I’m building MealF, an open-source, self-hosted meal planner with AI recipe imports and Bring! integration

Hey everyone! I’m currently working on MealF , a free, open-source and self-hosted meal-planning app. The idea came from a pretty simple problem: my girlfriend and I wanted an easy way to organize our weekly meals, save recipes from all over the internet, and automatically turn our meal plans into shopping lists. There are already plenty of meal-planning apps out there, but many require subscriptions, lack integrations, or don’t offer self-hosting. So I decided to build my own. 🍳 What is MealF? MealF combines recipe management, weekly meal planning, AI-powered recipe imports, and shopping-list automation into one application. Here’s what I’m planning: 📅 Weekly meal planner: Plan breakfast, lunch, and dinner with drag-and-drop scheduling. 📖 Recipe management: Organize recipes, adjust servings, manage ingredients, and keep everything in one place. 🤖 AI recipe imports: Import recipes from websites, screenshots, images, PDFs, and social media content. AI extracts ingredients, quantities, and cooking instructions into structured, editable recipes. 🛒 Bring! integration: Automatically synchronize ingredients from planned meals to Bring!, merging quantities while preserving existing shopping-list items. 🥫 Pantry management: Keep track of ingredients you already have. 💡 Smart suggestions: Get meal recommendations based on saved recipes, preferences, and available ingredients. 🏠 Household-focused: A shared experience so couples or families can plan meals together. 🐳 Self-hosted: Run MealF using Docker, with persistent local storage and control over your data. 🔓 Open source: No mandatory subscription, unnecessary telemetry, or vendor lock-in. 📱 Mobile-first, with a focus on PWA Right now, my main focus is making MealF work really well as a Progressive Web App (PWA) on mobile devices . I want it to feel as close to a native app as possible, especially on iOS and Android, without having to maintain separate native applications. The goal is to make everyday interactions simple: quickly checking what’s for dinner, adding a recipe, adjusting the weekly plan, or updating the shopping list while standing in the supermarket. Desktop support is part of the plan, but the mobile experience is currently the priority . 🤖 A little more about the AI integration One of my main goals is making recipe importing as painless as possible. Found a recipe on Instagram, TikTok, or a random website? Instead of manually copying every ingredient and instruction, I want MealF to extract the recipe for you. I’m also designing the AI integration to support multiple providers, including Google Gemini, OpenAI, OpenRouter, and compatible APIs. AI will be optional, and imported recipes can always be reviewed and edited before saving. 🛠️ Current development statu s MealF is still in active development, and not everything mentioned above is implemented yet. The application is being designed around a self-hosted Docker backend and a mobile-first PWA, with an emphasis on straightforward deployment and maintenance. My goal isn’t to build another overly complicated recipe platform. I want something that’s genuinely useful for everyday meal planning, particularly for households that already use Bring! for shopping. 👀 You can check out the project preview here: cloudcookch.github.io/mealf-website The preview gives you an idea of the direction I’m taking with MealF. It’s still a work in progress, so things may change as development continues. 💬 I’d love your feedback! Before I get too far into development, I’m curious: What features are missing from your current meal-planning or recipe-management setup? Would you use a self-hosted alternative like this? Which recipe-import sources or shopping-list integrations would you prioritize? How important is a polished, native-like mobile PWA experience to you? I’m building MealF primarily to solve my own problems, but I’d love to turn it into something useful for the self-hosting community. Thanks for reading!