Free Meal Planner App: What Actually Stays Free
Rose · 19 September 2026
A free meal planner app should let you plan a week of dinners and produce a shopping list without a card on file. Yumzi is free while it is in early access: planning your week and building the shopping list stay free, with no trial and no card. This page says plainly what that includes and what will eventually cost something.
What is free right now?
Everything, in practice. Planning a week of dinners is free. Building the shopping list from that plan is free, including merging duplicate ingredients across dinners into one buyable quantity and grouping the list by aisle category. Saving recipes you already have is free. Editing them is free. Cooking from them is free.
What will eventually cost something, and why?
Reading a recipe out of a video. That step transcribes the spoken track and reads the on-screen text, and it costs real money per video to run. A paid tier for heavy use of that specific feature is planned.
This is worth being straight about now, before it changes, rather than after: “free meal planner app” often means free until the feature you actually came for. Here the feature that will eventually cost something is named up front, and it is video reading specifically, not planning and not the shopping list.
How does that compare to other free tiers?
Most free planner tiers meter the recipe library itself or cap the number of saved recipes. ReciMe, for instance, caps its free tier at five recipe imports a week. Others gate the planner and leave the recipe box free.
The thing worth checking on any free tier is which half is limited: the storing, or the doing. A planner that stores recipes without limit but charges to plan a week is a recipe box wearing a planner’s name.
What do you need to sign up?
An email address, and nothing else.
What are the honest limits, today?
Yumzi is in early access, and pricing for the video-reading feature has not launched yet, so the exact shape of the eventual paid tier is not settled. What is settled: planning and the shopping list are not going anywhere behind a paywall.
Who should use something else?
If your recipes are already text on a food blog rather than saved video, a URL-based planner is a fine fit today and there is nothing to wait on.
FAQ
Is Yumzi free to use for meal planning?
Yes. Planning a week of dinners and generating the merged, aisle-grouped shopping list are free. Yumzi is free while it is in early access; reading a recipe out of a video is the part that costs money to run, so a paid tier for heavy use of that is planned.
Do you need a credit card to sign up?
No. Yumzi needs an email address and nothing else.
Will the free plan stay free?
Planning your week and building the shopping list are staying free. The part that is expected to eventually cost something is reading recipes out of video, because that step has a real cost per video. Nothing about pricing has launched yet. Facts in this piece were checked on 19 September 2026. Next check: 18 December 2026.
Yumzi is on the App Store.
Download it and cook your saved reels this week.