Food & Recipes
You spotted a recipe on Instagram. You screenshotted it, saved it to Safari, bookmarked it in Chrome, and sent yourself a WhatsApp message with the link — and you still haven't made it three months later.
Recipe saving is one of the most common reasons people start looking for a better app. You find things constantly — on TikTok, in newsletters, on food sites, in cookbooks — and then you can't find them again when you actually want to cook.
There are some genuinely good recipe apps out there. Here's an honest look at the main ones — and why your life might be simpler with just one app that handles everything, not just recipes.
Paprika is one of the most polished recipe apps available. It clips recipes from websites, stores them with ingredients and method, and creates shopping lists automatically. You can plan your meals for the week and scale recipes up or down. It costs a one-off £4.99 and is well worth it if recipes are your main use case.
The limitation: it's recipes only. Everything else you save — articles, products, gift ideas, travel links — goes somewhere else entirely.
Mela is beautifully designed, Apple-native, and very good at what it does. It imports recipes from websites with one tap, has a clean cooking view that keeps the screen on, and syncs across iPhone and iPad via iCloud. About £4.99 one-off.
Again — recipes only. If your life involves saving more than just food, Mela won't help with any of it.
AnyList combines recipe saving with shared shopping lists — useful for households where multiple people add things to the weekly shop. Free tier is limited; full features cost around £10/year.
Better suited to organised meal planners than spontaneous recipe savers.
Plan to Eat is essentially a meal planning calendar with recipe storage built in. You drag recipes onto a weekly planner, it generates a shopping list, and you can plan months ahead. About £3.50/month.
Excellent if you plan meals rigidly every week. Overkill if you just want to save recipes as you find them.
ReciMe is specifically built for saving recipes from social media — Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Facebook and websites. It has over 10 million downloads and 4.8 stars, which tells you it does what it promises very well. You can create shopping lists and meal plans, and it works on both iOS and Android.
Pricing is slightly unusual — a free 7-day trial, or £0.99 for a 30-day trial, then £29.99/year (about £2.49/month). It's good value if social media is where you find most of your recipes. The limitation is the same as the others: it's recipes only. Everything else you save lives somewhere different.
| App | Save recipes | Extract ingredients | Save anything else | Reminders | Free tier | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Paprika | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | £4.99 one-off |
| Mela | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | £4.99 one-off |
| AnyList | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | Limited | ~£10/year |
| Plan to Eat | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ~£3.50/month |
| ReciMe | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | 7-day trial | £29.99/year |
| Vaultzi | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ Everything | ✓ | ✓ 30 saves | Free / £6.99/mo |
If you cook seriously and want a dedicated recipe library with meal planning, ingredient scaling, and weekly shopping lists built in — Paprika or Mela are excellent. They do recipes better than anything else and they're worth the small one-off cost.
Don't let anyone talk you out of a good specialist tool if it fits your life perfectly.
The problem most people have isn't finding a good recipe app. It's that their life involves saving a lot more than just recipes.
You're also saving products you want to buy. Articles you want to read. Gift ideas. Travel links. Things to do. Work documents. And recipes — from TikTok, Instagram, food sites, and your mum's forwarded emails.
If you use Paprika for recipes, you still need somewhere for everything else. Which means you end up with multiple apps, multiple places to check, and the original problem — things getting lost — isn't really solved.
Vaultzi saves anything from anywhere. When you save a recipe link, it detects it's a recipe, files it in your Food category, and offers to extract the ingredients into a separate list with one tap. But it also handles every other category of thing you save — without needing a separate app for each one.
Free to download, 30 saves included, no card required. If you already use Paprika and love it — keep it. But if you're looking for something that handles your recipes and everything else in one place, Vaultzi is worth trying first.
How it works
Three steps. Zero effort.
Share any link, screenshot or idea straight into Vaultzi from any app on your phone.
Claude AI reads what you saved and files it into the right category automatically. No labels, no effort.
Everything in one clean place. Vaultzi nudges you back before things are forgotten forever.
Free to download — 30 saves included, no card required.
🍎 Download Vaultzi free