Meal Planner & Recipe Keeper

Review by eFreeware

If you cook most nights and your recipes are scattered across saved posts, screenshots and a drawer of handwritten cards, Stashcook is built for you. It is a free app that keeps recipes, a weekly meal plan and a shopping list in one place, and it has been around long enough to gather a 4.5 average from more than 14,700 ratings. That combination of a settled audience and a simple promise is what makes it worth a closer look.

The pitch is deliberately narrow. This is a recipe keeper and a weekly planner for everyday cooking, not a cooking school, a diet program or a restaurant guide. You save what you already cook, arrange it across the week, and let the app help you shop for it. What appeals to me is that these three jobs belong together: a plan without the recipes is a calendar, and a shopping list without a plan is guesswork.

The app is free to install and the developer offers in-app purchases. Those are the only commercial facts I can go on, so the sensible approach is to treat the free download as the starting point and decide from there whether anything on offer is worth paying for. Either way, the core idea is clear enough to judge on its own.

Saving recipes from almost anywhere

The feature the developer leads with is the recipe keeper, and it is the part that would decide whether this app earns a place on your phone. Stashcook saves recipes from TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube and Facebook, as well as from BBC Good Food, Food Network, AllRecipes, Yummly and most other websites. If your recipe collection currently lives in saved videos and bookmarked pages, that is the gap this fills.

It does not stop at links. You can add recipes from screenshots, photos, handwritten cards or plain notes, which matters more than it sounds. Family recipes on index cards and dishes photographed in a magazine are exactly the ones that never make it into a digital system, and the app is designed to take them in alongside the ones you find online.

Once saved, the recipes sit in a searchable, editable recipe box, with search and tags to keep a growing collection usable.

Planning the week without overthinking it

The weekly planner is flexible in a way that suits real households. Plan all three meals a day, or only dinner if that is all you need. Meals can be dragged, dropped and rearranged as the week changes, and you can duplicate a week that worked well rather than rebuilding it from scratch.

There is also room for the meals that are not recipes at all. The planner accepts notes for leftovers or eating out, so a Thursday that is really just reheating Tuesday's dinner does not have to be forced into the recipe format. That small allowance is what separates a planner you keep using from one you abandon in the second week.

Collections handle the organizing. The developer gives examples such as quick dinners, air fryer recipes, healthy meals, budget recipes and keto or low carb meals, and you can build your own groupings around how you actually cook. Combined with tags and search, this is how the recipe box stays useful as it grows instead of turning into another pile.

From meal plan to shopping list

The grocery side is where the planning pays off. Meals turn into a shopping list with one tap, extras can be added by hand, and the app organizes the list automatically. The developer frames the benefit as shopping faster, buying only what you need and reducing food waste, which is a reasonable description of what a list built from your actual plan can do.

I like that the list is generated from the plan rather than maintained separately. Anyone who has written a meal plan and then shopped from memory knows how quickly the two drift apart, and a single tap between them removes the most tedious step in the whole routine.

For shared households there is Family Share, which connects up to six people. One shared set of recipes, plans and shopping lists for the household. That is the feature that would matter most in a busy home, because it means the person doing the shopping is working from the same list as the person doing the cooking.

Cooking mode and nutrition at a glance

Cook Mode is the part designed for the stove rather than the sofa. Recipes open in a clean layout with clear steps from start to finish, serving sizes adjust automatically, and the screen can be locked while you cook. Scaling a recipe for a different number of people is the adjustment home cooks make most often, so having it handled inside the recipe rather than on a scrap of paper is genuinely useful.

Nutrition information is available for recipes, covering calories, protein, carbs, fats, sugars and sodium. The developer presents it as something to use when it supports your goals and to ignore when it does not, which is the right posture for a feature like this. It is there if you are tracking something specific, and it stays out of the way if you are not.

It also follows your device language more closely now. That is a maintenance detail rather than a headline feature, but it suggests the developer is still tending to the basics.

What it asks of you

Stashcook is a free download with no ads, which keeps the experience uncluttered, and the developer offers in-app purchases. The app gives more back the more you put in: you need to save recipes before you can plan with them, and you need a plan before the shopping list has anything to organize.

Family Share supports up to six people, so it covers a family or a shared household but not a wider group. The planner is weekly, which suits the way most people shop and cook, and the nutrition figures are presented as reference points rather than targets.

The app released in July 2020 and was last updated in August 2026, so it is not a new experiment. With over 500,000 installs and a 4.5 rating across nearly 15,000 ratings, there is enough of a track record to suggest the basics hold up.

Getting the most from it

The fastest way to make Stashcook useful is to stop saving recipes anywhere else. Import the links you would otherwise bookmark, photograph the handwritten cards, and let the recipe box become the only place you look. A keeper that is 80 percent complete is much less useful than one that is complete, because you stop trusting it and start searching your camera roll again.

Then build the week from what you already have. Duplicating a week that worked is the quickest route to a plan you will actually follow, and it keeps the shopping list short and familiar. Add the leftovers and eating-out notes as you go so the plan reflects the real week rather than an idealized one.

Use Collections and tags early. A handful of groupings such as quick dinners, budget recipes or air fryer meals will pay off once the box has a few hundred recipes in it, and it costs almost nothing to set up while the collection is still small. Finally, if you share cooking and shopping with others, set up Family Share before the habit forms, so everyone is working from the same plan and list from the start.

A practical pick for everyday cooks

Stashcook does three jobs and does them in one place: it keeps recipes, plans the week and builds the shopping list from the plan. The recipe imports cover the places most people actually find food, the handwritten-card option catches the recipes that usually get lost, and Family Share makes the whole thing workable in a shared household.

The trade-off is that it rewards a little discipline: save your recipes here, plan from them, and the app gets better every week.

I would point this at home cooks who want one organized system for saving, planning and shopping, and at families or shared households where more than one person cooks. If you already keep a tidy recipe box and a reliable shopping routine, the app is a tidier version of what you have rather than a revelation. For everyone else, it is a straightforward upgrade on scattered screenshots and a paper list.

What's new in version 1.4.111

Save Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Pinterest recipes. One app. Every recipe. This release includes: 1) More reliable recipe imports when your session refreshes or an import is interrupted 2) Stashcook now follows your preferred device language more reliably