How to use Gather.

Install and first launch

Gather is a desktop application. There is no sign-up step, because there is no account to create.

1. 01

   Download and run the installer

   Windows ships as an NSIS installer or an MSI. The app creates its SQLite database in your user application-data directory as meal-planner.db, and runs its migrations on first start.

2. 02

   You already have a catalog

   First launch seeds 1,000 USDA-derived foods, balanced across six aisles, so search and nutrition work before you have entered anything. Every seeded row can be edited or deleted like your own.

3. 03

   Set your dietary profile (optional)

   Settings → Dietary lets you set vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, dairy-free, keto, allergens and daily nutrition caps. Conflicts then surface on the day, the recipe, the ingredient and the shopping row.

Getting recipes in

Three routes, in the order most people use them.

1. 01

   Import from a URL

   Paste a recipe page link. Gather reads schema.org JSON-LD or microdata straight from the page — it does not read the prose, so it either finds structured data or tells you it did not. If the page is gone, it can retry through the Wayback Machine.

2. 02

   Write it yourself

   Add ingredients from your catalog with quantities and units, then ordered or sectioned instructions, yield, prep and cook time. Ingredients are reusable records, not free text, which is what makes the shopping list able to combine them later.

3. 03

   Import legacy CSVs

   Settings → Data accepts shopping and meal-plan CSVs, several files at once. The parser tolerates BOMs, preamble rows, header aliases and alternate delimiters, and commits in one transaction so a bad file cannot replace good data.

Planning meals

The planner is a real calendar, not a seven-slot grid.

1. 01

   Put a recipe on a date

   Pick a day and a meal slot, and set a batch multiplier if you are cooking double. Drag an assignment to another day to reschedule it; the grocery list follows automatically.

2. 02

   Let it plan for you

   The Automated plan sidebar schedules several days in one go. Plan My Week hands your library and dietary profile to your own AI provider and writes the reviewed result as one undoable action — it needs both a connected provider and a licence. Save at least three recipes first, or the week just repeats itself.

3. 03

   Know the free window

   Without a licence you can plan ±15 days around today, a 30-day window, and your library holds 60 recipes. Import a file with more than that and Gather tells you before it writes anything, rather than silently dropping the rest.

Shopping and prices

The list is derived state — your recipes and plan remain the source of truth.

1. 01

   Read the generated list

   Each planned recipe is expanded through its ingredients, names are canonicalised, and compatible quantities are summed. Incompatible units are deliberately kept apart rather than guessing a density conversion. Add manual rows alongside them.

2. 02

   Teach it your prices

   When you check an item off, Gather can ask what you paid. That price is divided by the amount it was observed for, so the next estimate scales to the quantity your plan actually needs. Turn the prompt off in Settings → Data & Integrations.

3. 03

   Send it to the store

   Connect a Kroger account with your own credentials to refresh regular and promotional prices and send the list to a Kroger cart. Matching is done on product IDs rather than guesswork, so expect most of the list to go across and a few items to need adding by hand. Gather never scrapes retailer pages.

Taking the list with you

Three layers of redundancy, because shops have bad signal.

1. 01

   Scan the QR code

   Send to Phone starts an ephemeral local server and shows a QR code pointing at your machine's address on your own Wi-Fi. The endpoint is read-only and exposes no credentials.

2. 02

   Leave the network

   Network Settings can open a public tunnel — bundled Cloudflare Quick Tunnels by default, or Ngrok/Localtunnel. A tunnel URL is readable by anyone who has it, so stop it when you are done.

3. 03

   Lose signal entirely

   On its first successful load the mobile page caches the whole app shell and your list with a service worker, and mirrors your checked-off progress into local storage. Open it once before you leave.

The optional AI module

Off by default, and genuinely absent from the interface until you turn it on.

1. 01

   Connect a provider

   Settings → AI Integrations offers OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Groq, OpenRouter, or a Custom Local / Hosted API for anything OpenAI-compatible — Ollama and LM Studio included. Cloud providers need your key; a custom endpoint defaults to localhost:11434/v1 and must expose a reachable /models route before AI tools appear.

2. 02

   What it is allowed to do

   Draft a recipe from what is in your fridge, extract one after the deterministic importer reports no schema found, look up ingredient facts, check your library, or hand a whole week to Plan My Week. All of it needs Premium. Nutrition, macros, prices and unit conversion are excluded from the schema entirely and stay calculated locally.

3. 03

   How it is contained

   Rust requests structured JSON, rejects unknown fields and invalid quantities, and returns a proposal to the normal recipe editor. Nothing is written until you press Save. Your key never enters the webview.

The seven tabs

One window, seven sections. What each is for, at a glance.