Totally agree on a video walkthrough, and it's on my list. I've mostly been putting it off because I'm not sure if I'm capable of making a polished enough presentation, which is a bad excuse.

Also 100% on messaging to differentiate from just using an LLM to do this yourself. This one feels a bit harder to me because I think it perhaps is not obvious until you get into the product and use it for a bit, though the integrations are a pretty good concrete example.

You're right that Meals You Love integrates with Instacart and Kroger for ordering meal plan groceries but it's not primarily a grocery funnel and this has no impact on meal plan construction. Really these are just value-add integrations IMO. For our family, the real value is actually providing a means for us to save our favorite recipes and get AI-recommended recipes peppered in. The grocery ordering is secondary, though quite useful for us.

The second big value prop for us has actually been the new "Quick Bites" feature which generates recipes based on ingredients you have on hand (either tracked in your pantry in the app or simply input manually). For instance, we'll often have some ingredients we want to use up but need suggestions on what to make. In this case, there's no grocery integration at all since we're using entirely stuff we already have.

Good question on the meal calendar. You CAN share meal plans (as well as recipes), though there isn't a calendar as such beyond the weekly meal plan view.

Preferences are primarily handled via the AI (uses Gemini on the backend) and this is the primary driver in how recipes are constructed and recommended.

It's actually a pretty decent API. I've hit some quirks with it, but for the most part works reasonably well overall. The best part about it was there were no hoops to jump through to start using it.

Albertsons (and also Safeway) has a kind of hidden API that I use to pull all my grocery purchases into a Postgres DB in order to see what's what.

https://bsky.app/profile/davidwelton.bsky.social/post/3m34al...

Ah, I hear you on the onboarding wizard. I did my best to keep it streamlined but understand it's still overwhelming. Hard to balance keeping it light with collecting enough data to provide reasonable recommendations.

The meal plan generation does take a bit, _typically_ it's around 90ish seconds but it does vary a lot. That's odd the images are loading slowly, I'll need to look into that.

You can ask for meal replacements (with or without input instructions) from the meal plan view. The replacements are not particularly snappy though. Trying to balance efficient usage of AI with a snappy UX is tricky.

You can specify this in "Preferences & Requests" in the meal planning wizard or "customize with instructions" on an existing meal plan recipe.

How many people own a cookbook they haven't opened in a year? I think the value proposition is the same as Pandora: send me something I'll like that I wasn't expecting.

It's surprising how easy it is to stare at an entire bookshelf of cookbooks and not feel inspired. Ask me how I know.

I'm content to just keep healthy ingredients on hand and improvise, but I get that some people could want something with more structure.

I'm not really an AI in everything person, but weirdly: I'm an avid cook. I own well over a hundred cookbooks. I've been cooking for literally decades. Putting aside humility, I'm pretty comfortable just opening the fridge and making something on demand and it usually ends up pretty good and interesting. (usually. ;-)

And I find meal planning to be a drag. I don't like it. But it's really helpful in saving time over the week. I find myself using gemini once in a while to get ideas to kick me out of a boring routine or when I'm feeling unmotivated, and it's pretty helpful. Probably most helpful because it gets the ball rolling -- dealing with the "blank page" problem is hard in all sorts of domains, including meal planning. I don't actually like the idea of the OP's app -- I like to have more control and iterate a fair bit -- but I can appreciate the general area.

Wow that's a great idea thanks for sharing

You can do that for free with Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini or grok or deepseek

How is this $10 / month?!