The 4pm question goes away
No more standing in front of an open fridge deciding. The week is planned before it starts, and the shopping was one order.
Private recipes. Private chef.
Stop deciding
what's for dinner.
It plans the week from food your family already loves, turns it into one grocery order, and tells you when to start each thing so the main, the sides and the dessert land on the table together. Like having a private chef — for $7.99 a month.
Free forever plan No credit card Cancel anytime
Not ready? The assessment finds which part of dinner is costing you most, and what to do about it first — no account needed.
- A week's menu, written for you
- One grocery order, not five trips
- Told when to start, so it all lands together
- Learns what your family actually eats
What changes
Planning dinner doesn't have to be hard.
Most nights the food isn't the problem. The deciding, the shopping and the timing are. Hand those over and what's left is the good part.
Everything lands at the same time
The hard part of a proper meal was never the cooking — it's the timing. Say when you want to eat and it tells you what to start, and when, right down to taking the meat out of the fridge.
It learns what your family actually likes
Rate a meal, note what you changed, and the next plan shifts. The things everyone asked for come back. The ones nobody finished quietly don't.
One grocery order, not five trips
Every dish in the week collapses into a single list, combined and deduplicated, sorted the way a shop is laid out.
Dinner costs what groceries cost
One sit-down dinner for four costs what several nights of cooking the same food at home does. And you know exactly what went into it, because you put it there.
Everyone sits down to the whole thing
Mains with sides and something afterwards, because it plans a meal rather than a recipe. That is the bit that makes it feel like going out.
Free · No account
Not sure which of those is your problem?
Most of what makes dinner exhausting isn't the cooking — and it's usually two or three specific things, not everything at once. Twelve questions, about two minutes, and you'll get a plan for the parts worth changing first. Including the ones that have nothing to do with us.
Find your Kitchen Friction ScoreThe part that's different
It has read your cookbook.
Ask a general chatbot what goes with your roast chicken and it invents something. Ask this and it names two side dishes you already have, because it can see them.
Every recipe you save, every version you cook, every rating you leave becomes context. That is the whole idea, and it is the one thing a stateless chatbot cannot copy.
- Substitutions for the exact recipe you're standing in front of
- Sides and desserts picked from your own collection
- Suggestions weighted by what you've actually cooked and rated
How it does it
The bits a chef would do.
Writing the menu, ordering the shopping, and calling the timings — done for you, from your own recipes.
What nothing else does
It writes the menu
Ask for a week and you get one — built from your highest-rated recipes, avoiding what you've had recently, with a reason beside each night. Read it, change what you want, and it becomes your plan and your shopping list in one go.
Add sides + desserts Combined ingredient list AI cooking timeline Cook like a chef
What nothing else does
It runs the timing like a kitchen
Tell it dinner is at 6:30. It works backwards: 4:00 take the chicken out, 4:40 oven on, 5:00 tray in, 6:10 out to rest, 6:30 plate. Sides and dessert folded into the same schedule, oven clashes flagged before they happen.
Add sides + desserts Combined ingredient list AI cooking timeline Cook like a chef
It plans meals, not recipes
Attach sides, a dessert, a drink to any main. The ingredient lists combine, the timings coordinate, and the whole thing is treated as one dinner — which is how anyone actually eats.
It remembers how it went
Every time you cook, it saves what you changed and how it turned out. Compare any two attempts side by side. That is how the sixth time you make something is better than the first.
It knows your kitchen
Household size, allergies, what people won't touch, the cuisines you lean on. Every suggestion is filtered through that, so you're not talked into a recipe someone at the table can't eat.
It can look in your fridge
Photograph what's in there and it tells you what you can make tonight — from your own collection first. Photograph a cookbook page and it lifts the recipe straight off it.
It stands next to you while you cook
Big text, screen stays on, timers built in. Out of buttermilk halfway through? Ask. It has the recipe you're standing in front of and the step you're on.
It stays yours
Send one recipe to your mother without handing over the rest of the book. No feed, no profile, no ads anywhere, and nothing trained on your recipes.
Pricing
Less than one takeaway.
The cookbook is free forever and never capped. Premium is the chef part — the planning, the shopping list and the timing — for about the price of a coffee a week.
Free
Everything you need to keep and cook your own recipes. Not a trial.
$0forever
- Unlimited recipes — no cap, ever
- Version tracking on every cook
- Cook mode with timers
- Clean printing
- Private recipe sharing
- 10 AI chat messages a day
- One AI meal plan a month
- No ads. Not one, anywhere.
Premium
Someone to plan the week, write the list and call the timings.
Best value
$5.00/ month
Billed $59.99 yearly — save 37%
- A week's menu whenever you want one
- The shopping list built from it, combined
- Timings worked backwards from when you eat
- Cook from a photo of your fridge or a cookbook page
- Swaps for allergies, keto, or whatever you're avoiding
- Ask the assistant as much as you like*
Start free — no credit card required. Upgrade when you're ready.
* Unlimited means unlimited for cooking. There's a fair-use ceiling of 200 assistant messages a day to stop runaway scripts — a heavy month of real use is around 400 in total, so you will not meet it.
Questions
Things people ask.
I don't have time to plan meals. How is this any different?
Because you don't do the planning. Press one button and you get a week built from the food you already cook, with the shopping list attached. Reading it and changing a night or two takes about a minute. That is the whole job.
Why not just use ChatGPT?
ChatGPT will happily write you a meal plan, and it will forget you the moment you close the tab. It doesn't know that you've made the roast three times this month, that your youngest won't eat peppers, or that the last version of the galette worked because you cut the sugar. PrivateCookbook does, because it watched you cook it.
What does $7.99 a month actually get me?
Somebody to plan the week, do the shopping list, and run the timing — the parts of a home-cooked dinner that take the thinking. Less than one takeaway. The cookbook itself is free and always will be.
Is the free plan actually usable?
Yes, and it isn't a trial. Unlimited recipes with no cap ever, a saved version every time you cook, cook mode with timers, private sharing, clean printing, no ads. The only thing metered is the AI: ten messages a day and one AI meal plan a month. No card needed.
My family are fussy. Will it just suggest things nobody eats?
It gets better at this the more you tell it. Allergies are treated as absolute. Beyond that, every time you rate a meal or write down what you changed, the next plan reflects it — the dishes that landed come back, the ones that didn't stop appearing.
I'm not much of a cook. Is this for me?
Especially. You set a skill level when you sign up and the suggestions respect it. Cook mode gives you one step at a time in large type with the timers built in, and you can ask questions mid-cook about the exact recipe in front of you.
Can I use my own recipes?
That's the point. Type them in, paste a link from any recipe site and it reads the page for you, or photograph a cookbook page. Everything the AI plans is built from your collection first.
Is any of this public?
None of it. There's no feed, no profile, no discover page. Share one recipe with one person and they see that recipe — never the rest of your cookbook. We don't sell your data, show ads, or train AI models on what you cook.
Can I cancel?
In two clicks from settings. You keep Premium until the period you paid for runs out, and your recipes and cooking history stay exactly where they are afterwards. Nothing is held hostage.
Everyone at the table.
Nobody in a panic.
Add a few of the meals you already make and let it plan next week around them. Under a minute to start, no card, and the cookbook stays free whatever you decide.