Mealime is shutting down: how to save your recipes first

Do this first, then read the rest. Mealime shuts down on 21 October 2026, and it has never had an export button. Your saved recipes and plans go away with the app. The good news is that Mealime recipes generally sit on shareable pages, so the fix is to open your saved recipes now and keep the links. Where a link opens without signing in, almost any modern recipe app can pull the ingredients and steps back out of it.

That is the urgent part, and it takes an evening. Choosing a replacement can wait until after. Below is both: how to get your recipes out, then an honest look at where to put them depending on what you actually used Mealime for.

Announced on Mealime’s own site and its App Store and Google Play listings. Mealime was bought by Albertsons in 2021, and the team is pointing users toward Meals Hub, a planner built into Albertsons’ own grocery apps. Pro has been made free for everyone until the lights go out.

Save your recipes before 21 October

1. Open Mealime and go through your saved recipes. Not the whole catalog, just the ones you have actually cooked. For most households that is somewhere between eight and twenty.
2. Copy the link for each one, and test one before you do twenty. Open a saved recipe, copy its link, and paste it into a private browser window. If the ingredients and steps load without you being signed in, the page is public, and a link is then enough for another app to rebuild the whole recipe. That is the single most useful fact about this shutdown. If a link does not open, fall back to step 4 and screenshot instead.
3. Paste those links somewhere safe today. A note, an email to yourself, a spreadsheet. Do this even if you have not chosen a replacement, because the links stop working when the site goes.
4. Screenshot anything that is yours rather than Mealime’s. Notes you added, tweaks to quantities, the version where you doubled the garlic. That part exists nowhere else.
5. Then import the links wherever you land. Any app with a recipe clipper or link import will take them. The mechanics are the same as saving a recipe from any website.

If you only do one thing this month, do step 2 and step 3. Everything else is recoverable; a dead link is not.

Where to go next, honestly

The right replacement depends entirely on which half of Mealime you used, and people tend to forget they were using both.

If you used Mealime for its recipes. You opened it to be told what to cook, picked from its catalog, and let it build the list. What you want is another app with its own recipe library and guided selection. Meals Hub is the official destination and is free, with the significant catch that it lives inside Albertsons’ grocery apps, so it is US-only and built to sell you groceries from one chain. eMeals does curated weekly menus in a lot of dietary styles with push-to-cart for major US grocers. Eat This Much generates plans from your targets rather than from a menu you browse. None of these are us, and if this is you, one of them is your answer.

If you used Mealime for the planning and the list. You brought your own idea of what to cook and mostly valued the week view and the automatic grocery list. That is a different market. Plan to Eat is the closest thing to a like-for-like: a proper planning calendar, shared household accounts, a recipe clipper, and it has published its own migration guide. Paprika is a one-time purchase rather than a subscription and is the strongest recipe clipper of the lot, though planning is lighter. AnyList is list-first, with meal planning added on top.

If the recipes you care about came from outside Mealime anyway. Plenty of people used Mealime as a holding pen for recipes they found elsewhere. In that case what you actually need is somewhere those links become real, structured recipes, which is the thing an AI recipe importer does, and then a plan that reads them.

The question worth asking before you pick

A shutdown is a bad time to choose in a hurry, but it is an excellent time to ask a question most people skip: what did you never use?

Mealime did roughly four jobs, and most households leaned on one or two. Before you sign up for the closest-looking thing, work out which jobs you actually want. The honest version of our own comparison of recipe keeper apps makes the same point: the feature list is nearly irrelevant next to whether the app fits the way you already cook.

One more lesson worth taking from this: an app that cannot export your data can take it with it. Mealime is not unusual here, and the lock-in was invisible right up until the announcement. Whatever you choose next, find the export button before you put two years of recipes into it. If there isn’t one, that is the answer.

Where Mealhive fits

We are a planner, not a recipe catalog, so we are not the answer if you came to Mealime to be told what to cook. We are a good fit for the second group and the third: you paste a link, a photo, or pasted text, and it comes back as a clean recipe with structured ingredients and steps. That means those Mealime links you saved in step 2 go in directly, one paste each. Put a few of those recipes onto nights and the grocery list assembles itself, merged and grouped by aisle, shared live with whoever else shops. If that is the half of Mealime you will miss, sign up free.

Being straight about the rest: we are early and invite-only right now, our recipe collection starts as yours rather than ours, and if you want push-to-cart at a US grocery chain we do not do that and are not planning to.

FAQ

When exactly is Mealime shutting down?

21 October 2026. After that date the app and its recipe pages stop working, and personal data is deleted. Pro features have been made free for everyone until then, and existing Pro subscriptions will not renew.

Can I export my recipes from Mealime?

There is no export button, and the shutdown notice does not add one. The workaround is to copy the link for each recipe you care about and import those links into another app. Check one link in a private browser window first: if it opens without signing in, the rest will import the same way. Do it before 21 October, because the links die with the site.

What happens to my Mealime data after the shutdown?

It is deleted. That includes saved recipes, meal plans, and grocery lists. Anything you want to keep has to leave the app before the date, either as saved links or as screenshots.

What is the closest replacement for Mealime?

There isn’t one app that matches all of it, because Mealime combined a recipe catalog with a planner and a list. If you want the catalog and guided picking, look at Meals Hub, eMeals, or Eat This Much. If you want the planning calendar and automatic list with your own recipes, look at Plan to Eat, Paprika, or AnyList.

Is Meals Hub the same as Mealime?

No. Meals Hub is a planning feature inside Albertsons’ grocery apps, which includes Safeway, Vons, and Jewel-Osco. It is free and it is the official destination, but it is tied to one US grocery group, so it is not useful outside those stores or outside the US.