AnyList earned its reputation the honest way: it is one of the best shared grocery lists on the iPhone, and households swear by it. The recipe features came later, and it shows. If your starting point is “I have recipes I love and I want to cook from them,” rather than “I need a list my partner can edit,” a recipe-first app fits better. Here is how to think about the switch.
Where AnyList shines, and where it strains
The list is the product. Sharing is instant, checkboxes sync across the household, and the aisle grouping works. Nobody switches away from AnyList because the list failed them.
The strain shows up around recipes. As of this writing, importing recipes from the web requires the paid AnyList Complete upgrade, and the recipe browsing, scaling, and cooking experience feels like what it is: a capable list app with recipes attached. If most of your time is spent in the recipes rather than the list, you feel that inversion every day.
What a recipe-first alternative should get right
Import that works, free. Saving a recipe from a link is the front door. It should not sit behind the paywall, and it should produce clean ingredients and steps, not a pasted blob. You can try Trivet’s importer right in your browser, no install needed.
Scaling and cooking built in. Change the servings and every amount should recalculate. When you cook, the screen should stay awake and walk you through the steps. Try the scaling math here.
A grocery list that comes from the recipes. The list should be generated: add a recipe or a week’s plan, duplicates merge, items sort by aisle. That is the part AnyList users rightly refuse to give up, so the alternative has to do it well.
Privacy without an account. AnyList uses accounts to power sharing. If you do not need household sync, an app with no account, no ads, and on-device storage is simply less to worry about.
How Trivet compares
- Web import is free, unlimited in spirit, and built to work the first time.
- Scaling, cooking mode, and full export are free forever.
- The meal planner turns a week into an aisle-sorted grocery list in one tap.
- There is no account. Recipes live on your iPhone, and the App Privacy label reads Data Not Collected.
- Premium is $19.99 a year or a one-time $29.99 lifetime purchase. See pricing.
The honest caveat
If the shared household list is the center of your kitchen life, AnyList is genuinely good at it, and Trivet does not do multi-person list editing today. Some households run both: AnyList for the shared staples, Trivet for the recipes, the plan, and the list it generates.
Moving over
There is no lock-in either direction. Start by importing a handful of your most-cooked recipes from their original sites into Trivet, cook from them for a week, and see which app you reach for. Your recipes stay exportable from Trivet at any time, as plain JSON you keep.