Help & FAQ

MealPrep is an AI meal planner that builds a weekly or monthly plan from your profile (goals, allergies, equipment, schedule, budget, what's in your pantry), then derives an aisle-grouped grocery list. Cook mode keeps the screen awake and reads steps aloud when your hands are messy.

1. Complete the questionnaire (Step 1 to last step) so the planner knows your goals, allergies, equipment, schedule, and calorie target.
2. Tap Generate on the Plan page.
3. Wait ~30 seconds per week of the cycle while the AI builds the plan.
4. Review the proposed meals; tap any one to see the recipe, swap it out, or remove it.
5. Hit Approve — the grocery list builds automatically.

Track what's in your fridge, freezer, and dry storage. The planner prefers recipes that use what you already have — cuts your grocery bill and reduces waste. When you mark a meal as cooked, pantry quantities auto-decrement.

Instacart is the one-tap one, and the only one with a real hand-off: send your whole list (or a single recipe, or one meal) and land on a pre-filled cart. Set your store once and it opens at your local shop.

The rest are copy-and-paste, on the line underneath it:
Walmart Grocery — we copy the list and open Walmart's Quick Add page; you paste, review, add to cart.
Amazon Fresh and Target Same-Day — guided mode: we auto-copy each item as you advance through the list.
Copy the list — plain text, grouped by aisle, for a paper list, your Notes app, or a text to your spouse.

Walmart has a public page called Quick Add (walmart.com/lists/quick-add) that accepts a multi-line paste. When you pick Walmart on your grocery list:

1. We copy your full grocery list to your clipboard, one item per line.
2. We open the Quick Add page in a new tab.
3. You press Cmd/Ctrl + V in the form field.
4. Walmart matches each line to a product, you review the matches, click Add to Cart.

Total time: about 30 seconds for a typical week.

Click Shop everything on Instacart on your grocery list (or Shop this recipe / Shop meal on a recipe or a planned meal). We send those items straight to Instacart and open a pre-filled cart in a new tab — no copy-paste.

Two things to know: (1) items are sent as search terms, so you confirm the exact brand and size on Instacart before checkout; and (2) set your store in Settings → Planning so the cart opens at your local shop instead of Instacart's store picker. Anything your pantry already covers is skipped automatically.

For Amazon Fresh and Target (sites that don't accept bulk paste and have no direct integration), Guided Mode walks you through the list one item at a time without you needing to scroll or remember your place. (Instacart no longer uses this — it's a one-tap hand-off; see above.)

1. Click Start guided shopping at your chosen provider.
2. We open their search page in a new window.
3. A big card appears in MealPrep showing Item 1 of N with the current item.
4. The current item is already copied to your clipboard.
5. Switch to the provider tab, paste in their search (Cmd+V), pick the matching product, add to cart.
6. Switch back, click Added — next. Next item auto-copies. Repeat.

Yes — anytime. Go to Settings → Planning → Preferred shopping experience and pick a different option. Instacart is the headline button on your grocery list either way — it is the only one-tap hand-off there is; Walmart, Amazon Fresh, Target and "copy the list" sit on the line under it.

Yes. Self-shop mode is just a clean copy-to-clipboard. Open it in Notes, paste into a text to your partner, print it on paper, use AnyList — whatever works. The list is plain text, grouped by aisle.

On mobile, every shopping-provider button uses your phone's native share sheet. Tap Walmart (or any other provider on that line) and you'll see the standard iOS/Android share menu. Pick the provider's app if it's installed, or share to Apple Notes, Google Keep, Messages, or anywhere else.

If the provider's app accepts incoming text shares, it'll open with your list already loaded. If not, the list is on your clipboard either way.

Three options: (1) Tap the meal → Swap for a fresh AI suggestion that respects your profile and the rest of the week's macros. (2) Remove from the draft and the slot gets re-planned on next approve. (3) Mark the recipe Never in the cookbook so it's never proposed again.

They're AI estimates derived from the ingredient list at generation time — not database lookups. Real macros vary with cuts, brands, portions, and cooking method. Treat them as ballparks (±10–20%). Tap How we got this on any recipe to see the ingredient list the estimate was built from.

First time anyone views a recipe with a new name, the photo is being AI-generated in the background (~15–30 seconds). Refresh once and the real photo appears. The photo is cached forever and shared with every other user who later gets a recipe of the same name, so the AI image cost is paid once per unique dish across our entire user base.

Yes — on the Cookbook page, open the Import a recipe from a URL panel and paste the link. Works best on mainstream recipe blogs that ship structured Recipe metadata (Smitten Kitchen, NYT Cooking, Serious Eats); for sites that don't, we run the AI to extract what it can — no setup on your end.

Yes — open any recipe, tap Edit. Your changes are local to your household and don't affect anyone else's copy of the recipe. The original is preserved if you want to revert.

Yes — open any recipe, tap Print. The print view is clean: title, ingredients, steps, macros, no app chrome.

Go to Settings → Household members → Invite an adult. Optional email lock means only that address can accept the invite. They get their own login but join your same household — one plan, one cart, one cookbook. One subscription covers you plus one other adult, both with full access; add kids on top of that. Included in the trial, like everything else.

Yes. Settings → Household members → Invite a child (13-17). You provide their email and birth year; they get their own login with restricted features (no billing, no household management, no marketing emails). Up to 6 children per household. By sending the invite, you attest you are the parent or legal guardian.

Children CAN: log in, see the household's plan and grocery list, browse the cookbook, use cook mode, mark recipes cooked/favorite, manage their own food preferences and allergens.

Children CANNOT: access billing or change subscriptions, invite other users, see admin areas, receive marketing or recap emails.

Use the Forgot your password? link on the login page. You'll get an email with a reset link valid for 1 hour.

You get 14 days of the whole app, free, starting the moment you sign up. No card, nothing held back and no feature switched off — it is the same product a subscriber uses, because a crippled trial tells you nothing about whether the real thing is worth paying for.
When it ends, everything you made is still there — plans, cookbook, grocery lists, pantry. You just need a subscription to open them again: $4.99/month or $49.99/year (two months free on the annual). Cancel anytime.
You can export or delete your data from Settings whether you subscribe or not.

Settings → Account → Subscription & billing → Manage plan (or go straight to Subscription in the menu). That opens our payment processor's billing portal, where cancelling takes effect at the end of your current period — you keep paid access until then.
On the free trial there is nothing to cancel: no card was taken and nothing renews. If you don't subscribe, it just ends.
Monthly: 7-day refund window from first charge.
Annual: 30-day window plus prorated thereafter — if you paid for a year and used four months, we refund the unused eight.

Subscription → Manage plan. The plan switcher uses the payment processor's customer portal — they handle all the proration math automatically. Switching mid-period credits your unused time against the new plan.

Settings → Privacy & data → Email me my data. We generate a zip with your profile, cookbook, plans, grocery + pantry history, and Diet Goals data, then email you a one-time download link valid 24 hours. Self-serve, instant, GDPR Article 20.

If you have a complimentary account (comp), yes — go to Settings → Privacy & data → Reset my kitchen. Wipes all plans, recipes, grocery, pantry, and shopping history. Keeps your account, profile/questionnaire, and household members.

If you have a paid plan, the equivalent action is Export my data → Delete my account → sign up again. The reset button is intentionally not exposed for paid accounts to prevent an accidental click from wiping a carefully-built cookbook.

Settings → Account → Delete my account. Your account is scheduled for permanent deletion 30 days out — log back in any time during that window and click Cancel deletion in the banner to restore. After 30 days, all data is permanently erased.

Your profile, pantry, plans, and cookbook live in our database, and sensitive fields like your Diet Goals are encrypted at rest with industry-standard symmetric encryption. We run the AI for you: for each request we send your profile and the recipe's ingredients to our AI provider using our own key. Your data never trains anyone's AI model.

Recipes are AI-generated. We scan for common food-safety mistakes (undercooked poultry, raw eggs in things meant to be eaten raw, honey for infants, cross-contamination wording) and show inline warnings. Always verify allergen labels and use a thermometer for cook temperatures. This is not medical or dietary advice.

The most common cause is a brief hiccup on our AI provider's side — rate-limiting or a short outage. We run the AI for you, so there's nothing to configure: just wait a minute and tap Generate again, and it usually goes through.

If the generation gets to the AI and the AI just produces an invalid plan, MealPrep auto-files a bug report we can look at. Email [email protected] if it happens twice in a row.

Your card declined on the last renewal attempt. The payment processor will retry automatically over the next ~3 weeks. You have a 3-day grace period of continued access starting from the first failed attempt — update your card in Subscription → Manage plan before then to keep access without interruption.

Cookbook → use the search bar at the top, or filter by tag/cuisine. Recipes generated in plans are saved to your cookbook automatically; if a recipe is from an archived plan, it might be in the Haven't had in a while view at the bottom of Cookbook.

Tap the Report a bug or Feature request button in the sidebar — we read every submission and respond within 48 hours. Or email [email protected] directly.