Chefless vs Save Thyme
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Chefless
Save, share, and plan meals with friends and family. Organize your personal recipes with notes and signatures, and collaborate on meal plans in shared kitchens. Explore global cuisines and track your cooking year.
- Save personal recipes with notes and signatures
- Share recipes privately or publicly
- Fork and modify existing recipes
- Collaborate on meal plans in shared Kitchens
- Track cooking progress and year in review
- Offline recipe access
- AI Recipe Helper (Pro feature)
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Chefless keeps the recipes you cook, helps you plan your meals, and turns that plan into a shopping list. Use it on your own or with the people you cook for. Bring in recipes from anywhere Paste a link from a recipe website, or from a public social media post with the recipe in its caption. You can also paste the recipe text, or take photos of a cookbook page, a screenshot, or a handwritten card, up to four pages at a time. You check each recipe before you save it. Chefless marks anything unclear for you to look at and leaves a missing amount blank for you to fill in. Keep recipes the way you like them A recipe can hold up to five photos, ingredients, steps, cooking times, servings, and tags for diet, cuisine, and meal. You decide whether each recipe is private or shared. Sign your recipes in your own handwriting and group them into cookbooks. You can also make your own version of another cook's recipe, called a remix, and their name stays on it as the original. Plan meals together in a Kitchen A Kitchen is a shared space where your household plans meals and shops together. Everyone sees the same meal calendar. Members suggest meals, and the Kitchen lead, or someone the lead chooses, approves them. Members can say whether they are coming to a meal, and the lead can tell everyone the food is ready with one tap. People join with an invite code, and your private recipes stay visible only to you. Plan the week and shop once Look at your plan by week, month, or year, and give each planned meal its own number of servings. Make one shopping list from your plan or your Kitchen's plan for the days you pick, and Chefless adds repeated ingredients together. When the plan changes, update the list. It keeps the items you checked and the things you added yourself. Cook mode Cook mode shows you one step at a time. Start a timer and Chefless alerts you when it finishes, as long as you allow notifications. The amounts follow the servings you choose and can show in metric or imperial units, and your screen stays on while you cook. Find something new to cook Follow other cooks and see what they make. Browse For You, Trending, Friends, and Seasonal, or search by cuisine, dietary need, meal, and cooking time. Chefless lists cuisines from your part of the world first, using the region setting on your phone. Comment on recipes, post a photo of a dish you made, and rate the recipes you cook. Your passport collects a stamp for each cuisine you cook. Your language and your privacy Chefless works in English, Arabic, Turkish, and Spanish. You can make your account and your recipes private, and report a recipe, comment, or profile that should not be there. You can also delete your account and its data from Settings. You will not see ads. Free and Chefless Premium A free account includes up to five recipes (your own and saved ones together), one remix, one cookbook, planning from two days before today to two days after, and a Kitchen with up to two members. Cook mode, shopping lists, following other cooks, and the passport cost nothing. Chefless Premium gives you unlimited recipes, remixes, and cookbooks, the full calendar, and unlimited members in a Kitchen you lead. You also get the AI Recipe Helper to write a recipe from ingredients you have, suggest swaps for a dietary need, or turn rough notes into a tidy recipe. It shares a limit of 20 uses a day with imports that read a photo, a caption, or pasted text. Pantry and Cook What I Have show you the recipes you can make with what is in your kitchen, and a chef hat badge appears on your profile. Chefless Premium costs $5.99 a month or $34.99 a year. Your subscription renews until you cancel it. To stop the next charge, cancel in your account settings at least 24 hours before the renewal date. Questions or ideas: admin@chefless.org Privacy Policy: https://chefless.org/privacy Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/
Save Thyme
This app streamlines meal planning by identifying shared ingredients across recipes, reducing shopping lists, saving money, and minimizing food waste. It allows users to share recipes, generates categorized shopping lists, and tracks pantry items to suggest meals you can already prepare.
- Shared ingredient meal planning
- Optimized shopping lists
- Pantry tracking
- Recipe sharing
- Curated recipe suggestions
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The meal planner that shrinks your grocery list. Save Thyme builds weekly meal plans around recipes that share ingredients. Four dinners might normally mean 40+ items in your cart. Save Thyme finds recipes that overlap — so the same onion, the same carton of cream, the same rotisserie chicken stretch across multiple meals. Fewer unique items, a lower grocery bill, and less food dying in the crisper drawer. HOW IT WORKS - Share recipes you love from popular food blogs with the app - Save Thyme finds recipes that share ingredients with them - Your shopping list merges duplicates automatically, grouped by store section - Watch the item count shrink as the overlap adds up WHAT YOU GET - Smart shopping lists — shared ingredients combined and tagged, organized by category - Ingredient overlap at a glance — see exactly which recipes share what - Pantry tracking — log what you have, get recipes that use it up - Curated recipes — hand-picked from trusted food blogs, always credited and linked to the original creators - Step-by-step directions on every recipe card WHO IT'S FOR Anyone tired of buying a whole bunch of cilantro for one recipe and tossing half. Budget shoppers, meal preppers, busy families — anyone who wants dinner planned without a cart full of single-use ingredients. Save Thyme — fewer ingredients, shorter lists, less waste. Terms of Use: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is update cadence: Save Thyme at every 10 days against Chefless's every 3 weeks. Chefless's advantage is ratings volume (5 vs 1). On price, rating, ads and in-app purchases there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Chefless sells 2 in-app purchases, starting at $5.99 per month and Save Thyme sells 2 in-app purchases, starting at $4.99 per month. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.
On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 5.0 for Chefless against 5.0 for Save Thyme. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Chefless has 5 ratings behind it against 1, so its average is the more settled of the two.
Chefless ships an update every 3 weeks, Save Thyme every 10 days. The most recent releases landed on October 1, 2026 and October 15, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Chefless | Save Thyme |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 5.0 (5 ratings) | 5.0 (1 ratings) |
| Positive reviews | 100.0% of reviews | — |
| Number of ratings | 5 — better | 1 |
| Update frequency | Every 3 weeks | Every 10 days — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | Yes |
| Monetization | Freemium | Freemium |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad — better | iPhone |
| Requires iOS | 16.0 — better | 16.4 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 66 MB | 65 MB |
| Age rating | 12+ | 4+ |
| Developer | SAHAB LLC | JON D MORTEN |
Customer experience
Chefless
Save Thyme
In-app purchases
Chefless
- Chefless Pro Monthly$5.991 Month
- Chefless Pro Annual$34.991 Year
Save Thyme
- Monthly Unlimited7 Days trial$4.991 Month
- Annual Unlimited7 Days trial$39.991 Year









