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The best meal planning apps for saving money on groceries (2026)
Most "best meal planning app" lists rank apps on recipes and design. This one asks a narrower question: which apps actually help you spend less on groceries? A meal plan saves money when it's built around what's cheap this week, uses real prices, and gets you to cook the recipes you already love instead of buying ingredients for dishes you'll never make.
⚖️ How we judged them
- Does it plan around your store's current sales? This is the single biggest money-saver, and very few apps do it.
- Does it show real prices and get you to checkout? A list priced at your own store, or sent straight to your grocery cart.
- Does it work with the recipes you already love? Importing recipes from websites and social media, and (rarer still) telling you which of them are cheap to make this week.
- What does it cost, and where can you use it? iPhone, Android or the web.
📊 At a glance
| App | Plans around your store's sales | Grocery cart | Imports social media recipes | Price | Where |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Grocery Fresh Chef | Yes, Kroger-family stores | Yes, one tap (pickup or delivery) | Yes | First plan free; $4.99/plan, $8.99/mo or $99.99/yr | iPhone, Android, web |
| The Dinner Daily | Yes, 16,000+ stores | Not listed | No (add your own recipes) | $58/yr or $24 per 3 months | Web app |
 Dishcount | Yes, 27+ chains | Kroger | No | Free | Website |
 eMeals | No | Walmart, Kroger, Instacart, Amazon Fresh and more | Web recipes | From $4.99/mo (annual) | iPhone, Android, web |
 Plan to Eat | No | Delivery partners | Yes | $5.95/mo or $49/yr | iPhone, Android, web |
 Samsung Food | No | Several retailers | Yes | Free; Food+ $6.99/mo | iPhone, Android, web |
 AnyList | No | Walmart, Kroger banners, Instacart and more | Web recipes | Free; $9.99/yr | iPhone, Android, web |
 Paprika 3 | No | No | Web recipes | One-time purchase per device | iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows |
 Ollie | No | Instacart, Amazon Fresh | Photos | About $10/mo | iPhone, Android |
The difference that matters most: several of these apps can send a list to a grocery cart, and a few plan around sales. Grocery Fresh Chef is the only app on this list that does both: it builds your week of dinners from this week's sales at your store, then sends those exact sale-priced ingredients to your cart in one tap, ready for pickup or delivery.
1. Grocery Fresh Chef
Planning a week of dinners around the sales usually means an evening with the weekly ad, a recipe site and a notepad. Grocery Fresh Chef turns that into a few taps, and it's genuinely fun to use.
It starts with this week's real sale prices at your own store and writes a dinner plan around them, with the estimated savings and cost per serving for every meal. Tell it you're craving pork schnitzel or tacos, choose how adventurous to get, and it does the rest.
Then comes the part that saves the most time: tap once and every ingredient, at this week's sale price, goes straight into your Kroger-family cart. Choose pickup or delivery at checkout (wherever your store offers it), and dinner for the week shows up at your door. No list to write, no aisles to walk. Prefer to shop in person? Take the list with you instead, grouped the way you walk the store.
It's also built around the recipes you already love. Import recipes by pasting a link from a website, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram or Facebook, or upload a screenshot of a post. Subscribers can tap "What's on sale?" in their Cookbook to see which saved favorites have their main ingredient on sale this week, and add them back into the plan. We didn't find another app that does that.
New: the Grocery Fresh Sommelier. Tap it on any Cookbook recipe for a wine pairing, or at checkout to get a bottle for each dinner picked from your own store's wine shelf, in the price range you choose. It's for adults 21 and older, and the store picks appear only where grocery stores can sell wine.
Good to know: it only works with Kroger-family stores (Kroger, Harris Teeter, Ralphs, King Soopers, Fry's, Smith's, QFC, Fred Meyer and nine others, nearly 2,800 locations). Your first plan is free; after that it's $4.99 per plan, $8.99 a month or $99.99 a year, and the on-sale Cookbook check is for subscribers.
2. The Dinner Daily
The Dinner Daily has been doing sale-based meal planning for years. It starts with what's on sale at your store and builds a weekly dinner menu around it, and it covers more than 16,000 stores across all 50 states, far more chains than we do. You can add your own recipes and pick from diets like reduced-carb, gluten-free and heart-healthy.
Good to know: it runs as a web app rather than a native iPhone or Android app. $24 for three months or $58 a year, with a 14-day trial.
3. Dishcount
Dishcount is a free website that builds a five-dinner plan from sale items at more than 27 chains, including Kroger, Aldi, Meijer, H-E-B, Safeway and Harris Teeter. You don't need an account to use it, and with a free account it can send the list to a Kroger cart.
Good to know: it's website-only, with no app, and it doesn't import your own recipes.
4. eMeals
eMeals gives you curated weekly menus from a long list of meal plan styles, and sends your list to more grocery services than any other app here, including Walmart, Kroger, Instacart, Amazon Fresh, Albertsons and Safeway. It saves money mainly by cutting impulse buys and over-buying rather than by planning around sales.
Good to know: from $4.99 a month on an annual plan, with a 14-day trial.
5. Plan to Eat
Plan to Eat is one of the best recipe collectors around. It imports from websites, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and Pinterest, and you drag recipes onto a calendar to build your week. It doesn't generate plans for you or look at sale prices.
Good to know: $5.95 a month or $49 a year on its website, with a 14-day trial.
6. Samsung Food
Samsung Food (formerly Whisk) saves recipes from websites, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Pinterest for free, and connects to several grocery retailers. AI-generated weekly meal plans are part of its paid Food+ tier. It doesn't plan around sale prices.
Good to know: free; Food+ is $6.99 a month or $59.99 a year.
7. AnyList
AnyList is primarily a shopping list app, and an excellent one, with recipe saving and a meal planning calendar on top. It can send your list to Walmart, Instacart, Kroger-family stores and others from its phone apps. It doesn't generate plans or look at sales.
Good to know: free, or $9.99 a year ($14.99 for a household) for the Complete plan.
8. Paprika 3
Paprika is a long-time favorite for organizing recipes you save from the web, with a meal planning calendar and an aisle-sorted grocery list. There's no subscription; you buy it once on each platform you use. It has no grocery store connection or sale-price features.
9. Ollie
Ollie uses AI to build weekly family meal plans around your preferences, and can send ingredients to Instacart or Amazon Fresh. It doesn't plan around sale prices.
Good to know: around $10 a month after a free trial; iPhone and Android.
📌 A few other things worth knowing
- Mealime is shutting down on October 21, 2026. It was a popular free planner, but its owner, Albertsons, is moving users to the meal planning tools inside its own grocery apps (Safeway, Vons, Jewel-Osco and others). If you use Mealime, export or re-save your favorite recipes before then.
- If wine with dinner matters to you: Blue Apron offers an optional wine subscription that ships separately from its meal kits every four weeks, and dedicated wine apps like Pocket Sommelier and GrapeGuru will suggest a pairing for a dish. They don't plan your meals or look at what your own store sells, though. We didn't find another meal planning app that picks bottles from your store's shelf to go with your dinners.
- Grocery chains are building their own planners. Kroger's apps now include a free AI shopping assistant that can plan a week of meals around your budget and build your cart, and Walmart's app offers something similar. They're worth a look if you only shop at one store, though they're designed to fill that store's cart rather than to find you the cheapest week.
✅ Which one should you pick?
- You shop at a Kroger-family store and want the biggest savings with the least work: Grocery Fresh Chef. Dinners built from this week's sales, then one tap to your cart for pickup or delivery.
- Your store isn't part of the Kroger family: The Dinner Daily, or Dishcount if you want something free.
- You mostly want to organize the recipes you already have: Plan to Eat, Paprika or Samsung Food.
- You mostly want a great shared shopping list: AnyList.
Your first meal plan, built from this week's sales at your store, is on us. Then one tap sends it to your cart.
Delivery and pickup are offered by your Kroger-family store, at its usual fees, wherever it's available.
More from the blog: How to turn the Kroger weekly ad into a week of dinners · Save recipes from TikTok and Instagram, then cook them when they're on sale