Mealime Meal Plans: Save Your Recipes and Find Your Next Planner

Mealime, the popular recipe and meal-planning app with more than 1 million Android installs on Google Play, is shutting down on October 21, 2026, and accounts will be deleted. You have until then to save your favourite recipes. If you bookmarked or rated recipes in Mealime, you can rescue them by pasting their names into Mealfolder's Mealime rescue tool—it matches your list against all 3,291 public Mealime recipes, photos included, so you don't lose what you've built.

What Happened to Mealime Meal Plans?

Mealime announced its closure in early 2026. The app won't accept new sign-ups, and by October 21, 2026, the service shuts down permanently. That means no export feature, no download of your saved recipes in a standard format—just an account deletion deadline. The timing is tight, but rescue is still possible if you move quickly.

The closure affects anyone who relied on Mealime for three core features: saving recipes they found online, planning weekly dinners, and generating grocery lists. If you've spent months or years building a personal recipe collection in Mealime, losing it stings. That's why Mealfolder built a rescue tool specifically for this moment—you can paste in the names of your favourite Mealime recipes, and Mealfolder finds exact matches from Mealime's public recipe index and saves them to your account with photos and details intact.

How to Save Your Mealime Recipes Before October 21

If you were a regular Mealime user, your collection likely includes recipes you clipped from Mealime's library, recipes you bookmarked or rated, and your favourite meals from weekly meal plans. Here's how to rescue them:

1. List your favourite recipe names. Go into Mealime and note down (or screenshot) the names of recipes you want to keep. If you have dozens, this is tedious but necessary—Mealime offers no bulk export.
2. Use the Mealfolder rescue tool. Go to mealfolder.com/mealime/ and paste the recipe names you want to save, one per line or comma-separated. Mealfolder searches its index of all 3,291 public Mealime recipes—the exact same recipes that were in the app before closure.
3. Review and import. The tool shows you matches with photos, ingredients, and instructions so you can confirm they're the right recipes. Click Import, and they're saved to your Mealfolder account.
4. Back up your grocery lists and meal plans. Take screenshots or copy the text of any custom grocery lists or meal plans you've assembled. These won't come across automatically, but recreating them in a new tool takes an hour or two if you have notes.

The Mealfolder rescue finds public recipes only. If you created custom recipes from scratch in Mealime (typed them in yourself, with no link to an online source), you'll need to manually re-enter those or photograph them and use Mealfolder's photo-upload feature to keep them.

How Weekly Meal Planning Works

"Meal planning" sounds formal, but it's really just asking yourself: what am I cooking this week? Doing it once, in bulk, saves time and money compared to deciding at 5 p.m. on a Tuesday.

Here's the typical workflow:

1. Check your calendar and preferences. Do you have a busy Tuesday? Prefer simple weeknight meals? Want to batch-cook on Sunday? Use that to pick which kinds of recipes make sense for the week.
2. Choose recipes. Pick 5–7 recipes for the week's dinners. You don't need a different meal every night—cooking a double batch of chilli and eating it twice is fine.
3. Generate a grocery list. A good tool combines ingredients across recipes and groups them by aisle: produce, dairy, frozen, pantry. This cuts shopping time.
4. Shop and cook. You know what you're making all week, so you buy only what you need. Less waste, less panic.

Apps like Mealfolder, Paprika, AnyList, and Plan to Eat all handle this workflow. The feature set differs in how they organize categories, manage household members, or let you adjust servings, but the core loop is the same.

Choosing a Meal-Planning App After Mealime

If Mealime was your tool, here's what to evaluate in its replacement:

Import your existing recipes. Mealfolder imports Paprika files (with photos, categories, ratings, and notes), JSON lists, and Mealime rescues. If you're coming from another app, check whether it can export to Paprika format, which Mealfolder can import. If not, you can bring recipes in one at a time using Mealfolder's link-import (paste a URL to any recipe site) or photo-upload (photograph a cookbook page and Mealfolder scans the text).

Here's where other apps stand:

Free tier and pricing. Mealfolder's free plan gives you 10 recipes and the current week's plan to try. Plus ($12.99 a year) is unlimited recipes and plans. Household ($19.99 a year) is for up to six people on the same account—useful if you're planning for a family.

Ease of adding recipes. Can you save a recipe with one tap from a browser (using "Share to Mealfolder" on Android)? Or do you open the app and paste a link each time? Friction matters if you clip recipes often.

Features you actually use. Think about whether you use categories (breakfast, vegetarian, quick), ratings (favourites versus everyday), or notes (allergy warnings, tweaks you've made). Pick a tool that keeps those features.

FAQ

Can I save my Mealime custom recipes (the ones I created from scratch)?

Only if they're based on a URL Mealfolder can fetch. If you typed in a recipe with no source link, you'll need to re-enter it, photograph it and upload it, or paste the text into Mealfolder's web form. It's extra work, but worth doing before October 21 if you have a lot of originals.

Will the Mealfolder rescue tool work after October 21?

No. Once Mealime's servers shut down, the public recipe index will disappear. The rescue tool relies on that index to find and match recipe names. If you have recipes to save, do it before October 21.

I already use Paprika. How do I move my recipes to Mealfolder?

Export from Paprika (you'll get a .paprikarecipes file), then go to mealfolder.com/import/paprika/ and upload the file. Mealfolder will import all your recipes with their photos, ratings, and categories intact. You can keep both apps if you like—there's no lock-in.

Can I see a sample of what a weekly meal plan looks like?

Yes. Mealfolder's site has a weekly meal planner template so you can see the layout before signing up. There's also a grocery list template.