Questions, answered

If yours isn’t here, just ask.

Getting started

What is Simmmer?: A recipe app built around actually cooking rather than browsing. You tell it how much time and energy you have, it suggests something that fits, and then it walks you through the cooking one step at a time — big text, built-in timers, screen that doesn’t sleep while your hands are covered in flour.
Does it cost anything to try?: No. The free plan has no time limit and no card required, and it includes the whole recipe catalogue — not a sample of it. Premium raises the limits and adds meal planning and offline cooking. There’s also a 7-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 full catalogue, step-by-step cooking mode, meal history and personal notes, plus 10 searches a day, 10 saved recipes, a shopping list up to 25 items, 3 recipe imports and 5 AI cooking questions. New accounts get 25 searches a day for their first 7 days while you’re finding your way around.
What does Premium add?: Unlimited searches, saved recipes, folders, shopping list and imports; unlimited AI cooking help; the weekly meal planner; offline downloads; full nutrition trends; always-on display while cooking; and a custom accent colour. 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 7-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 10 recipes you keep all of them but can’t add new ones until you’re back under the cap. 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 reset daily. Saved recipes and shopping-list items are a ceiling rather than a rate — remove something and the room comes back. Imports and AI questions are one-time allowances on the free plan, so they don’t refill.

Recipes

Where do the recipes come from?: Most of the catalogue is built on TheMealDB, an open recipe database, and every recipe links back to its source. We’ve rewritten the instructions for clarity, 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.
Can I add my own recipes?: Yes, three ways: paste a link from almost any recipe site, 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, they don’t appear in anyone else’s search, and they can’t be published without you explicitly submitting them and confirming the work is your own. That’s enforced in the database, not just in the interface.
Can I change a recipe?: Your own recipes, yes — edit anything. For catalogue 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 millilitres) 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 catalogue 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 greyed out or flagged, removed. Recipes you open still show a warning banner if they contain something you’ve listed.
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 labelled vegetarian, wheat in something labelled gluten-free. The same caveat applies: verify anything that matters medically.

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. On Premium the screen stays awake so you’re not prodding a phone with wet hands. 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. 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?: Drop recipes onto days of the week, then turn the whole week into a single 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 answers in a sentence or two and knows the recipe you’re looking at, including the measurements and temperatures as you’ve set them. It’s a tool, not a chatbot: one question, one answer.

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 plus a short trend; Premium sees full weekly trends and can page back through previous weeks. You can correct or delete any entry afterwards.

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.