Plan to Eat Alternative - Free & Open Source

Plan to Eat is a meal-planning subscription from an independent team in Colorado. It costs $49 per year direct, or $54.99 per year through the Apple App Store, after a 14-day trial. There is no free tier.

My wife and I made RecipeSage as a free, open source alternative. Drag-and-drop meal planning, recipe organization, smart shopping lists, photo and PDF import, and nutrition tracking are all included at no cost.

How they price

RecipeSage

Free forever. No paywall, no ads. Unlimited recipes, meal planning, and shopping lists for every account.

Plan to Eat

$5.95 per month or $49 per year direct (USD). $54.99 per year on the iOS App Store. 14-day free trial, then paid. No free tier.

Feature by feature

We've tried to be fair here. Where Plan to Eat is genuinely stronger, we say so. Numbers and feature claims are sourced from each product's own documentation as of August 2026.

Feature	RecipeSage	Plan to Eat
Price	Free, open source	$49 to $54.99 per year
Web app	Yes	Yes
iOS app	Free	Subscription
Android app	Free	Subscription
Browser extension (Firefox, Chrome)	Yes	Yes
Auto import from a URLRecipeSage's URL importer supports a wider range of recipe sites.	Yes	Yes
Import from a photo (OCR)	Yes	Yes
PDF importPlan to Eat supports adding PDFs one at a time, but not in bulk.	Yes	Partial
Import from Word documents	Yes	No
Drag-and-drop meal planner	Yes	Yes
Recurring meal plan items	Yes	Yes
Reusable meal-plan templatesPlan to Eat's Menus let you save reusable bundles of recipes to drop into a plan. RecipeSage has no equivalent.	No	Yes
Freezer / batch-cooking tracker	No	Yes
Smart shopping list with aisle categorization	Yes	Yes
Recipe scaling and unit conversion	Yes	Yes
Nutrition tracking (macros, vitamins, minerals)Plan to Eat focuses on macros, and vitamin and mineral depth is less documented.	Yes	Partial
AI cooking assistantPlan to Eat's AI covers ingredient substitutions and beginner-mode directions, but not a conversational cooking assistant.	Yes	Partial
Typo-tolerant search	Yes	No
Real multi-user collaborationPlan to Eat's family sharing means sharing one login.	Yes	No
Works offline	Yes	Yes
Open source	Yes	No
Self-hostable	Yes	No
Data portabilityPlan to Eat lets you export your recipe book to CSV from the website, even after a subscription lapses. RecipeSage supports well-recognized standardized formats.	Yes	CSV export
Public sharing by link or embed, no account neededRecipeSage gives you a public profile to share a recipe, a label, or your whole collection by link, plus website embed codes. Plan to Eat sharing is limited to its Friends feature, where both people must be subscribers.	Yes	No
Native desktop app (Windows, macOS, Linux)RecipeSage has native desktop apps for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Plan to Eat is web and mobile only.	Yes	No
Cook Mode (full-screen, distraction-free cooking view)Both offer a full-screen cooking view that keeps the screen awake. RecipeSage's also lets you check off ingredients and steps as you cook and scale servings without leaving.	Yes	Yes
Built-in kitchen toolkitRecipeSage's toolkit includes a measurement converter, a pan and bakeware converter that rescales ingredients and suggests bake time and temperature adjustments, and a cooking-temperature reference for safe internal temperatures. Plan to Eat has none of these.	Yes	No
Printable PDF cookbook generatorRecipeSage's Cookbook Generator compiles your recipes into one printable PDF with a cover page, optional table of contents, and each recipe on its own page.	Yes	No

Why people switch from Plan to Eat to RecipeSage

Built-in kitchen toolkitRecipeSage adds built-in converters for units, pan sizes, and cooking temperatures. Plan to Eat has none of these.
No paywallRecipeSage is free, with nothing you're required to pay and no time-limited trial. Plan to Eat is $49 to $54.99 per year with a 14-day trial.
More import optionsRecipeSage imports from URLs, photos, PDFs, and Word docs. Plan to Eat covers URLs and photos and adds PDFs one at a time.
Deeper nutrition dataRecipeSage tracks macros, vitamins, and minerals per serving, with auto-fill from a nutrition label.
Typo-tolerant searchSearch 'pankakes' and find your pancake recipe, or find that one recipe where you mistyped "asparaggus". Plan to Eat's search requires exact matches.
Collaboration with separate accountsEach family member can have their own RecipeSage account and still share recipes, plans, and shopping lists. Plan to Eat's family sharing means using the same login.
Share your recipes with anyoneRecipeSage gives you a public profile to share a single recipe, a whole label, or your entire collection by a link anyone can open without an account, plus embed codes to drop a recipe onto a website or blog. Plan to Eat sharing is limited to its Friends feature, where both people must be subscribers.
Turn your collection into a printable cookbookRecipeSage's Cookbook Generator assembles your recipes into a single PDF, with a cover page, an optional table of contents, and each recipe on its own page with its image and nutrition. It's an easy way to print a personal cookbook or give one as a gift. Plan to Eat has no built-in cookbook generator.

Where Plan to Eat is honestly stronger

We're not pretending RecipeSage wins on everything. Here's whatPlan to Eat does better than us today.

Reusable Menus templatesPlan to Eat's Menus let you save reusable bundles of recipes and notes to drop into a plan. RecipeSage doesn't have a saved-menu feature.
Freezer and batch-cooking trackerPlan to Eat has a dedicated Freezer feature for tracking frozen meals with date frozen and servings. RecipeSage doesn't have a direct equivalent.

Bringing your Plan to Eat recipes over

RecipeSage lists Plan to Eat as a supported migration source. You can export your recipe book from Plan to Eat in minutes and import it into RecipeSage, even if your Plan to Eat subscription has lapsed.

1From the Plan to Eat website, find the export option in your account settings and choose Export to CSV. You'll get a single CSV with all of your recipes.
2Create a free RecipeSage account at recipesage.com.
3In RecipeSage, open Settings then Import then CSV, and upload the file Plan to Eat gave you.
4Tags, course, and cuisine fields map across to RecipeSage labels.

Plan to Eat lets you export even after a subscription ends, so nothing is locked up if you change your mind later.

Start importing

About the people behind RecipeSage

My wife and I built and run RecipeSage. We're not a venture-backed startup. We cook every night, we got tired of paying subscriptions and losing access to recipes when an app changed hands, so we built the app we wanted to use. Hosting is funded by optional contributions and has been since 2018, and the source code is on GitHub under the AGPL.

If you ever want to leave RecipeSage, you can export everything in standard formats or run the whole thing on your own server. Your recipes are yours.

Common questions about switching from Plan to Eat

How can you offer this for free when Plan to Eat charges $49 a year?

Plan to Eat has a team they need to pay. RecipeSage is a side project for the two of us. Hosting is funded by optional contributions and has been since 2018.

Will I lose my meal plans when I switch?

Plan to Eat's export covers recipes, not meal plans. You'll need to rebuild your upcoming meal plan in RecipeSage, but drag-and-drop makes that quick.

Is RecipeSage's meal planner as capable as Plan to Eat's?

Plan to Eat's Menus templates and freezer tracker are more developed than ours. RecipeSage covers the meal-planning basics (drag and drop, recurring, scaling, shopping list integration) and adds things Plan to Eat doesn't, like photo and PDF import and deeper nutrition.

What happens to my recipes if RecipeSage shuts down?

You can export everything to JSON-LD, PDF, or text any time. Because we're open source, anyone can keep running the code, including on your own server. We've been doing this since 2018 with no plans to stop anytime soon.

Is there a free alternative to Plan to Eat?

Yes. RecipeSage is a free, open source alternative to Plan to Eat, with no paywall and no ads. You can import your recipes, plan meals, build shopping lists, track nutrition, and use it on the web, desktop, iOS, and Android. If you ever decide to leave, you can export everything or self-host.

If you'd rather not pay a yearly subscription for meal planning, give RecipeSage a few weeks in your kitchen. It's free, so there's really no downside :)

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The free, open source Plan to Eat alternative