back to the next option.
A list. Select the ingredient list on any page, copy it, and paste the whole thing in. MealsList separates the amounts from the names and drops words like "chopped" into the prep column on its own. This also works with text your phone has read off a photo of a cookbook page.
A dish somebody shared with you. See below.
The method paragraphs have their own box on the same screen, headed Cooking steps. A link fills it in for you; a list you paste yourself. If an ingredient list lands in that box by mistake, MealsList notices and offers to move it.
All three work the same way for sides and desserts. Start on the Sides or Desserts tab and the Serve as box is already set, so a dessert you paste in as a link lands on the Desserts tab on its own.
When you do type, anything already on your grocery list shows up underneath after two letters. Tap it and the name and category fill in, so the dish and the list always agree on what the item is called.
No AI assistant is involved in any of this. When you paste a link, the address is the only thing that leaves your device, and nothing about your list or your household goes with it. Typing and pasting a list never leave your screen at all.
No. The seven-day plan is there if you want it, with breakfast, lunch and dinner on each day, but the dishes work perfectly well on their own.
If you do use it, tap any meal and you pick one main, as many sides and drinks as you want, and a dessert if you are having one. Tap Done when the meal is set.
Changed your mind? Tap the small × next to anything on the day and only that one thing comes off. Or open the meal and tap Clear this meal.
Plenty of people just keep a library of what they cook and tick ingredients off it as they run out.
Yes. Every dish has a Share button that hands it over as plain text, so it goes through Messages, email or a group chat like anything else.
If the person on the other end uses MealsList, they copy the whole message and paste it in:
The name, the note, every ingredient and the cooking steps all fill in at once. If they do not use MealsList, it still reads like a recipe.
Yes. There is a Help button at the top of every page in the app, next to Groceries, Meals and Account.
It opens with a search box: type what you are stuck on, like "remove" or "prices", and only the matching answers show. Buttons underneath jump straight to Groceries, Meals, Account, or Fix it for when something is not working — the app looking out of date, a store's Wi-Fi getting in the way, or two phones not matching.
Each answer is a question you tap to open, so you read only the one you need.
It is one grocery list that your whole household shares, with your meal planning built in. Tick what you need and everyone sees it. Plan a dinner and its ingredients go onto the list.
If you want to compare stores, you can add a price column for each place you shop, and MealsList shows which store is cheapest for each item. Prices are optional — plenty of households use the list and the meals without them.
No. It runs in a browser, on a phone or a computer. Sign in and your list is there.
If you want it to open like an app, the Account page has the steps for saving it to your home screen, written for whichever phone you are holding.
Yes, and that is the point. Up to four people share one household and one subscription, and each person gets their own login. Anyone can add an item or tick something off, and it shows up on everyone else's phone within about half a minute, or straight away if they tap Refresh.
You can shop from it together at the same time, even in different aisles. If one phone loses its signal in the store, a red bar says so. Whatever that person ticks is kept on their phone and sent the moment it reconnects, without undoing anything the other person did in the meantime.
Up to eight, and you name them yourself. They can be any store at all — a national chain, the warehouse club, the market that only runs on Saturdays. MealsList does not have a fixed list of stores you have to pick from.
Yes, using your phone's own dictation. Tap into any field in MealsList and press the microphone on your keyboard, then say the item.
We deliberately did not build a separate microphone button, because the one already on your phone is more reliable and you already know how it behaves.
Because that is what it is. Produce is produce at every store, but aisle 25 is aisle 25 at exactly one of them. Categories are what group your list into sections and drive the jump bar along the top.
If you want the real aisle numbers, put them in the "Size, aisle or note" field on the item, and name the store: Smith's aisle 25. That line stays visible while you shop, and the search box looks inside it, so typing a store name finds everything you have marked for that store.
No. The shared list and the meal planning work with the price columns completely empty, and a lot of the value is there before a single price is typed.
Prices are what turn it into a price comparison. Add them when you feel like it, for the stores and the items you care about.
You enter them. There is no price feed behind MealsList and no scraping.
That sounds like more work, and at the start it is. What you get for it is prices that are actually right: the number on the shelf, in your town, at the store you actually go to. Published price data is usually a regional average and is often out of date before you read it.
Two ways, and you can mix them freely.
By hand. Tap an item and there is a price box for each store. Twenty items is one cup of coffee's worth of tapping, and you never do those twenty again.
From a receipt. The Import page turns one receipt into a whole store's column in a single paste. Faster, and it needs an AI assistant.
Yes, and it is the easiest way to do it. Tap the item, type what the shelf says, and it saves as you go. There is nothing to submit and no need to be finished.
Doing it a few items at a time, on trips you were making anyway, is how most households end up with a full set of prices without ever sitting down to a data entry session. The search box at the top stays reachable while you shop, so finding the item you are standing in front of takes a second.
No. A price stays until you change it. Most of the work is in the first couple of shops, after which you are only updating the things that moved.
There is no upload button, and we never see your receipt. The Import page gives you a prompt to copy. Paste it into whichever AI assistant you already use, add the receipt, and paste the answer back into MealsList.
It reads the whole receipt in one go, so you can refresh an entire store's price column in a single paste instead of typing items one at a time.
No. If you scan your rewards card at checkout, many stores keep an itemized copy of every trip on their website: Smith's and the other Kroger stores, Harmons (sign up for their eReceipts), Costco, Walmart when you pay with a card saved in your account, and Target with Target Circle.
Sign in on the store's website and open the trip. For Smith's and the other Kroger stores, copy the whole page and paste it straight into MealsList. It reads it on its own, with no AI assistant involved. For the other stores, copy it or take a screenshot and use it with the import prompt, the same as a photo.
Either way it is usually easier to read than paper: full product names instead of receipt abbreviations, with sale prices already applied. The Help page in the app has the steps for each store.
Watch how it works with Smith's (1 minute)
We do not sign in to your store accounts for you. MealsList never asks for another company's password.
Any that can read a photo. Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini all work, on free plans as well as paid. You do not need a particular one, and you do not need to pay for anything extra.
No. Anything already on your list has its price updated for that store rather than being added again.
A preview screen shows you exactly what will be added, what will be updated and what will not change, before anything is saved. Where two names are close but not identical, it asks you rather than guessing. Receipt abbreviations are genuinely hard and an assistant will occasionally misread one, so that preview is where you catch it.
Yes, if that app can give you your list as text. Copy it, use the "From another app" prompt on the Import page, and paste the result. Prices are optional, so a plain list of item names works fine.
$69 a year for the whole household. Not per person.
No. The 30-day trial does not ask for one. You get the full app for those thirty days, not a reduced version.
Nothing is deleted and you are not locked out. Your list, your dishes, your stores and every price you entered stay exactly where they are. You can still sign in, look at all of it, and download it as a file.
What you cannot do is change it. Read-only means read-only: no adding items, no editing prices, not even ticking something off. It becomes a record of what you built rather than a working list.
Subscribing turns it all back on, with everything where you left it. The same is true if you stop paying later on.
From your own PayPal account, under recurring or automatic payments. You do not need to ask us and you do not need to give a reason.
You keep access until the end of the year you have already paid for. After that the app goes read-only rather than locking you out.
Within 30 days of a charge, yes, in full. Ask through the contact page. After 30 days we do not refund that year, though you can still cancel to stop the next one.
Yes, at any time, as a file you keep. It can also be pasted back in, so an export is a real backup rather than a dead end.
Four, each with their own login. That covers the people who actually shop and plan, which is who needs an account.
Anyone in the household can remove someone from the Account page if that changes.
Account page, at the bottom: Close this household. It asks for your password and for you to type DELETE, then everyone in the household is signed out and emailed.
Nothing is erased straight away. Everything is held for 30 days first, so a mistake can be undone by replying to that email. After 30 days it is permanently deleted.
Download your data first if you want to keep it.
Use the contact page and it will reach a person.
Thirty days costs you nothing and answers the question better than this page can.
Start your free 30 days