Alternatives
Products that do what I quit my job, took up cooking as a hobby and built a Meal Planning app does
Around the middle of this year I quit my decently paid, high stress SWE job so I could spend some downtime doing things that make me happy. I did some travelling, both interstate and abroad, spent time working on projects around the house, did some gardening and took up cooking as a hobby. While cooking, I found that most of the apps already out there that focused on meal planning and recipe/shopping list management didn't quite work out how I wanted them to. Some would only work on limited devices, or bombarded me with pointless social features, or they didn't allow importing external…
- 17T
I am happy to announce the updated release of my web app, 7courses. http://7courses.com/ 7courses makes it ridiculously easy to jot down and manage your collection of recipes. As someone who cooks, I often find recipes online or in cookbooks, but have no way to organize them. I have been looking for a digital "recipe box". After plenty of searching I just made my own. 7courses was built around the idea that you should be able to choose how you want to organize your recipes, and doing so should be easy and quick. The UI is responsive and intuitive, with a no frills design. Just jump right in…
2011
- 2
- 3IM
My free to use app lets you schedule your favorite recipes with a few clicks
2024 · simplechore.xyz
- 4MY
Meals You Love is a meal planning app that creates weekly meal plans tailored to your tastes and dietary preferences. It integrates with Kroger and Instacart's APIs so you can add your meal plan groceries directly to your cart. You can also import your own recipes to include alongside AI suggestions. I originally built this to help my wife with meal planning and grocery shopping. We were always struggling to decide what to make and inevitably forgot ingredients. Most meal planners felt too rigid or generic, and few handled the grocery side well (or at all). We've also used meal kits like…
Oct 2025 · mealsyoulove.com
- 5YP
Care to share a screenshot and the 'killer feature' of any of your personal, self-built productivity tools? eg. I made my own calendar and money-tracker last year - there are no other users, it makes no money, I have no plans to make it public, but it holds my life together :) http://i.imgur.com/h2keJDg.png GREAT BECAUSE... it tells me how much I'm going to get paid this month. Absolutely no ulterior motive here (ie. I'm not canvassing opinions for a productivity app startup or anything), just interested.
2013
- 6AD
Hi guys, This is my first time building something from scratch so go easy on me. I've always used to-do lists to keep me productive and stave off anxiety (not sure why they work so well for me but they do). I get kinda annoyed at the to-do list apps on the app stores because they move tasks to the bottom of the list when you tick them off. Some people may like that, but it annoys the shit out of me, because I like to feel a sense of progression as I go down through the list over the course of the day. So this was borne out of my frustration really. I also made it browser-based so it's easy…
2022 · anotherdarntodo.com
- 7IM
Hello everyone, I created a EasyCook app, this app will generate food recipes based on your ingredients. The idea is not to waste food, and if you have left some ingredients in the Kitchen, you can write it down in app and get a recipe based on these ingredients. The app is free to use, however have more features available for paid users. Would be thankful for feedback, so I can improve the app more!
2024 · easycook.app
- 8IB
Hi HN! I built this tool for my wife to save her the headache of meal planning. She finds it helpful and I think you might too. Please check it out and let me know your thoughts. Thanks!
2024 · platepickers.com
- 9IB
I built this because I see that grocery savings are achievable in NYC. People usually just go to the store they're used to going to, and it's rarely worth the effort of combing through card cashback, weekly coupons, CPG rebates. Most people leave real money on the table by not stacking them, and even more don't even know that these deals are out there.... so I built a way to automate it. You can use it for free, no login, currently NYC-only with ~690 stores. I built it so that you just search whatever you want (use commas if you want to search multiple items). Or - use the AI tool to help…
Jul 2026 · sbnyc.app
- 10IB
Hi, I built this iOS App that would let parents create profiles for my children, plan their meals, put their meal preferences, recipes, lunchboxes, export the plan to their calendar, and share links to the timetable with others, and of course an AI helping with the plan and recipe . For now it has a free plan and also paid plan. Initially i built this as a web app but then after feedbacks from close people i developed this iOS app. I would really appreciate your feedback.
2025 · apps.apple.com
- 11IG
Hey, I'm an iOS engineer who took on the seemingly mad task of creating a new grocery app in this day and age. Yes, there are plenty out there, but I promise there's a method to my madness. It's born out of a personal need – my wife would rattle off a list of things to buy, and I'd struggle to remember them all. She's not a fan of typing into apps or shared notes, and honestly, neither am I when it's about speed. The epiphany was that all existing grocery apps have an input problem. They're not catering to the way real people communicate about errands. So, I built HoneyDo to solve my own…
2024 · apps.apple.com
- 12BY
I've just published my app and I would love to have more feedback on it. I got the idea when I was busy moving around several projects during my last semester. And I always don't know which project I should work on next. Even worse, whenever I'm busy with something, I no longer have time to "read book", "go jogging" etc. That's when I thought it would be great if there is an app that keeps track of all the tasks that you want to do and habits that you want to make. And here it is! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKVr0k9Hax0…
2014
- 13TO
I got tired of trying to figure out my vacation balance throughout the year, so I made this website to be a stupid simple solution. It was pretty satisfying to bang it out over a weekend. * not all holidays are supported, and probably will do some custom-holiday-in-cookie functionality, but this is a common US list. * basically only looks good on 'normal' sized browsers
2023 · daysoffplanner.com
- 14OI
I'm trying to get the motivation up to actually finish building out a "real" product, and I found myself needing a "win" to keep my momentum up. So, I hacked out a little one sentence journal app last night. I experimented with a few UI things (e.g.., the autosaving of the sentence for today and so on), so it was a good learning experience also. You can check it out at: http://osod.im
2012
- 15CT
Hey HN! I've just launched CookThis, my new app that helps fight food waste by using up leftover ingredients. It uses ML in a couple of ways to aid this, both by using a CNN to detect ingredients from a camera feed, and by using an LLM to generate new recipes. Would be great to get some feedback! There's a week free trial available with no commitment
2023
- 16PA
Hey Everyone! This is my first post on Hacker News, and I wanted to share my project with you! From a young age, I dreamed of becoming a chef, but life took me down the path of software engineering instead. Nevertheless, my passion for creating delicious meals has always remained close to my heart. This journey led me to seek out recipes to enhance my cooking skills, but I often found myself frustrated by the websites I encountered—ads everywhere, walls of text, and recipes that were difficult to follow. That’s where PurePlates comes in. PurePlates allows users to share a recipe through…
2024 · apps.apple.com
- 17IM
Hi HN, I am a solopreneur in the evenings and a software engineer during the day. In the past, I have created lots of calculators for my web projects and freelancing friends. These were pretty basic, but users always welcomed them. I also used currently available builders, but the problem was that they were either slow, broke on mobile devices, had nonsense page view limits, or were expensive. Some even ticked all those boxes. So I have decided to create my own, with a simple interface, and called it Creative Widgets (if it ever takes off, I plan to add more exciting stuff like charts, etc,…
2024 · creativewidgets.io
- 18IB
A few years ago, I started managing my finances using Google Sheets. It worked fine for a while, but then I hit some limitations. As my financial planning needs grew more complex, I found myself struggling with tracking assets and forecasting future financial scenarios. Thus, I started to work in my spare time on building FinancialAha: https://www.financialaha.com - a financial planning app designed to do everything my spreadsheets couldn’t. It is completely free and I intend to add some paid features later on as listed on the pricing page, but I want to keep it free for people…
2024
- 19MF
A little background: I'd been throwing this idea around in my head for a while, and finally had some free time between two quarters of school, and decided to make the site. I spent several days over the break laying out the backend for the site, and starting coding, and then the next few weekends finishing it up (and I've been making small changes since then). Where I got the idea: I originally got the idea when trying to look up coupons for some pizza places, and having a lot of trouble finding any that worked at my store since they were all regional, or weekly codes, so I just manually…
2012
- 20
- 21AS
No cookies / tracking / logins / monetization, just a free PWA.
2023 · shoptogether.app
- 22AA
Wanted to get everyone's feedback on the web app my startup has been working on for the past few months. (didn't want to tweak it anymore before getting feedback from viewers who weren't my friends/family). http://www.foodia.com Would definitely love feedback on the UX (which needs work) and whether this is something you'd use before shopping/deciding what to buy. I'd also love to hear what food problems (if any) you all feel need solving. Thanks.
2011
- 23MS
A little history first. Back in Jan 2011 I quit my day job after saving up my $ for a year and began my first startup, a hardware + SaaS business. It was exciting and at the end of 14 months I had a handful of customers but not enough incoming to keep me going so I went back into the workforce full time, running it on the side. Naturally my time is pretty limited. Users kept signing up and I had to constantly print and post them unique welcome forms, direct debit forms, post out monthly invoices etc, the list goes on. The paperwork alone took me hours. I'd have just coded up each form into a…
2013
- 24IB
I recently built an iOS app called Settld: Group Restaurant Finder that helps friends decide where to meet by finding restaurants that are roughly equally far from everyone’s location, and displaying information about them. We’ve all been in chaotic group chats where no one can agree on where to eat — this app cuts through that by calculating a “sweet spot” for the group. For 2 people, it’s the midpoint. For 3 people, it’s the circumcenter. For 4–6 people, it uses a minimum enclosing circle approach (Welzl’s algorithm). It then shows the top 15 nearby options so there’s no more “where do we…
2025 · settld.space
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