A recipe app with no subscription

Updated 9 October 2026

Many recipe apps now charge every month or every year. Plate & Page doesn’t. It’s free to start, and Premium is a single US$9.99 purchase that your Family Sharing group can use too. Pay once, and it stays yours.

Plate & Page is a recipe keeper and meal planner for iPhone, iPad and Mac. It keeps your recipes on your devices and in your own iCloud, so there’s no service to keep paying for. This page sets out exactly what you get for free, what the one-time purchase adds, and how to decide whether you need it.

What’s free, exactly

The free download isn’t a demo with a countdown. It’s a working cookbook with a recipe limit:

• Three starter recipes to explore the app.
• Five recipes you create yourself.
• Three reviewed imports for life, separate from those five. Import from a web link, pasted text or photos, check the draft, and save it. A free import is used only when you save, so a cancelled draft costs nothing.
• Scaling and unit conversion, including cups to grams for about 450 ingredients.
• A manual grocery list.
• Cooking Mode, with one step at a time, the screen kept awake, and voice commands on iPhone and iPad.
• Export and iCloud sync across your iPhone, iPad and Mac.

The guides show each of these in detail, starting with how to save recipes from any website.

What the one-time Premium unlocks

Premium is a one-time US$9.99 In-App Purchase. It removes the limits and adds the planning and organizing tools:

• Unlimited recipes and unlimited imports.
• Folders and organization, including suggested course categories that you approve before anything is filed.
• Weekly meal planning with breakfast, lunch, dinner and other slots, Copy Last Week and Draft This Week.
• Smart grocery building: turn a planned week into one combined, aisle-sorted list, and Import Grocery List from a pasted list or message.
• Cooking timers that stay visible across the app.
• Household sharing: create a household and cook from the same recipes, plans and groceries as the people you invite.

Pay once, and Premium stays yours. Family Sharing lets your family group use it too. The planner guide shows how to plan a week and build your grocery list with it, and the Free and Premium terms spell out the same split in legal language.

One purchase, three devices

Plate & Page is one App Store listing for iPhone, iPad and Mac. You don’t buy a separate Mac version or a separate iPad version. Buy Premium on any of them, and on your other devices use Restore Purchases with the Apple Account that bought or shares Premium. Your recipes follow through your own iCloud, so a recipe saved on the Mac is ready on your phone in the kitchen.

No account, no ads, no tracking

A subscription often pays for a server: an account system, a sync service, a database of everyone’s recipes. Plate & Page doesn’t run one. There’s no Plate & Page account to create, and the developer operates no data server. Your cookbook syncs through Apple’s iCloud using your own Apple Account, and works offline. The App Store privacy label for Plate & Page reads “Data Not Collected”, and the app has no ads and no trackers.

That design is what makes a one-time price workable. There’s no ongoing service cost per user that a monthly fee would need to cover.

How to decide if Premium is worth it

The free edition is meant to be useful on its own, so use it the way you’d really cook:

1. Import your three favorites. Pick recipes you make often, from different places: a food blog, a recipe you were sent as text, a page of a cookbook. See how the drafts look and how much tidying they need.
2. Create a family recipe by hand. You have five of these. Try scaling it and switching units.
3. Cook one in Cooking Mode. On iPhone or iPad, try saying “next” with floury hands. See the Cooking Mode guide for the details.
4. Ask what you’re missing. If you want more than a handful of recipes, plan the week, or shop from one combined list, that’s where Premium lives. If a small personal cookbook is enough, you may never need it.

How other apps price

Prices vary a lot between recipe apps, so check each app’s own site. For example, AnyList’s website lists “AnyList Complete is just $9.99 / year for an individual or $14.99 / year for a household.” (anylist.com/complete, checked 9 October 2026). Paprika’s website notes, “Please note: each version of Paprika is sold separately.” (paprikaapp.com, checked 9 October 2026). If you’re weighing those apps, the comparison pages go further: Plate & Page as a Paprika alternative and Plate & Page as an AnyList alternative.

AnyList and Paprika details quoted from anylist.com/complete and paprikaapp.com, checked 9 October 2026. AnyList is a product of Purple Cover, Inc. and Paprika is a trademark of its owner; Plate & Page isn’t affiliated with either.