I spent months building a meal planning app that personalizes around your diet type — just launched on iOS (Simmerz)
Hey everyone,
I built Simmerz because I couldn't find a meal planner that didn't treat everyone the same. Every app I tried would generate a "healthy" 7-day plan that was completely useless for someone eating keto, or vegan, or carnivore. The filters were cosmetic — the AI underneath didn't actually know who you were.
So I built one that does.
The onboarding asks 5 questions:
- How do you eat? (vegan, keto, carnivore, vegetarian, pescatarian, flexitarian, paleo, or omnivore)
- Any specific dietary restrictions?
- Favorite cuisines?
- Anything completely off limits?
- How many people are you cooking for?
Those answers aren't just stored — they shape everything. The AI meal planner gets your full profile before generating a single meal. The cookbook filters automatically. The grocery list is built from what you're actually missing from your pantry.
What I learned building it:
Connecting an AI meal plan to a real pantry scan is harder than it sounds. The vision model needs to identify ingredients from messy fridge photos, match them against a grocery list, and surface only the gaps. Getting that reliable took longer than the entire rest of the app.
The other hard part was diet compatibility. "Vegan" isn't just a tag — it means checking ingredients at the component level. A recipe tagged vegetarian might still have a dairy ingredient buried in it. I had to build a compatibility layer that checks ingredient aisles and keywords, not just recipe tags.
What's still rough:
Recipe variety for some diet types is thinner than I'd like. Keto and carnivore users will notice this fastest. I'm working on it.
It's free to download. There's a subscription for advanced features but the core meal planner and cookbook work without it.
🔗 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/simmerz/id6767691610
If you try it and something feels broken or missing — please tell me here. That's genuinely more useful than a 5-star review right now.
Happy to answer any questions about how it works or what's coming next.