My recipe budgeting app MealSave is out at MealSave.io, please check it out! I made it to solve a problem I encountered often as a college student; identifying the price of meals I was making. I often choose smaller servings than listed in the recipe I’m following and I tend to reuse the same ingredients as much as possible. Because of these habits I looked for an app that could accurately calculate the price of a recipe given some number of servings and prices of the constituent ingredients and I didn’t find any I liked, so I made this one!

link Features

MealSave is designed to work with exact ingredient prices so you start by inserting ingredients you expect to use and their prices and quantities. Thumbnails can be included as a way to quickly differentiate them in the list. Units are included and transparently converted between to find the final price at the end.

List of ingredients

With ingredients created, you can create a recipe using those ingredients. By specifying what amount of the ingredient is used in the recipe the app can take percentages of the price of the ingredient to give the exact cost of a serving, assuming you use ingredients fully. A thumbnail can also be chosen for recipes. Once finished the price will show in the bottom left.

Recipe editing

A backup feature exists to allow users to share recipes between themselves in a simple file, or for users to ensure they never lose their recipes. Individual recipes or every recipe can be backed up. Loading is guarantee to add your recipe back as you saved it in every subsequent version of the app.

Backing up and loading recipes

link Planned Features and Goals

• Online recipe leaderboard
• Automatically deduce the "price per [unit]" of an item that doesn’t have it from the name
• Scan receipts to add ingredients
• Integration with Instacart, Walmart, Kroger, Safeway, Albertsons, Amazon Fresh, H-E-B, Shipt etc
• Scan tag then item itself to add ingredient, tag contains name + price + quantity
• Scan every receipt and track spending that way, not through recipes (separate part of the app)
• Global recipe database compiling cheap user-created recipes

I mainly want to integrate computer vision and AR to make the budgeting process as painless as possible. The current process requires manual entering of all recipe data, the future of this app would primary involve scanning of tags, receipts and recipes themselves. I also want to add an online component so everyone can benefit from cheap and tasty recipes from experts that they might not find anywhere else.

link Try It Out!

If you like what I described here, consider giving MealSave a try! You may discover how easy and rewarding it is to become conscientious about your food spending habits and how easy it is to save money when you can compare different recipes! I personally found it very useful!