Mealime Is Gone: How to Move Your Meal Plan (and 5 Free Alternatives)

On October 21, 2026, Mealime was shut down: the meal planning app was folded into Albertsons' Meals Hub, and the standalone app stopped working. If you used Mealime to plan your week, your recipes and meal plans are now inaccessible — and Mealime does not offer a recipe export.

That leaves you with two jobs: getting your recipes out (or at least recreating them), and picking a Mealime alternative. This guide covers both — how to rebuild your meal plan with the least effort, and which free alternatives are worth a look.

What happened to Mealime

• Mealime's owner, Albertsons, retired the standalone app and folded its functionality into the Meals Hub experience.
• There is no official export tool. Recipes you added, favorites you saved, and plans you built are not recoverable from the service.
• The Mealime website still resolves, but the app no longer functions as a meal planner.

That's the full picture — no controversy, no drama, just a shut-down service. The practical question is what to do about the recipes and routines you had built up.

Step 1: Recover what you can

Since there's no export, recovery is partial by nature. Work through these in order:

1. Screenshots from your camera roll. If you ever screenshotted recipes or weekly plans, those images are your best asset. Keep them in one album — you'll use them in the next step.
2. Saved grocery lists. Check any notes app, email receipts, or reminders where you pasted shopping lists. Ingredient lists are often enough to reconstruct a recipe.
3. Memory + the 80/20. Most people rotate the same 10–15 dinners. Write those down first; they carry most of your week and you likely know them well enough to rebuild from ingredient lists alone.

Don't aim for a perfect migration. A meal plan works as soon as next week is covered.

Step 2: Pick a replacement

There are two routes: a full meal-planning app, or a lighter "plan + list" tool. If you're weighing how to switch from Mealime, here are five free options worth comparing, including where each one fits.

1. WeekPlate — plan-and-list, built around your own recipes

WeekPlate is a free-to-start meal planner focused on the two artifacts that actually matter week to week: the weekly plan and the grocery list.

• Plan from your own recipes, not a fixed database — which matters for Mealime migrants, since your recovered recipes (see Step 1) are the things you're rebuilding.
• Import your favorites from a screenshot: snap a photo of a recipe (a cookbook page, a saved screenshot, a handwritten card) and add it to your library, then fill in anything the import missed by hand.
• Grocery lists build themselves from the week's plan, organized the way you actually walk the store.
• No subscription to cancel — free to start, one-time purchase to unlock everything. There's a limited-time launch offer running right now — see the App Store for current pricing in your region.
• Your data stays on your device.

Fit: best if your Mealime routine was "pick dinners for the week, get a shopping list, go."

2. EatThisMuch — macro-driven autoplanning

EatThisMuch generates plans from calorie and macro targets, with a free tier and a paid subscription. Its /switch-from-mealime page is aimed at exactly this moment. Fit: best if you used Mealime's nutrition targets more than its recipes.

3. Mealime's successor: Meals Hub

Albertsons folded Mealime's concept into its own Meals Hub. Fit: worth a look if you already shop at Albertsons banners; note it's tied to that ecosystem rather than a standalone planner.

4. Plan to Eat — recipe clipper + calendar

A long-running planner built around saving recipes from the web and dragging them onto a calendar. Subscription-based with a free trial. Fit: best for heavy recipe collectors who plan 2+ weeks out.

5. Pen and paper (or Notes) — the zero-cost baseline

A weekly template in any notes app covers maybe 70% of what Mealime did: five dinner lines and a shopping list. It's a legitimate answer while you evaluate apps. Fit: everyone, briefly.

Step 3: Rebuild your first week (30 minutes)

1. Pick 5 dinners from your Step 1 recovery list.
2. Put them on the calendar Monday–Friday (leave the weekend loose).
3. Generate the grocery list from the plan — automatically in WeekPlate, or by walking the plan aisle by aisle.
4. Shop once. You're back to your Mealime routine, minus the app that left.

Frequently asked questions

Is Mealime coming back? No. Albertsons retired the standalone app as of October 21, 2026, and its features live on inside Meals Hub. There is no announced return.

Can I export my recipes from Mealime? No — Mealime does not offer an export. Recovery is limited to what you saved locally (screenshots, pasted lists) plus rebuilding your regular rotation by hand.

What's the closest free alternative to Mealime? Depends on what you used it for. For "plan the week, get the shopping list, use my own recipes," WeekPlate's free start is the closest shape — you can rebuild your rotation by importing recipes from screenshots and plan immediately. For nutrition-target-driven planning, EatThisMuch is the closer fit.

Do I need a subscription? Not with WeekPlate: it's free to start, and unlocking everything is a one-time purchase — no subscription to cancel. (Other tools in this list vary; check their pricing pages — several are subscription-based.)

I have more questions about WeekPlate. Write to support@baize.buzz — replies within 2 business days.

The short version

Mealime is gone and your data went with it. Screenshot-salvage what you can, rebuild your 10-dinner rotation, and pick a replacement that plans from your recipes. If that last part is the priority, WeekPlate does exactly that — free to start, no subscription.