Mealime is closing on 21 October 2026.

What Mealime has said, in its own words.

Mealime published a closing page. These are quotes from it.

Source: mealime.com/closing, fetched 9 September 2026 and checked again on 21 and 27 September 2026.

The same page says Mealime was acquired by Albertsons Companies in 2021, and that planning moves to Meals Hub inside the Albertsons Companies store apps and websites, under the More icon in the bottom right of the store app. Its own download link opens a list of those banners: Safeway, Vons, Jewel-Osco, Acme, Shaw's, Tom Thumb, Randalls, Pavilions, Star Market, Carrs, Haggen and others. If there is no Albertsons Companies store near you, the page says you can still browse recipes, create meal plans and generate shopping lists in Meals Hub.

Mealime has already named a free destination, so if you shop at those stores and want the same recipes, that is the shortest path.

Mealime is cheap, quick to start and very well liked.

On the US App Store on 9 September 2026, Mealime held 4.81 stars from 53,992 ratings, near the top of this whole category. Its subtitle is the plainest description of its job, "Meal Planner & Grocery List", and its App Store description claims "over 7 million users".

Apple lists Mealime Meal Planner Pro at $2.99 a month, and the closing page winds the paid subscriptions down, so Pro recipes and features are now available to every user. Until the closing date you have the whole app for nothing.

Source: Mealime's App Store listing and mealime.com/closing, both read 9 September 2026 and checked again 21 September 2026.

What happens to your account on the closing date.

• The app stops on 21 October 2026, and the closing page says personal data will be deleted at shutdown.
• Pro members are not charged again. Mealime says no additional subscription fees before that date.
• The recipes continue in Meals Hub, free, inside the Albertsons Companies store apps and websites.
• Your settings do not travel. The closing page says certain preferences and settings need to be established directly within Meals Hub.
• The closing page offers no download of your own data. It points to Meals Hub and your privacy rights, not an export file, so whatever you want to keep you copy out by hand.

Half an hour now, or nothing at all after 21 October.

Screenshots are the copy that will still be on your phone in November. Do it in one sitting with the television on.

1. Open every recipe you have saved and screenshot it twice, once with the ingredients and their amounts visible, once with the method. A remembered recipe without quantities turns into guesswork the first time you cook it.
2. Screenshot the shopping list you usually generate. It is a portrait of how your household really shops.
3. Write down the ten dinners you genuinely repeat. Not the aspirational ones, the Tuesday ones. Ten names in a note is the most useful thing you can carry out of a closing app.
4. Note your diet settings, allergies and dislikes in the same note. The closing page says preferences and settings need to be established directly within Meals Hub, so write them in plain words now.
5. Put the screenshots somewhere that is not the camera roll: a shared album, a notes app, a folder in your cloud drive.
6. Turn the screenshots into one PDF on the phone. Mealime's closing page, read 27 September 2026, describes no way to export or download your recipes, plans or lists, so the only copy is the one you make. On an iPhone, open Photos, tap Select, choose the recipe screenshots, then tap Share and Print. Pinch outward on the page preview to open it full size, tap Share again and choose Save to Files, and the whole set is one PDF you can keep or print.
7. Do it before 21 October. After the shutdown the personal data is deleted, and you cannot screenshot an app that no longer opens.

Printed from www.whatscook.ing/alternatives/mealime.

Three questions worth asking before you install anything else.

These three questions sort the category faster than any feature list, and they apply to us too.

• Can you get your data back out. An app that stores recipes on your own device, or lets you export them, cannot take them away when the company changes its mind.
• Who pays for the app, and what does that steer. A grocery chain wants you in its shop, and a subscription has to keep earning its price, which is fair to hold us to. Whoever pays shapes what the app suggests for dinner.
• Does it work from what is in your kitchen, or from a shop. Recipe-first planners hand you a list to buy; pantry-first planners start from the shelf. One reduces deciding, the other reduces waste.

Four places to go, before ours.

• Meals Hub. The route Mealime itself points to. Free, it carries the Mealime recipes, and the closing page says the same core team supports it. It is built around shopping at that chain, a fit if you already do and a friction if you do not.
• Paprika Recipe Manager 3. One payment of $4.99 and the highest rating in this set, 4.90 from 53,706 ratings. It stores your recipes on your own device and puts them on a calendar, so nothing depends on a company staying alive. Its pantry is a list you keep by hand, the planning stays yours, and it does not score what you eat.
• Samsung Food. Free at its core, with premium at $6.99 a month or $59.99 a year, and 4.78 stars from 6,333 ratings. It imports recipes from most sites and plans a week, the easiest landing place for a folder of saved links. Its paid Samsung Food+ adds meal plans tailored to your health goals, pantry management and nutrition tracking.
• Eat This Much. 4.72 stars from 22,087 ratings, in-app tiers from $8.99. It builds a full plan against calorie and macro targets, a budget and a schedule. Pick it if hitting targets matters more than using up what you own.

A longer version of this list is at the best meal planning apps in 2026, and a shorter answer at what to use now that Mealime is shutting down. If you came to Mealime from Yummly, which went offline at the end of 2024, there is a page on what to use now that Yummly is gone.

WhatsCook.ing starts from you and your shelf, not from a recipe library.

Mealime asked what you like, then filtered its catalogue. WhatsCook.ing asks what you like, what you are aiming for and what you already have, then writes the week around all three and reads back what each meal did for you.

• The week is written from your goals and your kitchen. You set diet, goals and tastes once; a photograph of the shelf gives the items and their quantities, and the week is built around both. Ask for a pantry-only week with a whole food group missing and it writes four days instead of seven, and says so first.
• The shopping list is led by your nutrient gaps. It is not the plan's ingredient list. It leads with the foods that close your nutrient gaps, then what is running low, what your daily routines use up, pantry staples, produce in season near you and recipe essentials for your cuisines, and it leaves out what your pantry covers. Ingredients a recipe needs that you do not have are marked "To buy" on that recipe.
• Cooking has a consequence. Marking a meal cooked scores the day across four pillars, calorie fit, protein adequacy, micronutrient coverage and heart health, and moves a BioAge estimate: nutrition-derived, with its method shown inside the app, not a medical measurement.
• Nothing is dropped at the end of the week. It stays on screen, and one button plans the next from the pantry as it is now.
• It asks before your food data goes to AI. Photos you take and food you type in are read by Google Gemini, and your answers about diet, goals and body metrics, with your pantry, go to Anthropic, which writes the recipes and the shopping suggestions. The app says what each one receives and asks the first time, and it remembers an agreement on the iPhone itself, so another account signed in later on the same iPhone is not asked. Nothing is sold and nothing goes to advertising.

Setting it up is not a two-minute job: the questionnaire is long, and the first plan takes three to four minutes. The pantry idea is explained on the page about planning from what is in the fridge.

The questions page answers the common ones, including what happens when the pantry is nearly empty and what BioAge is built from.

Where every figure on this page comes from.

App Store prices, star ratings and rating counts are what Apple showed on the US storefront on 9 September 2026. Every link below was opened again on 21 September 2026 and still resolves. Counts rise daily, so read them as a snapshot.

• Mealime's closing notice at mealime.com/closing, for the closing date of 21 October 2026, the quotes in section 01, the subscription wind-down, the move to Meals Hub and the statement that personal data is deleted
• Mealime on the App Store, for its star rating, its rating count, its subtitle, the Pro price and its own claim of over 7 million users
• The Albertsons Companies store list that the closing page's own download link opens, for the banner names
• Eat This Much on the App Store, for its rating and its in-app tiers
• Samsung Food on the App Store, for its rating and its premium price
• Paprika Recipe Manager 3 on the App Store, for its rating and its one-off price