Why I didn't like PepperPlate

I've written about how, from a budgeting perspective, food is my household's weakest link. To combat this, I started looking at meal planning apps or services since we save more money when we stick to a menu, particularly a monthly menu. My wife and I spent a solid 6-7 hours exploring Pepperplate and could not get it to meet our needs. I'd like to talk about what we didn't like so as to help someone else out in a similar situation.

Pepperplate is a free recipe management service that offers mobile apps on iOS and Android and also has a web-app. It sounded promising and it's a commonly recommended solution for managing digital recipes. If you're looking for a free solid recipe manager, I encourage you to check it out. However, if your're looking for something with robust grocery list and meal planning capabilities, I can't recommend Pepperplate. After spending some time with the web-app, below are our grievances.

1. There's absolutely no new user tutorial.

We spent a collective several hours and dozens Youtube videos from other individuals learning how to actually do even the most basic tasks. When you sign up, you just get dropped right at the main screen.

2. Their Help link at the top of the page is broken. 

I got an error saying {"error":"Couldn't authenticate you"}. This went on for several days. 

3. No ability to plan for a month at a time.

That's right, it only limits you to planning individual weeks. While planning for a week isn't bad at all, my wife and I prefer planning out our dinners for the month. We've simply found that it works better for us. It allows us to get 90% of our food the first shopping trip, bolstered by smaller weekly shopping trips for things that may not last all month, like bread or milk. 

4. The Planner needs to be more reliable. 

In our first week we created, w had to resort to going to each recipe individually and adding it to the shopping list. The Add-to-list button at the top of each day in the planner only worked for 3 out of the 7 days. This was the single most frustrating part of the entire experience. Also, each time we used the Add-to-list button, it would add a different 3 of the 7 days, so there seemed to be no recognizable pattern or indication that the Add-to-list feature was simply having issues with a specific day or a specific recipe. In the Planner, there should be an option to Add-all rather than having to add each-day individually. 

After this experience, I sent questions and feedback to feedback@pepperplate.com as per their website. However, that was 6 months ago and counting with 0 reply or assistance from the team. After this experience, I'd begun building my own solution with PHP and MySQL, but before I got to deep into it, I found another product called Paprika, which I'm working on a post about.