Best Eat This Much Alternative in 2026

Eat This Much has over 6 million users. CNN named it the best meal planning app of 2025. It's been around for years and it's popular for good reason.

If you think in macros, Eat This Much is excellent. You set your calorie target, choose your protein/carb/fat split, pick a diet type (keto, vegan, paleo, whatever), and it generates a daily or weekly meal plan automatically. It has grocery list integration with Instacart, a recipe clipper for saving recipes from the web, and the ability to rate meals so the algorithm learns what you like.

For fitness-focused people who want precise macro control, it works. But a specific type of person keeps searching for alternatives. If you're reading this, you're probably one of them.

The complaints about Eat This Much follow a pattern. These aren't one-off reviews. They come up hundreds of times across the App Store, Google Play, and Reddit.

The recipes are boring and repetitive

This is the single biggest complaint. Users report getting the same meals multiple times per week even with variety settings maxed out. Reviews describe the food as "absolutely disgusting" and "very simple." International variety is limited. If you've cooked beyond the basics, the suggestions feel like they were designed by someone who's never been excited about food.

Eat This Much pulls from a fixed database of around 5,000 curated recipes. That sounds like a lot until you factor in your dietary restrictions, dislikes, and macro targets. The pool shrinks fast.

Grocery lists are oversized and inaccurate

Because each meal pulls from different recipes, the ingredient list for a single week can be massive. Users report actual grocery bills coming in at nearly double the app's estimate. Items already in the pantry still show up on the list.

It needs constant manual tweaking

Plan to Eat's review noted that "despite automation, users must extensively edit plans to match schedule, budget, and preferences." Calorie calculations are sometimes wildly off. Single foods appear as entire meals. You end up spending more time fixing the plan than following it.

The free tier barely works

The free plan only generates one day at a time. No weekly planning, no grocery lists, no leftovers management. You need Premium ($14.99/month or $59.99/year) to get the features most people actually want.

Eat This Much is a meal plan calculator. You input numbers, it outputs a plan. MealThinker is an AI meal planning assistant. You have a conversation with it.

That's the fundamental difference, and it affects everything.

	Eat This Much	MealThinker
How you use it	Fill out forms (macros, calories, diet type), click Generate	Talk to it: "What should I make tonight?"
Recipe source	Fixed database (~5,000 recipes)	AI generates meals from any cuisine or style
Knows your kitchen	Basic virtual pantry, often out of sync	Tracks your fridge and pantry through conversation
Remembers you	Food ratings (thumbs up/down)	Remembers preferences, past meals, cooking skill, dietary needs
Adapts to your mood	No	"I'm tired, give me something easy" works
Handles leftovers	Premium feature, limited	"I have leftover rice and veggies, what can I make?"
Grocery lists	Auto-generated, often oversized	Built around what you already have
Best for	Macro-focused fitness tracking	Busy home cooks who hate deciding what to eat
Free option	1 day at a time, very limited	7-day free trial with full access
Paid price	$14.99/mo or $5/mo (annual)	$15/mo or $12.50/mo (annual)

When to pick Eat This Much

If you're tracking macros for bodybuilding or a specific fitness goal and you want precise control over protein/carb/fat ratios across every meal, Eat This Much gives you that level of granularity. It's built for people who think in numbers.

When to pick MealThinker

If you're a home cook who's tired of the nightly "what's for dinner?" question, wants meals built around what's actually in your kitchen, and doesn't want to fiddle with forms and sliders, MealThinker handles the thinking for you. Explore the full feature list or see it in action.

Eat This Much launched in 2013. Back then, auto-generating a meal plan from macro targets was genuinely impressive. The approach made sense: input your numbers, get a plan.

But the reason most people hate meal planning isn't that they can't calculate macros. It's that they're exhausted from deciding what to eat every single night. That's a different problem, and it needs a different kind of tool.

AI meal planning in 2026 means saying "I have leftover rice and some vegetables going bad, what should I make?" and getting a real answer in 30 seconds. No forms. No regenerating. No swapping out meals because the algorithm picked something you'd never cook.

Eat This Much's blog hasn't been meaningfully updated since 2020. Their product still works, but the approach is stuck in a different era of what meal planning software can do. Even Yummly, which had 20 million users and $100M in backing, shut down in December 2024 because the old model couldn't keep up.

That's the real reason people search for alternatives. Not because Eat This Much is bad. Because what "meal planning app" means has changed, and the gap between recipe databases and AI assistants keeps getting wider.

If you're tired of tweaking auto-generated plans that don't match your life, try MealThinker free for 7 days. No credit card required.

Is Eat This Much worth it in 2026?

For macro-focused fitness tracking, yes. Eat This Much gives you precise control over calorie and macro targets with auto-generated meal plans. If you think in protein/carb/fat ratios, it's one of the best tools available. If you're a home cook who wants meal suggestions based on what's in your kitchen without fiddling with forms, an AI meal planner like MealThinker is a better fit.

What's the best free alternative to Eat This Much?

MealThinker offers a 7-day free trial with full access to all features, no credit card required. Unlike Eat This Much's free tier (which limits you to one day at a time with no grocery lists), the trial gives you the complete experience so you can see if it works for you.

Can AI meal planners replace Eat This Much?

For most home cooks, yes. AI meal planners like MealThinker handle the parts that make Eat This Much frustrating: boring recipes, oversized grocery lists, and constant manual tweaking. The tradeoff is that AI planners focus less on precise macro tracking and more on practical, everyday meal decisions.

Is Eat This Much good for families?

Multiple reviews note that Eat This Much is "poor for multi-person households." Recipe scaling exists in Premium, but it only adjusts ingredient quantities. It doesn't account for different preferences within a family. MealThinker handles household size and individual preferences through conversation.

What's the difference between Eat This Much and AI meal planning?

Eat This Much is algorithm-based: it matches recipes from a fixed database to your macro targets. AI meal planning (like MealThinker) uses conversational AI to generate personalized suggestions, remember your preferences over time, track your kitchen inventory, and adapt to context like "I'm tired and don't want to cook anything complicated." The difference is a calculator vs. an assistant.