Questions, answered

If yours isn’t here, just ask.

Getting started

What is Simmmer?: Dinner, decided. Tell Simmmer what’s in your fridge, or how much time and energy you have, and it suggests dinners you can make tonight. Then it walks you through the cooking one step at a time — big text, built-in timers, a screen that doesn’t sleep while your hands are covered in flour. It can plan your week and sort your shopping list by aisle, too.
Does it cost anything to try?: No. The free plan has no time limit and no card required, and it includes the whole recipe catalog — not a sample of it. Premium raises the limits and adds meal planning and offline cooking. There’s also a 14-day free trial if you want to try Premium itself.
Do I need an account?: To save recipes, plan meals or keep a shopping list, yes — those things have to live somewhere. If someone shares a recipe link with you, you can read the whole thing and even cook it without signing up.
Is there an app, or is it a website?: Both, and they’re the same account. There’s an iPhone app, and the website works on any device — on a phone you can add it to your home screen and it behaves like an app.

Free vs Premium

What do I get for free?: The whole recipe catalog, step-by-step cooking mode, notes and folders, plus 10 searches a day, 30 saved recipes, a shopping list sorted by aisle that holds 40 items, and the last 7 days of your cooking history. And a taste of what Simmmer does for you: 3 recipes cooked up from what you have, 4 fridge scans, 8 idea searches, 10 cooking questions and 8 recipe imports. These share one allowance, which doesn’t reset; Settings shows what’s left.
What does Premium add?: No ceiling on what you keep: unlimited searches, saved recipes and shopping list, and your whole cooking history. And Simmmer doing more of the work: Plan my week; recipes cooked up for you, fridge scans, idea searches, cooking questions and recipe imports, unlimited for everyday cooking (they share one weekly fair-use limit, far above a busy week); offline downloads; full nutrition trends; and a choice of accent colors. There’s a full side-by-side on the pricing page.
How much is Premium?: $6.99 a month, or $59.99 a year — which works out at $5.00 a month. Both come with a 14-day free trial.
What happens to my recipes if I cancel?: Nothing is deleted. Your saved recipes, folders, notes and history stay exactly as they are. You go back to the free limits, so if you’d saved more than 30 recipes you keep all of them but can’t add new ones until you’re back under the limit, and History shows the last 7 days. The meal planner pauses. Resubscribing picks up where you left off.
How do I cancel?: If you subscribed on the iPhone app, cancel through Apple: Settings → your name → Subscriptions. If you subscribed on the web, use the billing portal in Simmmer’s Settings. Apple doesn’t let us cancel an App Store subscription on your behalf, which is why the route differs.
Do the limits reset?: Searches come back every day at 4am, your time. Saved recipes and shopping-list items are a ceiling rather than a rate — remove something and the room comes back. Recipe imports, cooking questions, recipes cooked up for you, fridge scans and idea searches are one-time allowances on the free plan, so they don’t refill.

Recipes

Where do the recipes come from?: Most of the catalog is built on TheMealDB, an open recipe database, and every recipe that came from somewhere links back to it. We’ve edited the instructions into steps, checked them against the originals, added allergen information and both US and metric measurements — but the dish itself stays faithful to where it came from. The rest of the catalog is written here, mostly to fill gaps in cuisines TheMealDB covers thinly. And when nothing in the library fits what you have, Simmmer can cook a recipe up for you.
Where do the photos come from?: Separately from the recipes. Most come from Pexels and Wikimedia Commons; a small number are TheMealDB’s own. Each one is credited under the photo on the recipe page. We check every photo against the dish before it goes in, because a picture of the wrong thing is worse than no picture at all when you’re cooking from it. A recipe Simmmer cooks up for you, or one you import without a picture, gets its photo the same way: a real photograph from Pexels, picked to match the dish’s name, never a generated one. It shows a dish like yours rather than yours, so now and then it’s off. When you finish cooking, the photo you take replaces it for you.
Can I add my own recipes?: Yes, three ways: paste a link from most recipe sites or from a cooking video, photograph a cookbook page or a handwritten card, or type one in yourself. Imported recipes are reformatted into the same step-by-step layout as everything else.
Who can see the recipes I add?: Only you. Recipes you import or write are private, and they don’t appear in anyone else’s search. That’s enforced in the database, not just in the interface.
Why do some recipes warn about eating them raw?: A few dishes are traditionally eaten raw or barely cooked — steak tartare, ceviche, anything made with raw egg. They carry a short warning, because raw meat, fish and eggs are a real risk for young children, older adults, pregnant people and anyone whose immune system is weakened. Buy the freshest you can, and skip them if that’s you or someone you’re cooking for.
Can I change a recipe?: Your own recipes, yes — edit anything. For catalog recipes, use “Make it yours” to get a private copy you can change however you like. The original stays as it is for everyone else.
Why does a recipe show different measurements than I expect?: Settings has a Units preference (US cups and ounces, or metric grams and milliliters) and a separate one for oven temperature, because plenty of people want grams for ingredients and Fahrenheit on the dial. Recipes convert as you read them.
Something looks wrong in a recipe. What do I do?: Tell us at support@simmmer.com and include the recipe name. We’d genuinely rather know — several catalog corrections have come from cooks noticing something off.

Allergies and dietary needs

How do allergy filters work?: Set your allergies in Settings and recipes containing them are removed from your search results entirely — not grayed out or flagged, removed. Recipes you open still show a warning banner if they contain something you’ve listed, and a recipe cooked up for you is checked against them before you see it.
Can I rely on the allergen information?: No — please treat it as a helpful first pass, not a medical safeguard. Allergen data is derived from ingredient lists and reviewed, and we deliberately over-include when there’s doubt (coconut counts as a tree nut, soy sauce flags both soy and wheat). But brands vary, recipes get adapted, and cross-contamination doesn’t appear in any ingredient list. If an allergy is serious, always read the ingredients yourself and check the packaging you’re actually cooking with.
What about vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free labels?: They’re on recipes where they apply, and we audit them for contradictions — fish sauce in something labeled vegetarian, wheat in something labeled gluten-free. The same caveat applies: verify anything that matters medically.

What can I make?

What is “What can I make?”: Tell Simmmer what’s in your kitchen — type it, or snap the fridge, the cupboard and the counter — and it suggests dishes you can make tonight. Pick one and the full recipe is cooked up in about half a minute. The free plan includes 8 idea searches, 4 fridge scans and 3 recipes cooked up for you.
What happens to the photos I take?: They’re read, then thrown away. A photo of your fridge, your dinner or a cookbook page goes to the service that reads it and comes back as a list, a nutrition estimate or a recipe; Simmmer never stores the photo, and asks you once, before your first photo (Settings can take that back). The exception is a photo you choose to keep, like the one you take when you finish cooking: it becomes that recipe’s picture in your Simmmer, and only you see it. The privacy policy has the details.
Does Simmmer remember what’s in my fridge?: For a little while. What a scan finds, and anything you type, is saved so next time you start from it. Each item is forgotten 14 days after a scan last saw it or you last added it, because fridges change, and Clear forgets everything at once. It’s the names of the food only, never a photo.
Are the recipes Simmmer cooks up tested?: They’re written for you on the spot and checked before you see them, against your allergies, your diet and food-safety rules. They haven’t been through a test kitchen, so use your judgment, and tell us if one goes wrong. The copy you save is private. Simmmer keeps its own copy of what it wrote, with nothing that identifies you, to learn which dishes people want; the best may be added to the library.
Can I save a recipe from TikTok, Instagram or YouTube?: Yes, when the recipe is in the video’s caption, or the caption links to the creator’s recipe page. Simmmer can’t listen to the video itself, so a recipe that’s only spoken out loud can’t come in, and it’ll tell you so. The recipe arrives wearing the video’s cover.
How does logging food from a photo work?: On the Nutrition page, photograph your plate or a Nutrition Facts label. A label is read as printed. A plate is an estimate, and portions are hard to judge from a picture, so treat it as a rough guide; you can correct it (“I only had half”) and the estimate adjusts. The free plan includes 3 photos; on Premium they’re unlimited for everyday use.

Cooking, planning and shopping

What is cooking mode?: One step at a time, in large type, with the ingredients for that step and any timers built in. The screen stays awake so you’re not prodding a phone with wet hands — free for everyone, and switchable in Settings. You can scale the servings first and every amount adjusts.
How does the shopping list work?: Add a recipe’s ingredients in one tap, scaled to the servings you want, and the list sorts itself by aisle — produce, bakery, meat, dairy, the pantry shelves, then frozen last so it stays cold. Duplicates combine automatically — three recipes needing an onion give you one line, and a cup plus four tablespoons of stock becomes one amount rather than two rows. Pantry staples show as what you actually buy (“1 jar”) with the recipe amount underneath, and you can edit any of it.
What does the meal planner do?: Plan my week fills the days and meals you pick — from your own recipes and favorites, new ideas, or both — around how much time and energy you usually have. Swap or replace any meal, add your own from search, a link or a photo, then turn the week into one shopping list with the duplicates already combined. It’s a Premium feature.
Can I cook without an internet connection?: On Premium, yes. Recipes you save are downloaded to your device automatically, so a kitchen with no signal doesn’t stop you mid-recipe. You can turn that off, or download individual recipes by hand, in Settings.
What is “Ask Simmmer”?: A short question about the recipe you’re on — what to substitute, what a technique means, why a step matters. It knows the recipe as you’ve set it (servings, units, oven temperature), what’s in your saved kitchen, and your last few questions on that recipe, so you can follow one up. One answer at a time, not a chat.

Nutrition

How accurate are the nutrition numbers?: They’re estimates, calculated from ingredients using USDA food data. Good enough to compare dishes and spot a pattern; not good enough for anything medical. Portion sizes, brands and how much oil actually ends up in the food all move the real figure.
Why do some recipes have no nutrition at all?: Because we’d rather show nothing than something wrong. If a recipe’s ingredients can’t be weighed reliably — a pastry batch that deliberately makes more than the recipe uses, or bone-in meat where much of the weight isn’t eaten — the estimate would be misleading, so we leave it blank.
How does meal tracking work?: Finish a recipe in cooking mode and it’s logged with the servings you ate. Free accounts see today; Premium sees full weekly trends and can page back through previous weeks. You can correct or delete any entry afterward.

Account, privacy and billing

What do you do with my data?: We use it to run the app — your saved recipes, preferences and cooking history are what make it useful. We don’t sell it. The privacy policy has the specifics.
Is my cooking history private?: Yes. Your history, notes, shopping list, meal plan and any recipes you’ve added are visible only to you.
How do I delete my account?: Settings has a delete option, and it removes your data rather than hiding it. If you have an active subscription, cancel that first — through Apple if you subscribed on iPhone — so you’re not billed after the account is gone.
Can I use Simmmer on more than one device?: Yes. Sign in anywhere and your recipes, lists and plans are there. Some settings are deliberately per-device — offline downloads and the always-on display describe that particular phone or laptop, not your account.
I subscribed on the web. Does Premium work in the iPhone app?: Yes — Premium follows your account, not the platform you bought it on.
Something is broken. Who do I tell?: support@simmmer.com. A real person reads it. Mentioning what device you’re on and what you were doing makes it much faster to fix.