Coming from AnyList
Switching from AnyList? Here's what's familiar, what's different, and how to bring a few recipes across before you commit.
AnyList is a great app — we’re not pitching against it. This guide is for households already on AnyList who want to know what they’d find in Recipes and how to try without moving everything across.
What you’ll find familiar
- Shared household: invite your partner with a code, same library, same grocery list.
- Real-time grocery list, sorted by aisle.
- Meal-plan calendar with one tap to push ingredients to the list.
- Works offline. iOS app (Android in beta).
What’s different
- Save from anywhere. TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube, Facebook, food blogs, even ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini share links — not just schema.org sites.
- Smart scaling. Doubling a recipe doesn’t double the salt. Seasonings, leavening, and extracts hold their amount.
- Ingredients merge. Three recipes that each call for an onion become one line (“2½ onions”) on your grocery list.
- Metric or imperial, instant. Flip the whole library between cups and grams in one tap.
- Per-recipe sharing. Send one recipe by link without merging your two libraries. AnyList’s shared-account model means a delete on either side wipes it from both.
What you might miss
- Price. AnyList Complete is $14.99/year for a household; Recipes Pro is $96/year.
- A decade of polish. AnyList has fewer rough edges.
- If a shared list is all you need, that’s AnyList’s core focus and they do it well.
How to try three recipes
AnyList has no bulk export, so move three favorites by hand and cook from them for a week. Your AnyList library doesn’t move.
- 1
Open the recipe in AnyList
Pick three you actually cook — a weeknight pasta, a weekend roast, something with notes you've added.
- 2
Tap Send Recipe → Mail
AnyList emails the recipe to you as plain text, plus the original source URL if it had one. The text uses simple markdown (# for headings, > for multi-line steps).
- 3
Bring it into Recipes
If there's a source URL in the email, share that URL to the Recipes app — we'll re-extract it from the live page, usually cleaner than AnyList's stored copy. If there's no URL (you typed it in yourself), copy the email body and paste it into Recipes.
- 4
Cook from them for a week
Plan a week of meals, watch the grocery list merge, scale a recipe up for guests. If it doesn't click, your AnyList library is exactly where you left it.