PlateJoy shut down in 2025. Here is where to go next.

What happened to PlateJoy

PlateJoy was founded in 2012 by Christina Bognet and acquired in 2021 by RVO Health, the parent company of Healthline Media. Its founder left in 2022, and by most accounts activity on the product slowed after that: the last Android app update landed in September 2024, the app was pulled from Google Play in March 2025, and the service was discontinued on July 1, 2025. The site itself, platejoy.com, does not resolve anymore — there is no live pricing page or account portal left to check.

PlateJoy's recipes were folded into Wellos, a separate app from the same parent company, RVO Health. Whether that move preserved any individual user's saved plans is not something a former PlateJoy account holder can check today, because there is no working PlateJoy login to sign in from.

Some subscribers report pro-rated refunds were offered around the shutdown, per PlateJoy's own former support center as indexed by search engines. If you were charged after the closure and never saw a refund, your card issuer or PayPal is the practical next step — there is no PlateJoy support inbox left to write to.

What PlateJoy did well

The preference quiz behind PlateJoy drove a genuinely large recipe library, filtered to what each person actually said they liked and could eat — professional reviewers rated it well for ease of use while it was live.

The grocery list went a step further than most: everything for the week landed in one list, with a direct hand-off into Instacart or Amazon Fresh so you could check out instead of copying items into a shopping app by hand.

It is fair to say PlateJoy solved the "what do I cook this week" problem well for a lot of people, for a long time — the complaints below are mostly about billing and about the last couple of years under new ownership, not about the core idea.

Where it stopped working for people

Billing after cancellation shows up repeatedly in reviews: "My account has been CANCELLED for MONTHS, but yet tonight I was in line to buy WATER and my card was declined. PlateJoy charged me $69 for an account that still shows inactive" (Trustpilot). Another subscriber describes being warned about a renewal, cancelling, and being charged anyway: "I received a warning that I was going to be charged...and so I reached out and cancelled...imagine my shock when I am charged $99" (Trustpilot).

Recipe variety thinned out for some users too — swapping a meal tended to keep surfacing similar, unappealing suggestions rather than something genuinely different, and reviewers noted a quality drop after the RVO Health acquisition: "Quality dropped fast...regret buying year of service" (per MealThinker's synthesis of user feedback).

A few users also flagged that recipes were not adapted to season — oven-heavy dishes suggested in summer, out-of-season ingredients like basil in winter — and that certain diets had thinner recipe coverage than what is available for free elsewhere online.

What Macro Recipe does the same

You still get a weekly menu built from a quiz-style profile — your diet, allergies, the ingredients you want to avoid, your kitchen equipment — made of real, complete dishes rather than a bare nutrient target.

Everything in the week lands in a single grocery list, quantities combined across recipes so you are not buying three half-used bags of the same ingredient. You can swap a dish you do not fancy and the list follows.

Recipes open step by step when it is time to cook, and a batch cooking mode groups the week's prep into one session if you would rather cook once and eat several times.

What Macro Recipe does differently

PlateJoy planned meals around your stated preferences and diet, not around a calorie or macro target — its own former support content described no macro-goal adaptation feature. Macro Recipe starts from a goal (cut, maintenance, muscle gain) and adapts real recipes so the day lands near your estimated calorie and protein numbers, and says so honestly when a day falls short instead of pretending.

The grocery list carries an estimated cost in your own currency, adjusted for your country's price level. You set a weekly grocery budget and the menu is built with it in mind — an estimate, not a receipt, but a number PlateJoy's plan-around-preferences model never gave you.

There is no daily food log and no barcode scanner to keep up with. You set your diet, your goal, and your budget once; the app rebuilds the menu around them, week after week.

What it does not do

It cannot recover or import a former PlateJoy account, saved plan, or favourites list — PlateJoy's shutdown offered no export path, and the account system behind it no longer exists to pull anything from. Be wary of any app that claims to import your PlateJoy data.

It is not free. Your first menu is free and there is a 3-day trial, after which it is a paid subscription — PlateJoy was never free either (its last-known pricing was around $12.99 for one month, $69 for six months, or $99 for a year, after a 10-day trial), but it is worth weighing against your own budget.

There is no grocery-delivery checkout built in the way PlateJoy hooked into Instacart or Amazon Fresh — the grocery list is yours to shop from, in any store. And it is on iPhone today.

Switching in practice: what to carry over, how the first week looks

There is nothing left to export from PlateJoy, so the only thing worth carrying over is what is in your head: the diet you had set, the allergies and dislikes you excluded, roughly how many servings you cooked for, and the two or three dishes from your PlateJoy weeks you would genuinely cook again from memory. Write those down once and you will be asked for the same things setting up a new menu.

A first week starts the same way PlateJoy's onboarding did — a short profile of your diet, your goal, and your kitchen — and ends with a weekly menu and one grocery list. The difference shows up at the bottom of the list: an estimated total cost, so you know roughly what the week will run before you are at the register.

Price, compared

PlateJoy's last reported pricing, while it was live, was roughly $12.99 for one month, $69 for six months (about $11–12/month), or $99 for a year (about $8.25/month), after a 10-day free trial — figures as reported by review sites, not verifiable on a live pricing page today.

Macro Recipe's first weekly menu is free, with a 3-day trial, then 9.99 € a month or 69.99 € a year. Both are estimated comparisons across currencies and time, not a live like-for-like — check the App Store listing for the current price where you are.

What three days of a weekly menu look like

An indicative example for someone aiming at roughly 1,700 kcal and 105 g of protein a day. Estimated figures; your own menu is built from your profile, your tastes and your budget.

Frequently asked questions