Meal Planner vs Home Kitchen Notes
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Meal Planner
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Decide the week's meals once — then stop thinking about food until it's time to cook. MealPlan is a weekly meal planner, recipe book and grocery list in one: lay every breakfast, lunch and dinner out on a Monday-to-Sunday board, and the shopping list writes itself from whatever you planned. No account, no cloud, no calorie lectures. MealPlan works completely offline and keeps everything on your iPhone. It reads the ingredients out of every planned meal, merges duplicates — two dinners that both need onions become one line, not two — and sorts the result by supermarket aisle so you walk the store in order. WHAT YOU GET • The whole week visible at a glance — every breakfast, lunch and dinner on one Monday-to-Sunday board, as a compact grid or a day-by-day list • A grocery list that writes itself — ingredients pulled from every planned meal, quantities merged, grouped by aisle, ready to check off in the store • Next week planned in under a minute — copy last week's board in one tap, then auto-fill the empty dinner slots from your favourite recipes • Every recipe where you can actually find it — save your own with ingredients and steps, search, filter by category, mark favourites • Ideas when you have none — a built-in collection of curated recipes to browse offline and drop straight onto the board • Dinner starts on time — an optional evening reminder tells you what's planned and when to start cooking PERFECT FOR • Family cooks who answer "what's for dinner?" once on Sunday instead of every day at five o'clock • Meal preppers who shop once a week from a single, complete list • Couples splitting the cooking — the board settles who makes what before it becomes a debate • Anyone tired of buying an ingredient twice and still forgetting the one that mattered WHY NOT JUST USE A NOTES APP? A note can hold a list of dinners, but it cannot turn them into a shopping list. MealPlan does the tedious part for you: it extracts the ingredients from every meal on the board, totals the quantities, removes the duplicates and orders them by aisle. And next week, instead of typing everything again, you copy the whole board in one tap. PRIVATE BY DEFAULT Your plans, recipes and shopping lists never leave your iPhone. There is no account to create, no cloud upload, no ads and no tracking. The app is fully usable offline, and notification permission is only requested if you switch on a dinner reminder. FULL ACCESS MealPlan unlocks with a single purchase choice: Weekly, Yearly or Lifetime. Full access includes planning any week past or future, one-tap copying of a whole week, auto-filled dinners from your favourites, unlimited saved recipes and week-plan export — plus the planner board, the offline recipe collection, the self-building grocery list and your cooking insights. Prices are shown in the app before you confirm, and subscriptions can be cancelled anytime in your Apple Account settings. Download MealPlan, plan your first week tonight, and walk into the store this weekend with the list already done. Terms of Use: https://leanstudio.asia/terms-of-use Privacy Policy: https://leanstudio.asia/privacy-policy Support: support@leanstudio.asia
Home Kitchen Notes
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Private Recipe: Turn Your Cravings Into Real Meals Countless recipe links sit scattered in your photos, bookmarks and notes. Saved with excitement, they are forgotten when cooking time comes. The real problem is not lack of inspiration, but messy content: dead links, ad-filled tutorials and instructions buried in comments. When you cook, you need your own tidy cookbook with clear steps and grocery lists. Private Recipe is an iPhone local recipe app. Import online recipes and organize them with AI, or manually type recipes yourself to build a full workflow: collect recipes, make weekly menus, shop ingredients and cook. All data stays locally on your phone. No required login, no data shared with platforms and no annoying push alerts. Public recipe apps focus on discovering new dishes, while Private Recipe focuses on practical cooking. It fixes common troubles: saved links may break and lose formatting; food ideas do not automatically turn into meal plans; algorithm recommendations ignore your allergies, fridge ingredients and past meals; sharing links forces family to hunt for instructions again. This app keeps only recipes you like, filters meals by your preferences and creates simple shopping lists. Copy a recipe link to import directly. Your selected AI extracts title, ingredients and steps into clean text. Recipe photos can be zoomed while cooking. It handles webpage verification, and images save locally, so recipes remain intact even if original links expire. You can also create recipes manually from notes or family oral tips. AI sorts messy notes, and you can freely adjust steps later without extra AI polishing. Tag recipes as weekend meals, dinner parties, low-calorie or 15-minute quick dishes. Mark difficulty and cooking time. Track ingredients from your saved recipes to use leftovers easily. Titles and ingredient names adapt to your system language, while cooking steps keep original text to avoid wrong guidance. It uses iOS Liquid Glass design for fast launch and easy one-handed use by the stove. Once you save over 20 recipes, “What Should I Cook Today?” is available. It picks meals only from your collection. Set rules to skip foods you dislike, prioritize ingredients you own and avoid repeated dishes. Mark meals as cooked after finishing. Add the home widget to see recommendations quickly and reduce meal decision stress. Build weekly meal plans; only current and future dates can be edited, old plans clear automatically. Generate grocery lists that hide common seasonings. Export lists as images and share with family. The workflow: schedule meals, share shopping lists, cook from local steps and mark finished dishes. Generate recipe long images or cover cards locally and share through the system sheet, no server upload. Use Siri and Apple Shortcuts to import links. It supports URL Scheme for quick import from other apps. Built with Core Data, all recipes and images save on your iPhone. No mandatory sign-in. AI uses your own API key. Your recipe and taste data stay private and will not be used for ads. Please back up data regularly just like your photo album. This app works great for home cooks tired of meal decisions, people who save many unused recipe links, families planning menus and shopping together, users with special diets and power users preferring local storage. Recipes are easy to find, but turning cravings into finished meals is hard. Private Recipe uses AI for sorting, local storage for safety, weekly plans and shopping lists for execution. It will not turn you into a chef, but keeps instructions, photos and lists ready when you decide to cook. Terms of Use (EULA): [https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/](https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/)
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is in-app purchases: Meal Planner at none against Home Kitchen Notes's 4. Meal Planner also leads on iOS requirement (17.0 vs 26.0). Home Kitchen Notes's advantage is update cadence (every 3 weeks vs every 3 months). On price, ads and device support 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. Home Kitchen Notes sells 4 in-app purchases, starting at $1.99 per month. Meal Planner asks for nothing beyond the download.
Meal Planner ships an update every 3 months, Home Kitchen Notes every 3 weeks. The most recent releases landed on October 24, 2026 and October 23, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Meal Planner | Home Kitchen Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Update frequency | Every 3 months | Every 3 weeks — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No — better | Yes |
| Devices | iPhone | iPhone, iPad — better |
| Requires iOS | 17.0 — better | 26.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 6 MB | 14 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 17+ |
| Developer | LEAN ASIA CO., LTD | Kai Yang |
In-app purchases
Meal Planner
No in-app purchases
Home Kitchen Notes
- Monthly subscription3 Days trial$1.991 Month
- 3-Month7 Days trial$1.993 Months
- 6-Month14 Days trial$4.996 Months
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- 1 Year1 Month trial$8.991 Year
Questions
Is Meal Planner free?
Is Home Kitchen Notes free?
Do Meal Planner or Home Kitchen Notes have ads?
Which is updated more often, Meal Planner or Home Kitchen Notes?
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