u/OkStrawberry9638

A bit of context: I'm a solo iOS dev. Every meal planner I tried wanted my email before showing me a single recipe, then upsold me to $7.99/mo. I wanted to know if I could ship a working one that asked for neither.

Six months later it's on the App Store. Here's what's in it:

- 524 recipes built in (not scraped — each has macros, steps, and a linked YouTube tutorial when one exists)

- Pantry tracking that feeds an "AI Meal Ideas" view — add the 6 things you have, get 6 dinners you can actually make

- One-tap shopping list generation from the week's plan, grouped by aisle

- Local notifications 25 minutes before each meal with the recipe queued up

- No account, no tracking, runs offline. $2.99/mo Pro after a 30-day free trial. Free tier is genuinely usable on its own.

Things I'd do differently:

1. I underestimated how much work the recipe data layer was. I rewrote it three times.

2. Shipping without account creation meant rethinking sync — I ended up using iCloud private database, which I'd recommend to anyone building a "no-account" app.

3. The launch week ad budget is $20 because I ran out of money.

Happy to answer technical questions (SwiftUI, CloudKit, what shipped vs what got cut). Not here to push downloads — but if anyone wants to look, it's at mealcurate.github.io and there's a free 30-day Pro trial with annual subscription.

Critical feedback welcome. The next version is being scoped now.

It was a Wednesday in January,2025. I had a head of celery, pickled jalapeno peppers, carrots, and yogurt I'd forgotten about. I stood there for twenty minutes. I closed the fridge. I ordered Panag Curry from our favorite Thai place, which beats fast food.**

>

> That kept happening. Not occasionally. Several times a month. A full fridge, a working brain, twenty minutes of standing, and a $ 45 DoorDash receipt I didn't want.

>

> So I tried the meal-planning apps. I tried Mealime. It wanted my email before showing me a single recipe. I tried Paprika — it's a beautifully built app, and I still own it. But it doesn't know what's in my fridge. I tried Plan to Eat. It's $39 a year and built for someone who already meal-plans. I am not that person.

>

> What I wanted was simple. An app I could open at 5:30 PM, that would look at the seven things in my pantry, and tell me what I could cook in under thirty minutes without going to the store. No account. No subscription wall before I'd even seen what it could do. No social feed. No AI hype.

>

> I'm an IT professional with a passion for meal planning and more than 20 years of development experience. I'd never built something at this scale solo. I gave myself six months of nights and weekends and started.

>

> The hard part wasn't the code. The hard part was the recipes. I could have aggregated them from the web — there are APIs for that — but every other app is doing exactly that, and the recipes that result feel like they came from a content farm. So I wrote and tested **524 originals**. Mediterranean, Asian, Latin, American, and Middle Eastern. Vegan, gluten-free, keto, dairy-free, high-protein. I tagged each one. I cooked most of them. I rewrote any that didn't work in my own kitchen.

>

> The pantry-aware ranking is rule-based. No LLM. The user's pantry items get matched against each recipe's ingredient list, and recipes are sorted by how many ingredients you already have. A recipe at 92% match means you'd need to buy one or two things. A recipe at 40% means it's tonight's *aspirational* recipe, not tonight's *realistic* one. The app makes that distinction visible.

>

> I made some intentional choices that make Meal Curate worse on paper than its competitors:

>

> - **No account.** Not "single sign-on with Apple." None at all. Your data lives on your device, full stop. This means I can't send you re-engagement push notifications. I can't see your behavior. I can't tell you "users who liked this also liked..." I traded growth tools for trust.

> - **No web app.** iOS only, including iPad and Mac as a universal binary. Cooking happens at home, in front of a phone or tablet. Browser tabs are not where you plan dinner.

> - **Pricing under $3/month.** I priced low intentionally — I wanted Pro to feel sub-impulse, not a subscription decision. $2.99/mo or $29.99/yr after a 30-day free trial that Apple's intro offer manages on my behalf.

>

> The biggest challenge that caused many sleepless nights and long beach walks was the stripping of adjectives for ingredients that required but leaving it for others.  For example, a can of diced tomatoes vs 1 lb of diced tomatoes.  One is a canned good and the other is produce.  I finally took a step back and followed my long-term development and delivery cycle - small incremental delivery.  This finally led to a shopping list creation that was more than 95% accurate when extracting ingredients from recipes.

>

> Meal Curate launches on the iOS App Store in May/June. If the wedge — pantry-aware planning, no account, original recipes — is the thing you've been wanting, **mealcurate.github.io** has the email list, and you'll know the day it goes live.

>

> If you've shipped a solo iOS app and survived App Review more than once, I'd love a tip in the comments.

>

> If you stand in front of a full fridge for twenty minutes and order takeout, this is the app I built for you and for me.

https://preview.redd.it/aw7xvsu26y0h1.png?width=1320&format=png&auto=webp&s=f4b0242bc531010fb8c0b2bafca67e3a8d384464

It was a Wednesday in January,2025. I had a head of celery, pickled jalapeno peppers, carrots, and yogurt I'd forgotten about. I stood there for twenty minutes. I closed the fridge. I ordered Panag Curry from our favorite Thai place, which beats fast food.**

>

> That kept happening. Not occasionally. Several times a month. A full fridge, a working brain, twenty minutes of standing, and a $ 45 DoorDash receipt I didn't want.

>

> So I tried the meal-planning apps. I tried Mealime. It wanted my email before showing me a single recipe. I tried Paprika — it's a beautifully built app, and I still own it. But it doesn't know what's in my fridge. I tried Plan to Eat. It's $39 a year and built for someone who already meal-plans. I am not that person.

>

> What I wanted was simple. An app I could open at 5:30 PM, that would look at the seven things in my pantry, and tell me what I could cook in under thirty minutes without going to the store. No account. No subscription wall before I'd even seen what it could do. No social feed. No AI hype.

>

> I'm an IT professional with a passion for meal planning and more than 20 years of development experience. I'd never built something at this scale solo. I gave myself six months of nights and weekends and started.

>

> The hard part wasn't the code. The hard part was the recipes. I could have aggregated them from the web — there are APIs for that — but every other app is doing exactly that, and the recipes that result feel like they came from a content farm. So I wrote and tested **524 originals**. Mediterranean, Asian, Latin, American, and Middle Eastern. Vegan, gluten-free, keto, dairy-free, high-protein. I tagged each one. I cooked most of them. I rewrote any that didn't work in my own kitchen.

>

> The pantry-aware ranking is rule-based. No LLM. The user's pantry items get matched against each recipe's ingredient list, and recipes are sorted by how many ingredients you already have. A recipe at 92% match means you'd need to buy one or two things. A recipe at 40% means it's tonight's *aspirational* recipe, not tonight's *realistic* one. The app makes that distinction visible.

>

> I made some intentional choices that make Meal Curate worse on paper than its competitors:

>

> - **No account.** Not "single sign-on with Apple." None at all. Your data lives on your device, full stop. This means I can't send you re-engagement push notifications. I can't see your behavior. I can't tell you "users who liked this also liked..." I traded growth tools for trust.

> - **No web app.** iOS only, including iPad and Mac as a universal binary. Cooking happens at home, in front of a phone or tablet. Browser tabs are not where you plan dinner.

> - **Pricing under $3/month.** I priced low intentionally — I wanted Pro to feel sub-impulse, not a subscription decision. $2.99/mo or $29.99/yr after a 30-day free trial that Apple's intro offer manages on my behalf.

>

> The biggest challenge that caused many sleepless nights and long beach walks was the stripping of adjectives for ingredients that required but leaving it for others.  For example, a can of diced tomatoes vs 1 lb of diced tomatoes.  One is a canned good and the other is produce.  I finally took a step back and followed my long-term development and delivery cycle - small incremental delivery.  This finally led to a shopping list creation that was more than 95% accurate when extracting ingredients from recipes.

>

> Meal Curate launches on the iOS App Store in May/June. If the wedge — pantry-aware planning, no account, original recipes — is the thing you've been wanting, **mealcurate.github.io** has the email list, and you'll know the day it goes live.

>

> If you've shipped a solo iOS app and survived App Review more than once, I'd love a tip in the comments.

>

> If you stand in front of a full fridge for twenty minutes and order takeout, this is the app I built for you and for me.