Palato: Recipes & Meal Planner

Palato app icon.
Earn awards as you cook, plan and build your recipe collection.
A shared shopping list keeps ingredients in one place.
Plan leftovers and portions before you cook.
Plan dinner together and leave a note on the meal.
See the week’s meals at a glance.
Rate what you cooked, so your favourites are easy to find again.
Discover recipes, collections and your own saved meals.
Swipe & Bite helps you find a meal together.
Cooking milestones make progress feel tangible.
Cook hands free with live activities on ios
Follow clear, step-by-step cooking instructions.
Keep the full recipe and ingredients close while cooking.

Palato is a place to keep the recipes you want to cook, plan when you'll make them, and build the shopping list that follows. It's available on iPhone and Android.

I started it for my girlfriend and me. Recipes were scattered across messages, saved videos, screenshots and notes. We would still reach dinnertime with no plan and no idea which ingredients we needed. I wanted us to have one shared place for the whole routine.

What Palato does

Save recipes from supported Instagram and TikTok links, websites, photos, screenshots and notes. You can also create or edit a recipe yourself, organize it in custom lists, and search your collection.
Adjust the number of servings and see the ingredient quantities recalculate. Recipe details can show estimated nutrition information.
Plan meals in a weekly calendar, or let the rules-based Smart Planner assemble a week from your settings. It isn't an AI meal planner. After you have saved at least ten recipes, a separate AI-powered recommendation can suggest something based on your collection.
Turn planned meals into a shopping list, add items by hand, check them off and share the list. Your household can share its recipes, plans and list, with invitations and membership controls.
Use Dinner Roulette to vote on saved meals together when nobody wants to choose. When it's time to cook, step through the recipe with timers and an optional always-on screen.
Keep a cooking history, streak and monthly statistics. Account data syncs online, and supported offline changes are queued until the connection returns.

Building it

I built Palato with Flutter, a Go backend and RevenueCat for optional Premium features. The hard part was making all those small steps connect without turning dinner into a project-management exercise. An import has to become a recipe you can actually find later; a plan has to become a list you can shop from; two people need to see the same thing.

Marketing it

I marketed Palato through different formats and I am still trying to optimize whats working best. I tried different slideshow and UGC formats across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube Shorts, which brought me quite some users. I am now still working on optimizing the conversion.

Publishing Palato is personal for me. After a lot of building, this is the first app I've put out into the world. I made it for us first, but now anyone can use it for an ordinary Tuesday dinner.