Helthee: Diabetes Meal Planner

A week of diabetes-friendly dinners in seconds. Pick your store, budget, and favorite types of food. Helthee builds delicious meal plans with instructions and a shopping list, all on your phone.

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Inspiration

This one is personal. My blood sugar hit 475, and overnight every meal turned into a question I didn't know how to answer. My wife wanted to cook for me, but figuring out what was actually safe for my numbers, on our budget, from our normal grocery store, turned into a stressful guessing game every night. We were two capable people standing in front of the fridge with no idea what to make. I figured if it was this hard for us, it was this hard for millions of people who just got the same diagnosis. So I built Helthee.

What it does

Helthee is a meal planner for people managing diabetes, high cholesterol or high blood pressure. You pick your grocery store, who you're cooking for, your weekly budget and your health conditions. Helthee builds a full week of meals that fit, and gives you one shopping list sorted by aisle. Calories and macros are tracked, or you can turn on no-counting mode (in the update Apple is reviewing now), which hides every number and just checks each meal for protein, fiber and healthy fat. The planning happens right on your phone, and it turns the nightly "what can I eat" panic into one tap.

How I built it

Helthee is built with Expo and React Native. The meal planner runs on the phone. Diet, allergy, health condition and appliance filters are enforced in code, so the planner can't put a meal on your week that breaks your settings. That mattered to me, because a health app that quietly serves you the wrong meal is worse than no app at all. Recipes and prices ship inside the app, so you don't need an account to plan a week. The AI features (a calorie estimate from a meal photo, and a fridge scan for ideas) run through a server function that holds the key and has daily spending caps, so costs can't run away.

How I used RevenueCat

RevenueCat runs the whole subscription. One Pro entitlement unlocks the premium features, offered as weekly ($8.99), monthly ($9.99) and yearly ($59.99) plans, each with a 3-day free trial. The paywall pulls its plans from RevenueCat offerings, so I can change pricing and packaging from the dashboard without shipping an app update. There's also a web version at helthee.app with its own Stripe checkout, plus a RevenueCat web funnel for people who find us on Instagram.

Challenges I ran into

The hardest part was keeping the health filters strict. When there aren't enough recipes that fit someone's conditions, it's tempting to loosen a rule just to fill the week. Helthee doesn't do that. The empty slot stays empty and the app tells you, instead of quietly serving something off-plan. Getting a full week that fits your budget and your conditions to generate on the phone, with no server and no AI cost per plan, was the core engineering fight. App Review was the other one: Apple rejected Helthee three times before approving it.

What it means

Helthee is a general wellness app, not a medical device. It doesn't diagnose or treat anything, and it isn't medical advice. What it does is take the daily mental load off someone who's already dealing with enough. My wife can open it and just cook.

What's next

More cuisines and condition profiles, better grocery price coverage for more stores, more languages, and turning the fridge scan and photo calorie features into everyday habits.

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