I love the automated grocery list I love the automated grocery list. For me, that’s worth the cost of the yearly plan alone. I gave it 3 stars because I don’t love a lot of the recipes and when I import recipes from the internet, they don’t always import correctly. For instance, amounts of ingredients will be wrong or items will be missing from the grocery list. But even so, I would still purchase it again just for having an automated grocery list.

Incredibly versatile I am impressed with how many different dietary styles are accommodated by Real Plans. I think the common denominator is “real” food. It’s whole foods, in whatever style you choose. I myself have used the Paleo, Vegan, Classic, and GAPS styles. Real Plans is very versatile and perfect for our family. There are so many customization and automated options that it has taken me a long time to utilize them all. Basically, if you do something specific with your meal planning (like pancake Saturday mornings), there are settings to automate that. Pretty awesome. The only complaint I have is that I love to pre-plan a month’s meals at a time, but you can only do three weeks at a time, and it’s a bit difficult to do so because the app likes to reset you to the current week. Also, as I go along and want to tweak my settings, usually any tweaking requires you to erase all future planned meals, which keeps me from changing things to accommodate our schedule better. But overall, best meal planning app I’ve ever used. You can also upload and enter your own recipes or online recipes. Time consuming, but helpful for planning family favorites.

Mixed experience Mixed experience. Really like the ease of scheduling meals and shopping list function. But there aren’t enough good recipes, and the excluding ingredients function is either wonky or too complicated, so recipes are showing up with ingredients I thought I had excluded.

Mostly very positive Mostly very positive; sometimes auto populated weekly menus have the tendency to clump foods together— like four kinds of stew in one week. So you replace three of them with other things for variety.

Flexible and Tasty Planning I have enjoyed and used Real Plans in many ways throughout the years. For weight control, dietary restrictions, Whole30, and now sugar/carbohydrates control, the Real Plans met my needs with flexible, tasty meals.