Meal Planning Apps That Shut Down: Yummly, PlateJoy, Forks and Now Mealime

You went to open your meal planner and the app was gone, or a black bar told you it soon will be. If it felt like an unlucky one-off, it was not. Four planners that a lot of people built their week around have closed or announced a closing date since December 2024, and the pattern repeats closely enough that you can use it. This page lists the four, with the date each one gave and who said it, then what actually happens to the recipes and the grocery list, then the checks that tell you whether the app you are using right now is the next one.

Four closures in under two years

Dates first, because that is what people are searching for. Each one is attributed below to the source that published it.

• Yummly, 20 December 2024. The website and both apps went offline. yummly.com now sends you to KitchenAid's recipe pages.
• PlateJoy, 1 July 2025. Announced by PlateJoy itself in its help centre, which is still online today and still carries the notice.
• Forks Meal Planner, March 2026. No announcement from Forks Over Knives. The date comes from a third party, and the rest of the evidence is what is missing from the web.
• Mealime, October 21, 2026. Announced on Mealime's own home page and closing page. This one has not happened yet.

The gap between the first and the last of those four is under two years. Three of the four had been bought by a larger company before they closed.

Yummly, 20 December 2024

Yummly was a recipe search engine with a saved recipe box and a shopping list on top of it. Plan to Eat, which published a piece about the closure on 2 December 2024, wrote that Yummly "will permanently shut down its website and mobile app by December 20th, 2024", that Yummly was started in 2009 and acquired by Whirlpool in 2017, and that Whirlpool cited "adjusting its operating model" as the reason.

What you can check yourself today, without taking anyone's word for it. A request to yummly.com returns a permanent redirect to kitchenaid.com/recipes, and searching Apple's own App Store index for Yummly returns no app by that name. Both checked 14 September 2026. The recipe content did not vanish from the internet, it moved into a manufacturer's website. Your saved recipe box is a different matter: there is no Yummly account to sign into any more, so whatever was in it is not reachable from anywhere.

That is the part people underestimate. A closure can preserve the recipes and still lose everything that made them yours: the collections, the notes, the things you had marked to cook again.

PlateJoy, 1 July 2025

PlateJoy generated a personalised week from a long questionnaire, which made it the closest thing on this list to an automated planner rather than a recipe box.

Red Ventures announced that its RV Health business had acquired PlateJoy Health, adding it to a roster that already held Healthline and Medical News Today. After that, the ending was documented properly, and it is the only one of the four where the company's own words are still readable. PlateJoy's help centre is still online at support.platejoy.com, still shows the banner "Notice: PlateJoy is ending July 1st, 2025", and still serves the article behind it, which says:

"PlateJoy will no longer be available as an app or website after July 1st, 2025. We understand this may be sad news, as we know many of you have used PlateJoy to plan your meals and inspire your cooking for years."

The same article says subscriptions ended on that date, that pro rated refunds were offered for remaining subscription time and processed automatically for people who had signed up on the web, that anyone who subscribed through an app store had to request the refund from that store, and that PlateJoy's recipes were moving to the Wellos app with free access offered to PlateJoy users.

Read that list again and notice what is not in it. Refunds, yes. A new home for the company's recipes, yes. A file containing your plans, your preferences and the questionnaire answers that made the plans yours, no. Checked 14 September 2026: platejoy.com does not resolve at all, healthline.com/nutrition/platejoy redirects to the nutrition section, and Apple's App Store index returns no app called PlateJoy.

Forks Meal Planner, March 2026, with nothing said out loud

Forks Over Knives is the plant-based brand behind the documentary, the magazine and a subscription meal planner. The planner is the one entry on this page where the company has published no closing notice at all, which makes it the most instructive of the four.

The date is a third party's. Clean Food Dirty Girl, which sells a competing plant-based meal plan and therefore has an interest in the story, published a post on 20 April 2026 saying that Forks Over Knives meal planning services "came to a sudden halt in March 2026" and that the planner "was discontinued with little warning" and "is no longer available to new customers or past members". Treat the month as a claim by an interested party, because that is what it is.

What is not a claim is the state of the web. All of this was checked on 14 September 2026:

• forksoverknives.com/meal-planner/ still returns a permanent redirect to forksmealplanner.forksoverknives.com, and that host no longer resolves in DNS.
• my.forksmealplanner.com does not resolve either.
• shop.forksoverknives.com/pages/meal-planner redirects to the shop home page, and the shop's meal planner collection page loads with no products in it.
• The planner's support site, support.forksmealplanner.com, answers with 403.
• Apple's App Store index returns no app called Forks Meal Planner.
• And the company's own FAQ page still describes the meal planner in the present tense, as a digital subscription with a weekly plan, a recipe box and a money-back guarantee, with a support address at the planner's dead domain.

A marketing page that still sells a product whose servers are gone is not a conspiracy. It is what happens when the people who would have updated it are no longer there. It is also a warning worth keeping: the absence of a shutdown announcement is not evidence that an app is alive, because a company that stops maintaining a product usually stops maintaining its pages about that product too.

Mealime, October 21, 2026

Mealime is the only one of the four you can still open, and it is the only one where you still have time to act. The notice is on its own home page, which currently carries the line "Mealime will shut down on October 21, 2026", and the company page behind it says the app "will be discontinued as of October 21, 2026".

The same closing page says Mealime was acquired by Albertsons Companies in 2021, that the recipes continue in a product called Meals Hub, that "certain preferences and settings will need to be established directly within Meals Hub", and, in the sentence that matters most here, that "all personal data will be deleted when the Mealime application is shut down". Apple's own listing data shows the app still being updated, with version 4.21.35 released on 2 September 2026.

So the recipe library survives and the account does not. That is the same shape as Yummly and the same shape as PlateJoy: the company's content is worth moving, and the thing you made inside the app is not part of the move. There is a separate page on this site about Mealime specifically, covering what the notice says line by line and which planners fit which habit.

What the four have in common

Four is a small sample, and one closure was a small brand while another was a supermarket group tidying its portfolio. Still, the same four things are true of all of them.

The app was not the business. Whirlpool sells appliances. Albertsons Companies sells groceries. RV Health sells health media. In each case the planner was a way to reach customers, and when the parent decided to reach them another way, the planner had no independent reason to exist. The one exception, Forks Over Knives, was running the planner as its own product, and that ended too.

The recipes moved and the account did not. Yummly's recipes went to a manufacturer's website. PlateJoy's went to Wellos. Mealime's went to Meals Hub. In no case did the personal layer travel: your collections, your notes, your preferences, your history of what you actually cooked.

Nobody handed out a file. Not one of the four published an export tool as part of closing. PlateJoy came closest and what it offered was money back and a free account somewhere else.

The notice came late, or not at all. Yummly's closure was being written up on 2 December 2024 for a date eighteen days later. Forks Meal Planner customers got, by the only account of it that exists, little warning. Mealime is the outlier: it published the date weeks ahead, and its closing page says that "effective immediately, Pro subscribers will not be charged any additional subscription fees" and that "all Pro recipes & features will become available to all Mealime users" for the wind-down. That is the decent way to do it.

What you lose, and what rebuilds itself

It helps to separate these, because the panic and the actual damage are rarely in the same place.

Rebuilds itself. The grocery list. Every planner worth using generates the list from the recipes on the plan, so once the recipes are in the new app, the list comes back on its own. The weekly plan as a structure, too: a plan is a set of recipes on dates, and you will make a new one next Sunday anyway.

Does not rebuild itself. Recipes you typed in yourself, from family, from a book, from a card. Notes you left on a recipe after cooking it, the substitution that worked, the oven that runs hot, the amount that actually feeds your household. Items you typed straight into the grocery list and never attached to a recipe, which is usually the household staples and the specific brands. Ratings and favourites, which are the reason your recipe box was better than a search engine.

That second list is what to spend your hour on. It is smaller than it feels.

What to do while the app still opens

This applies to Mealime today, and to whichever planner posts the next banner. Do it in this order, because the order is roughly cheapest first.

1. Look for an export in settings before anything else. Account, settings, privacy, data. If it exists, it takes a minute and gives you a file. If it does not, you have lost a minute.
2. Write down the recipes only you have. Not the ones the app supplied, which you can find again. The ones you entered. Screenshot or copy them into a document, one per page, ingredients and method.
3. Screenshot the grocery list screen. One screen, the staples and brands that never belonged to a recipe.
4. Save your favourites as a plain list of names. A recipe title is enough to find the recipe again elsewhere. A list of forty titles is a small file and it is most of what your recipe box meant.
5. Check the subscription on your phone, not in the app. Settings, your name, subscriptions on iPhone, or Play Store subscriptions on Android. A closing company saying you will not be charged again is not the same as seeing it yourself.
6. Send a data request if there is a privacy policy that offers one. Under a data portability right you can ask for a copy of your data. Expect a file about your account rather than something the next app can read, and send it well before the closing date, not on it.

The question to ask the next planner: can you leave?

Most comparisons of meal planners rank them on what they can import. Import is what a company builds when it wants your business. Export is what it builds when it respects you, and it is the only feature on the list that protects you from the situation that brought you to this page. So ask it first, and take the answer from the maker's own help pages rather than from a review.

Checked 14 September 2026, here is where four commonly suggested planners stand on getting your recipes back out:

• Plan to Eat documents exporting your entire recipe book to a .CSV or .TXT file, and its help centre says you can do it "whether you have a current subscription with Plan to Eat or not". That last clause is the strongest promise on this list, because it survives your own subscription ending.
• Paprika documents File then Export on the Mac edition, to HTML or to its own .paprikarecipes format, which several other apps can read. It is also the one you buy rather than rent, so there is no monthly relationship to end.
• Eat This Much is explicit that there is no such thing yet: its help centre says "we don't currently have any options to export meal plan data as CSVs" and suggests the plain text print option as a workaround. Honest, and a limitation.
• AnyList documents three ways to import recipes, including from Paprika files, and its recipes help section documents no way to export them out. If the shared grocery list is the reason you want it, that may still be the right trade, but make it knowingly.

The same question applies to whatever you pick that is not on this list. Open its help centre, search for "export", and read what comes back. Two minutes now, and it tells you what the end of the relationship will look like.

Five checks that say whether your planner is next

None of these is proof on its own. Three of them together have been right about every app on this page.

1. When was the app last updated? The store listing shows the date of the latest version. A planner that has not shipped anything in a year is being kept alive rather than developed.
2. Who owns it? If the app was bought by a company that sells appliances, groceries or media, the planner is a channel, not the product. Channels get consolidated.
3. Does support answer? Send a small question. Silence is the cheapest early warning there is, and it usually arrives months before a banner.
4. Is the marketing page still true? Compare what the site promises with what the app does. Forks Over Knives is the clean example: the FAQ still sells a subscription whose servers are switched off.
5. Has the blog or the social account gone quiet? Content is the first thing a company stops paying for and the easiest thing for you to date.

If three of the five point the wrong way, do not necessarily switch. Do the export step now, while it is calm, rather than in the eighteen days between a public notice and the lights going out.

Questions people are asking

Is Yummly gone for good, and can I get my saved recipes back?

Yes, and no. Yummly shut down its website and app on 20 December 2024 according to Plan to Eat's post of 2 December 2024, and today yummly.com redirects to KitchenAid's recipe pages, with no app of that name in Apple's App Store index, checked 14 September 2026. There is no Yummly account left to sign into, so a saved recipe box from that account cannot be retrieved. Recipes that originated on Yummly are often still findable through the KitchenAid recipe pages or through the original blog that published them, but your collections and notes are not.

For the money side of Meal Planning Apps That Shut Down, the answer from us is that BeCute is free during early access, and free is a promise about launch rather than a product you can obtain today; the app is not yet on the App Store or Google Play.

When did PlateJoy shut down, and did subscribers get refunds?

1 July 2025. PlateJoy's own help centre still carries the notice and the article behind it, which says PlateJoy "will no longer be available as an app or website after July 1st, 2025", that pro rated refunds were offered for subscription time past that date and processed automatically for web signups, and that people who had subscribed through an app store needed to request the refund through that store. The same notice said PlateJoy's recipes were moving to the Wellos app and that PlateJoy users would be offered free access to it.

A reader who lands on Meal Planning Apps That Shut Down lands on a site for an app that does not exist yet: BeCute is being built by our team, and nothing here is software you can install; BeCute is not yet on the App Store or Google Play, and the early access waitlist at becute.app is what exists in the meantime.

What happened to the Forks Over Knives meal planner?

It stopped, and Forks Over Knives has published nothing about it. Clean Food Dirty Girl, a competing plant-based meal plan service, wrote on 20 April 2026 that the planner "came to a sudden halt in March 2026" and "is no longer available to new customers or past members". Independently of that claim, as of 14 September 2026 the planner's own site does not resolve, the meal planner page on the Forks Over Knives shop redirects to the shop home page, the meal planner collection there is empty, the planner's support site answers with 403, and Apple's App Store index returns no app by that name, while the company's FAQ page still describes the subscription as though you could buy it.

A week gets rewritten sooner or later, and on Meal Planning Apps That Shut Down rewriting one without rewriting every meal in it is what BeCute is being built to handle; the app behind it is not yet on the App Store or Google Play, and what does work today is the free 5 meals a day schedule at becute.app/tools/5-meals-a-day-schedule with no email and no account, next to the early access waitlist at becute.app for the app.

Is Mealime shutting down too, and how long do I have?

Yes, on October 21, 2026. Mealime's home page carries the line "Mealime will shut down on October 21, 2026" and its closing page says the app "will be discontinued as of October 21, 2026". Until that day the app still opens and still updates, with version 4.21.35 released on 2 September 2026 according to Apple's listing data. The closing page also says all personal data will be deleted when the app is shut down, so anything you want to keep needs copying out before that date.

Whether Meal Planning Apps That Shut Down is working for you comes out of your own log, and progress charts and milestones are part of what BeCute is being built to show; the app behind it is not yet on the App Store or Google Play.

Why do so many meal planning apps shut down?

Because for most of them the planner was never the business. Three of the four here were owned at the end by a company selling something else: appliances, groceries, health media. A meal planner is expensive to run, because recipes have to be tested, photographed and kept current, and it earns little per user. When the parent company decides to reach the same customers through its own app or its own website, the planner is a duplicate, and the recipes are the only part worth carrying over.

On Meal Planning Apps That Shut Down, logging a meal by barcode or by photo is one of the features BeCute is being built around; BeCute is not yet on the App Store or Google Play, and the early access waitlist at becute.app is what exists in the meantime.

Can I move my recipes from one meal planner to another?

Sometimes, and almost never from an app that is closing. Import between living apps is common: Paprika reads a long list of recipe file formats and clips from websites, AnyList imports from websites and from Paprika files, and Plan to Eat takes bulk files from several programs. What is missing is the other half. None of the four apps on this page published an export, which is why moving off them means copying by hand rather than uploading a file. That is also why the export question is worth asking before you move in rather than after.

Cooking is the point on Meal Planning Apps That Shut Down, and recipe ideas built from your goals and the ingredients already in your kitchen are on the BeCute build list; the app is not yet on the App Store or Google Play.

What should I do right now if my planner has not closed?

Export once, today, while nothing is wrong. If your app documents an export, run it and put the file somewhere you will find it. If it does not, spend fifteen minutes copying out the recipes you typed in yourself and screenshotting your grocery list staples. Everything else in a meal planner rebuilds from the recipes, so the recipes are the whole job.

Readers of Meal Planning Apps That Shut Down ask when it opens, and we publish no launch date for BeCute because we do not have one; the app behind it is not yet on the App Store or Google Play.

Sources

1. Mealime. Home page shutdown banner, "Mealime will shut down on October 21, 2026", read 14 September 2026. mealime.com
2. Mealime. Closing page and shutdown FAQ: "will be discontinued as of October 21, 2026", the Albertsons Companies acquisition in 2021, Meals Hub, "certain preferences and settings will need to be established directly within Meals Hub" and "all personal data will be deleted when the Mealime application is shut down". Read 14 September 2026. mealime.com/closing
3. PlateJoy. Help centre notice, "Notice: PlateJoy is ending July 1st, 2025", read 14 September 2026. support.platejoy.com
4. PlateJoy. "PlateJoy ending July 1st: more details", the article behind that notice, including the refund terms and the move of recipes to Wellos. Read 14 September 2026. support.platejoy.com/platejoy-faqs/35663
5. Red Ventures. Press release, "RV Health adds PlateJoy Health to its Brand Roster". redventures.com
6. Plan to Eat. "Yummly Closed: Discover the Best Meal Planning Alternative", written 2 December 2024, for the 20 December 2024 date, the 2009 founding and the Whirlpool acquisition in 2017. plantoeat.com
7. Clean Food Dirty Girl. "What the FOK? What Happened to the Forks Over Knives Meal Planner?", by Team Dirty, 20 April 2026, for the March 2026 date. This is a competing meal plan service, not a statement by Forks Over Knives. cleanfooddirtygirl.com
8. Forks Over Knives. FAQ page, which still describes Forks Meal Planner as a running subscription with a weekly plan, a recipe box and a money-back guarantee. Read 14 September 2026. shop.forksoverknives.com/pages/faqs
9. Forks Over Knives. Meal planner collection page on the shop, loading with no products. Read 14 September 2026. shop.forksoverknives.com/collections/meal-planner
10. Apple. iTunes lookup and search endpoints, used to confirm that Mealime Meal Plans and Recipes is still listed at version 4.21.35 released 2 September 2026, and that searches for Yummly, PlateJoy and Forks Meal Planner return no app of that name in the United States store. Queried 14 September 2026. itunes.apple.com
11. Plan to Eat. Help centre, "Export your Entire Recipe Book", .CSV and .TXT downloads and the note that this works with or without a current subscription. learn.plantoeat.com
12. Paprika Recipe Manager. Help, Mac edition, File then Export to HTML or .paprikarecipes, and File then Import. paprikaapp.com/help/mac
13. Eat This Much. Help centre, "How do I email, print, or download my meal plan and grocery list?", including "we don't currently have any options to export meal plan data as CSVs". help.eatthismuch.com
14. AnyList. Help centre, Recipes topic index, listing import articles and no export article. help.anylist.com
15. Yummly. yummly.com, which returns a permanent redirect to kitchenaid.com/recipes. Checked 14 September 2026. yummly.com