Health, home and travel decision
Dishlist
A capable developer can build a useful subset (meal planner + shopping list + pantry capture) using open-source projects, but reproducing Dishlist's polished integrations, proprietary recipe/personalization data, and vendor partnerships is non-trivial—keep paying for the full experience unless you only need the basic planner and list features.
Visit website↗Not priced
No pricing page we fetched carried a figure, so there is nothing to compare against. The build side is still real.
$100one-off114 h to build
$120/mo6 h/mo upkeep
No published price to break even against.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Dishlist alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- User provides targets and pantry -> generate weekly meals matched to macros and restrictions -> pre-fill grocery cart skipping pantry items -> user cooks and logs meals -> week adapts from feedback.
What it still won’t have
- Proprietary recipe and personalization dataset and tuning
- Official Instacart/Whole Foods partnership and any private checkout APIs
- White-glove onboarding, billing, and support handled by vendor
- Polished cross-platform UX and retention/gamification polish
- Gym partner integrations and enterprise billing
What remains hard
- Integration maintenance
What stores do you support? Instacart (most major grocers) and Whole Foods today, with more on the way.
- Execution quality
We handle onboarding, billing, and support.
First-year cost
No published price
Dishlist does not publish a price we could read, so there is nothing to compare against. What building costs is below.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a deployable web app (Next.js + Node/Express + Postgres) that provides: 1) user intake and profile (calories, protein, dietary restrictions, household size) with auth; 2) a rule-based meal planner that composes a 7-day plan from a recipe table to match macro targets and restrictions; 3) pantry capture via image upload and simple OCR + manual item-match; 4) Instacart/Whole Foods cart builder that maps recipe ingredients to store items and opens a pre-filled cart or deep-link to checkout; 5) UI to view recipes, prep times, grocery list, mark meals as cooked and log progress; out of scope: gym partnership portal, paid billing flows, large-scale recommendation ML training. Include error handling for failed OCR, API timeouts and ingredient-mapping misses; include unit tests for planner logic, API integration tests for cart-building flows, and deployment scripts (Docker + managed Postgres + Vercel or Fly).
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Evidence score60
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productDishlist (product & features)
- official pricingDishlist (pricing)
- official docsDishlist (features/docs)
- open sourceTandoorRecipes/recipes
- open sourceulsklyc/yuvomi
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
