Mealime is closing. The team has confirmed the app will shut down on 21 October 2026, and has already stopped charging Pro subscribers. If you plan your family's meals there, you have until that date to get anything you care about out.
There is no export button, and Mealime's own notice says personal data will be deleted when the app shuts down. Whatever you want to keep, you will have to copy out by hand before 21 October.
What Mealime has actually announced
The notice on Mealime's own site is short. The app shuts down on 21 October 2026. Pro billing has already stopped — nobody will be charged again — and every Pro feature is unlocked for everyone in the meantime.
Users are pointed to Meals Hub, a recipe and planning tool built into the grocery apps run by Albertsons Companies: Safeway, Albertsons, Vons, Jewel-Osco and their sister chains.
What happens to your recipes and your plans
This is the part worth reading twice. The notice says Mealime's recipes will continue to be available on Meals Hub — that means Mealime's own recipe catalogue, not your copy of it. The things you built are a different matter.
- Recipes you saved or added yourself
- The meal plans you have built, past and upcoming
- Your shopping lists
- Your diet, allergy and dislike settings
None of that has an export path, and none of it follows you to Meals Hub. On 21 October it goes.
How to save your plan before 21 October
You cannot automate this, but you do not need to save everything either. Most households cook the same twenty-odd meals on rotation, and that rotation is the part worth rescuing.
Start with what you actually cook
Open your saved recipes and pick the ones your household has genuinely eaten in the last few months. Ignore the rest — you saved them once and never made them, and you will not miss them.
Screenshot first, retype later
Screenshots are fast and you are working against a deadline. Capture the ingredients and the method for each keeper now, while the app still works, and deal with tidying them up afterwards.
Write down your settings, not just your recipes
Your allergies, dislikes and household size took time to get right. Note them somewhere plain — they are the first thing you will be asked for by whatever you move to.
Rebuild one week, not your whole history
When you set up a replacement, plan the coming week and nothing else. A full back-catalogue is what makes people abandon a migration halfway through.
Is Meals Hub the right move for you?
For some people, genuinely yes. If you are in the United States and you already shop at Safeway, Albertsons, Vons or Jewel-Osco, Meals Hub keeps the Mealime recipe catalogue and ties it to the shop you were going to do anyway. That is a real advantage and no other app can match it.
If you are outside the United States, it is not an option at all. Those are US grocery chains, so the app Mealime is pointing its users towards is one most of them cannot use. If you are in the UK, Ireland, Europe, Canada or Australia, you need somewhere else to go.
What to look for in a replacement
Mealime was built around one person choosing healthy recipes. If that described how you used it, a recipe-led planner will suit you. If you were quietly using it to run a household's food, the things worth checking are different:
- Can more than one person see and change the plan, without sharing a login?
- Can you write "leftovers" or "eating out" for a day, or does every slot demand a recipe?
- Does it plan a week at a time, or does it expect you in it every day?
- Can you get your food in without retyping every recipe first?
Where Lilara fits
Lilara is a shared family meal planner, so it answers the first question differently from Mealime: a household plans together, with a profile for each person and the option to say who is cooking. It also accepts a day that says "leftovers" or "nursery lunch", because most real weeks contain several of those.
For the migration specifically, you can paste a recipe in as plain text and Lilara pulls out the ingredients and steps for you to check — which is the fastest route from a Mealime screenshot to something you can actually plan with. Lilara is free to use, with Smart Plan for 14 days a month, up to 4 people in the household and 14 days of planning ahead.
It will not suit everyone leaving Mealime. If what you valued was a large catalogue of macro-counted recipes for one person, or a grocery order at the end of it, Lilara is not trying to be that and Meals Hub is closer to what you had. If what you actually wanted was for the rest of the house to stop asking what's for dinner, that is the problem Lilara was built for.