About
A pantry-first dinner planner. That's the whole pitch.
You take a photo of your pantry. We turn what's already in there into a week of dinners. If something's missing, we send the gap to Instacart — and only if you ask. That's the whole product.
Cooking with Robots is free. Always. The only money that ever changes hands is when you choose Instacart delivery, and that's between you and Instacart. We're not a subscription, not a meal kit, not a freemium thing with a paywall around the good stuff.
The pantry-first loop
Pantry in. Dinner out. No mystery box in between.
Snap your pantry
Photo your shelves or fridge. We read what's in there. No typing, no barcodes, no app to download.
Get a week of dinners
Built around what you actually have. Allergies and taste pinned. Cook tonight, plan the rest, change anything you don't like.
Send the gaps to Instacart
Only the items you don't have. One tap, one cart. Skip it and shop yourself if you'd rather. The button is yours.
What we are not
Not a meal kit. Meal kits ship you a box of pre-portioned ingredients you didn't already buy. Different job. We do the opposite — turn the food you already bought into dinner.
Not an AI chef.We don't pretend a robot has feelings about your grandmother's braise. The AI is a tool: it reads your pantry photo, plans the week, and writes the recipe. That's it. No tapestry, no testimony, no journey.
Not a recipe magazine. Recipe magazines are great if you want to read about food. We're built for the moment it's 6pm and you need an answer to "what's for dinner?" without scrolling through a writer's childhood.
Not a fridge accessory. Some apps only work if you bought one specific brand of smart fridge. You don't need to own anything specific. A phone is enough.
See the side-by-side on the compare page.
Why it's free
Cooking with Robots is free to use. There's no paywall, no "premium plan," no meter on how many recipes you can generate, and no upsell hiding inside the meal plan.
We earn an affiliate fee when you choose to send your missing items to Instacart for delivery. That's it. If you never click the Instacart button, the app is free to you and we make nothing on you — and that's fine. The product still works.
We're not collecting your pantry data to sell to anyone. The photo, the items, the meal plans — those are yours. The privacy page has the long version.
How the AI actually works
We use OpenAI for text — pantry-photo recognition, recipe writing, meal-plan generation. We use Google's Gemini for the recipe images. Both run on Cooking with Robots' servers, not on your phone.
The recipes are generated. They are not pulled from a chef's cookbook. They're tested by us against your allergies and dietary restrictions before they show up. If a recipe ever looks wrong, broken, or unsafe, the contact email at the bottom of the page goes straight to a human.
We're not a substitute for a doctor or dietitian. If you've got a serious allergy or medical condition, double- check the ingredient list yourself before cooking.
Who built this
Cooking with Robots is built by Nate Lemos — solo, no team, no VC. Senior engineer. Got tired of the 6pm dinner panic, kept looking at a full pantry and ordering takeout anyway, decided to build the tool that would've fixed it.
More about Nate at nate.lemos.dev. Bug reports, feedback, or general arguments about food go to hello@cookingwithrobots.com.
Try it. It's free.
Sign up, upload a pantry photo, get a week of dinners. The whole loop takes about a minute.
Plan this week