Search for a free meal planner app and you'll get plenty of results. Install four of them and you'll find that “free” was doing a lot of work in that sentence: one expires after a fortnight, one shows ads between your dinners, one is free only if you're cooking for yourself, and one lets you plan but charges to share the plan with your partner.

That matters more for meal planning than for most software, because the cost of switching is unusually high. Once you've entered your recipes, set up profiles for everyone and built a few weeks of history, moving to another app means doing it all again. A free tier that quietly ends after 14 days doesn't just cost money — it costs the fortnight of setup you did inside it.

The four kinds of “free”

1. Free trial

A countdown. Everything works beautifully until it doesn't, usually 7 to 30 days in. Subscription-only apps often present the trial as the free plan in App Store copy, and the distinction only becomes clear at the paywall. The tell: look for the phrase “free trial” rather than “free plan”, and check whether the App Store listing mentions a permanent free tier at all.

2. Free with ads

Genuinely free, indefinitely, and paid for by advertising. This is a legitimate model and some well-loved family organisers use it. Whether it suits you is a taste question: an ad banner sitting under Tuesday's dinner is a small tax, but it's one you pay every time you open the app, and family organiser apps are opened several times a day.

3. Free for one person

The free tier is complete but single-user, and household sharing is the paid upgrade. This is the most common pattern, and the most frustrating for families, because sharing isn't a power feature for a household — it's the entire point. If only one parent can see the plan, you've bought a personal to-do list with extra steps.

4. Free with limits

The whole feature set works, but with ceilings — a number of members, a planning horizon, a monthly allowance of something. This is the model most likely to be genuinely usable for free, provided the ceilings sit above what a normal household actually does. That last clause is the one to check.

Four questions worth asking before you commit

  1. Can everyone in my household see the plan without anyone paying? If sharing is gated, nothing else on the free tier matters much.
  2. Does it expire? A limit you can live with is fine. A countdown is a different product.
  3. What happens at the ceiling — a nudge, or a wall? Being told “you've used your 14 Smart Plans this month” is workable. Losing access to meals you already planned is not.
  4. Can I get my recipes out? Even a good app can stop suiting you. Import from a link, at minimum, means you didn't type them in by hand the first time.

What families actually need on a free tier

Strip it back and a household needs four things from a meal planner before money enters the conversation: everyone can see the same week; you can store the meals you actually cook; something reminds you before it's too late to defrost anything; and adding a recipe doesn't feel like data entry.

Nutrition panels, allergen filtering and automated shopping lists are genuinely useful, but they're refinements on a loop that has to work first. An app whose free tier breaks that basic loop isn't cheaper than a paid one — it just fails earlier.

How Lilara's free tier works

Lilara is the fourth kind: free with limits, no expiry, no advertising. The whole planning loop is ungated. Up to four people share one plan in real time, each with their own profile. You can save your own recipes, import them from a link, see nutrition per recipe and per day, keep allergens and disliked ingredients off the plan entirely, and get reminders in eleven languages. None of that is time-boxed or watermarked.

Four ceilings exist: four family members, fourteen Smart Plan days a month, planning fourteen days ahead, and editing meals up to three days back. Four conveniences are Pro-only: generating the shopping list from your plan, the calendar month view, grouping meals by member, and custom reminder times. Everything else is identical on both tiers.

A four-person household planning a fortnight at a time and generating a couple of Smart Plans a week never reaches a limit. That's deliberate — the free tier is meant to be a destination, not a corridor.

The full row-by-row breakdown, including what Pro adds and what it costs, is on the pricing page.

The honest comparison

Lilara isn't the only meal planner with a free tier, and it would be misleading to claim otherwise. Several competitors have one. What differs is the contents: some are ad-funded, some are built around a single cook, and at least one keeps recipe import and meal planning itself in the paid tier.

It's also worth saying that one popular option — Paprika — isn't a subscription at all, but a small one-time purchase. If you cook alone and mainly want a recipe manager, that's arguably the fairest deal in the category. Lilara solves a different problem: getting a household onto one plan.

The question isn't really “which app is free”. It's “which app is free at the thing my family needs it for”.