Answers
Questions, answered plainly.
Including the ones with awkward answers. Nothing here needs you to take our word for it: the free tier is the whole application, so the cheapest way to check any of this is to run it.
Buying and licensing
Yes. The Lifetime Premium Unlock is $25, paid once. There is no subscription, no renewal, no per-seat price and no upgrade fee later — the purchase covers the product, not a version of it. Features still on the way are included in the same payment.
Yes. Gather runs on your machine with the wifi off, and Premium stays on while it is. Once a day a running copy asks Lemon Squeezy whether the key is still active — it sends the key, nothing else, no account and no personal information. If that check cannot get through, for an hour or a year, nothing changes: no reply is never read as a bad reply, so an outage or a long stretch offline cannot take away what you paid for. The one thing that does switch Premium off is the provider explicitly saying the key is dead, which is what happens after a refund or a chargeback.
One purchase covers 3 devices, so a household buys once. If you replace a machine, free its slot from the Settings screen on the old one — or from Settings on any device — and use it on the new one.
Checkout is handled by Lemon Squeezy. Your licence key arrives by email; paste it into the Settings screen in the app and Premium switches on.
Then you keep using Gather for free, with no time limit. The free tier is not a trial and does not expire: 60 recipes, planning 15 days at a time, shopping lists, allergen warnings, nutrition, Kitchen mode, leftovers, the cooking log, live Kroger prices and backups.
Privacy and your data
No. There is no account, no cloud database, no telemetry and no advertising. Your recipes, your plan and your shopping list stay on your computer, and Gather works with the wifi off. Network requests happen only when you ask for something that needs one — importing a recipe from a website, looking up Kroger prices, sending the list to your phone, or the optional AI tools.
A single SQLite file named meal-planner.db in your user application-data directory. It is a standard database file you can copy, back up, or open with any SQLite tool.
Copy meal-planner.db. That file is the whole application state. Restore it by putting it back in the same directory on the new machine.
In your operating system's credential vault, through the Rust keyring integration — never in the database and never in local storage. The webview cannot read them; provider calls are made from Rust.
The local endpoint is read-only, exposes no credentials, and lives on your own Wi-Fi. If you open a public tunnel, that URL is readable by anyone who has it, so stop the tunnel when you are finished.
Using the app
Gather only reads structured schema.org data — JSON-LD or declared microdata. It deliberately does not guess a recipe from page prose, so a page without that markup will report no schema found rather than inventing ingredients. If the page has since died, try the Wayback retry.
Because their units are not safely convertible. Combining 200 g of flour with 1 cup of flour requires a density assumption that is wrong often enough to ruin a recipe, so Gather keeps them as separate lines instead of guessing.
No. Dietary auto-tags and conflict flags come from deterministic keyword rules and are convenience warnings only. Always verify labels and cross-contamination yourself.
No. Everything except the optional AI tools works without one, and someone who never touches AI loses nothing. The AI tools are part of Premium and are bring-your-own-key: you supply a key from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Groq, OpenRouter or a local model. Gather does not resell AI and charges nothing for usage — you pay your provider directly, or nothing at all if you run a model on your own machine.
No. It can only return a proposal, which opens in the normal recipe editor. Nothing is saved until you review it and press Save. It is also completely hidden from the interface while disabled.
Platforms and the project
Windows, shipped as an NSIS installer or an MSI package. It is built on Tauri 2, so macOS and Linux builds are possible, but they are not released today — treat Gather as a Windows application for now.
Unsigned NSIS builds produce a temporary intermediate file that some antivirus products quarantine. That temporary file is not the distributable — the finished installer is the versioned one in the bundle directory.
No. Gather is a paid product and its source is closed, so you cannot audit the code yourself. The privacy claims are still checkable from the outside, which is the part that actually affects you: block it in your firewall and everything except the optional online features keeps working, and meal-planner.db is an ordinary SQLite file you can open with any database browser to see exactly what it stores.
Still unsure?
The free tier is not a trial and does not expire. The cheapest way to find out whether it suits you is to run it.