How Amamable works: from recipe to a shared shopping list
You add recipes, they become a meal plan, and the plan becomes one shopping list you tick off together with your household. Here is the whole cycle, step by step.
Amamable does one thing: it takes the question "what are we eating today and what do we need to buy?" off your mind. The whole cycle has four steps — recipes, plan, shopping list and cooking — and most of it is free, with no time limit.
1. Gather your recipes
It all starts with the recipes you actually cook. In the Recipes tab, tap New recipe and choose where it comes from:
- Manually — you type in the ingredients and steps yourself. This is always free.
- From Instagram — paste a link to a public reel or post with the recipe in its caption. Amamable copies out the ingredients and steps and saves a link to the original.
- From the web — paste the address of a recipe page. The ingredients, steps, photo and source are saved.
- From a photo — take a photo of a page from your notebook or a cookbook. You can add up to 5 photos and one PDF file to a single import.
Imports from a link or a photo are written out by a language model. Every account starts with 10 free AI calls, and Premium has no limit. After an import you always check the recipe and save it yourself.
No recipes of your own yet? Start with Ready meals — a catalogue of tried-and-tested recipes, where one tap on the heart adds a dish to your collection.
2. Build your meal plan
In the Plan tab, choose Plan meals for… and the number of days — from one day to two weeks — and when to start: Today, Tomorrow or a day you pick. Then there are two ways to go:
- Plan it for me — Amamable builds the plan from your recipes,
- I’ll pick recipes — you select the dishes the plan should be made from.
Planning is not done by artificial intelligence. The plan comes from a simple, predictable algorithm: it doesn't repeat a dish until it has used the whole pool, and it leaves meals you have already planned alone. You can swap any dish in the plan with a tap. Where the plan gets its dishes and how it looks after your household's allergens is covered in How the meal plan works. If you cook just for yourself, see A meal planner for one person.
3. Turn the plan into one shopping list
For the shopping list you answer one question: Which days are you shopping for? Then tap Create list, and the ingredients from every meal on those days come together in one list:
- the same products merge into one item — even when the recipes call them by different names,
- kilograms and grams, litres and millilitres add up on their own,
- items are grouped by store section, so you can go aisle by aisle.
In the shop, tap an item to tick it off, or press and hold it when it's Not available. The list works without signal too — changes sync once your phone is back online.
Got something in the fridge? Quick inventory spots in a photo which products you already have and lets you tick them off. It only checks whether a product is there — not how much — and nothing is saved. The fridge photo uses the same pool of free AI calls as recipe import.
4. Plan and shop together
The plan and the list work best when the whole household uses them. In Settings, someone with Premium taps Start a family and gets an invite code. The others enter it under Have an invite code? and join — for free. A family can have up to 6 people.
From then on you share one plan and shared shopping lists. Whoever gets to the shop first ticks things off — everyone else sees it on their own list. Everyone's recipes also feed into the shared plan.
5. Cook step by step
In a recipe, tap Start cooking. Your phone shows one step at a time, in large text, and a time from the recipe ("fry for 10 minutes") becomes a timer. The ingredients needed for each step are scaled to your servings, and the screen stays on while you cook.
What's free and what's in Premium
Recipes, the meal plan, shopping lists, the calendar and joining someone else's family are free, with no time limit. Premium removes the AI call limit, lets you start your own family and switches on the shopping agent, which moves your list into the basket of an online shop. A new account can switch on 7 days of Premium free, with no card required.
