How much does it cost to develop a Meal Planner app like Food Planner?

By

IIH Global

TV dinners were very popular among families and singles even a few decades ago when they didn’t want to cook. The advent of technology has slowed down today’s generation and ultimately the savior of the Meal Planner app. This app helps users to maintain a proper diet and take follow-up of a healthy routine. One of the easiest ways to save money and eat healthily at the same time is to plan your meals adequately. Scheduling a meal plan before going out for grocery shopping will not only allow us to save money but will also encourage a healthier lifestyle. Effectively planned meals allow you to avoid eating your calorie intake carelessly and stay in control.

Nowadays prepared, pre-packaged foods are more convenient to deliver, with a focus on healthy recipes. They are prepared with fresh ingredients and packaged with microwave reheating within minutes, making them the perfect choice for busy people looking for meals that follow a specific meal/diet plan.

According to a survey conducted by Statista, the CAGR for the global digital health care market from 2015 to 2020 is expected to be around 41%. The digital health market is estimated to reach more than 200 billion US dollars.

What is Meal Planner App

Meal Planner Mobile application Development helps put all your favorite offline recipes in one place! One can use these apps to download recipes from all over the internet with just a few taps onto your mobile, laptop, or PC with a large selection of approved websites and blogs. One can even attach their own personal recipe, enhance and/or change their own ingredients, notes, pictures, and much more. Create your own custom cookbook from the recipe collection and tag it with all your favorite keywords to easily find your recipe.

These apps allow users to create their grocery list using their favorite recipes and Meal Plans for the whole family. The app also allows registered users to share their favorite recipes on their social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc. directly.

The Key Features Must be in Meal Planner App

It should be remembered that the food industry is no longer limited to recipe information only. So you should consider the best features of the best food planner apps before developing your own.

Wide Collection of Recipes

As a food startup and organizer, your food plan can be the right choice for finding the best healthy foods. With beautiful menu options to search for, you are sure to be able to attract more attention from the crowd.

Plan Meals for the Week

This presents them in two ways, first, they can quickly access information and make the changes they want. And one more thing, users can avoid daily analysis of what to do today. By creating their own chart all in one roll, they can log their daily nutritional intake from a list.

No Internet Accessibilit

In today's era, the offline feature is indispensable, while people who travel are successfully experimenting with food or making their own. So it is very important to give them offline access to all the recipes they collect and store.

Other Useful Features That Your Meal Planner App Required

Let me know if you've been here before: You're on your way home, thinking about the delicious Cornish free-range chicken you'll be roasting in a minute. Then it hits you - the chicken is still in the freezer. Here comes the food, especially if you don't have a microwave! A good food planning app will have a built-in alarm to remind the user to get the chicken out in the morning. These can be set at the tap of a button, having instant reminders sound before you leave for work - or whenever the user wants them to.

Other important features that would make this project take off include:

You can choose your diet type like standard, pescetarian, vegetarian, vegan, paleo, etc., and exclude certain ingredients and allergens.
Learning videos and visuals to help new chefs learn. Cooking is difficult and requires experience and knowledge. While the best way to gain knowledge is through cooking, having a food planning app that guides users through recipes is a great way to make your app more useful. Heck, instructional videos are a great second-rate choice; in other words, the app itself may be free, but the user pays a subscription to access further options.
The food planning app helps you keep tabs on future meals and lets you record them anywhere. The ability to automatically order ingredients for delivery is a great feature that's just starting to gain traction. This can be done easily and cheaply with API integration with companies such as Instacart.
No need to worry about the number of ingredients or whether your diet includes the macronutrients you need.
Any food application must not only have a recipe search application, but it must also have the ability to filter results. There's no denying that there are lots of different dietary restrictions out there: Gluten-free, Nut-Free, Egg-Free, Vegan, Kosher, Jain Diet, Low Carb, Paleo, Vegetarian, Pescatarian - and the list goes on. If a meal planning app for Android or iOS sounds like your thing, be prepared to tackle this particular hurdle. Fortunately, this is a simple task for expert developers.
If you are not hungry enough for the planned snacks or you are having lunch out with some friends or family, you can skip and/or take note of other meals.
No need to search for healthy recipes on the internet, with this meal planning application you have a complete recipe application.
If you don't like how you feel, just swap it for something delicious!

These are by no means all the great features a meal planning app can offer. Everything from a connection to a local grocery store to automated pricing isn't covered here - but shouldn't be ignored.

Meal Planning App with a Goal

Meal planning for diabetes, athletes, weight loss, etc. is a complex process. In the case of weight loss and diabetes, this is an important process for being healthy. But planning meals that give you the highest levels of carbohydrates, calories, protein, vitamins and other nutrients to do is a difficult task.

That's where meal planning apps come into play. It is a simple process of developing a menu planner application that calculates the nutritional requirements of food. Even better, apps can be created to meet all kinds of different needs - or even combine several. After all, nobody said you could be a diabetic trying to lose weight and train for that triathlon! Nutritional calculations can be carried out in several different ways:

From a database of curated and stored recipes. Each recipe will contain nutrient groupings and the user can select different foods or set meals for one week automatically.
List of common ingredients with stored nutritional information. Users can pull ingredients from a selected list to create their own meal - and see if it will meet their dietary needs!
The manual input option is another way of approaching this. Users can enter a material with its nutritional value, stored.
As usual, we said, "why not all of the above?" The features are not mutually exclusive and all three add broad value to an application of this kind.

Is Planning Meals Easy without having much experience?

There are many challenges in meal planning. Weighing the potential risks and potential benefits of an ingredient can vary from person to person, so meal planning involves all but simple solutions. Time and knowledge are the two most common meal planning challenges.

Consider a dietician who works in a hospital. They plan meals for their patients with a full focus on their health conditions and preferences. In school, a Dietitian can use cycle menu planning in which the food offerings must also be nutritionally balanced.

When it comes to meal planning for many in health care or academic settings, timing appears to be a major hurdle. Making meal plans by hand can sometimes lead to mistakes. Hence, dietitians and nutritionists tend to work with meal planning software programs to be efficient and minimize errors when planning a client's diet.

Why is Meal Planning application Necessary for Dietitians?

Dietitians can help clients reach their health goals with additional guidance by offering meal plans. Meal packages can be personalized based on the health conditions and ethnic food preferences of their clients. Nutritionists and dietitians also often have difficulty adhering to client recommendations when planning meals by hand. A meal planning application can be an excellent solution to save time and improve compliance.

What Should be Considered When Selecting a Meal Planning Application?

The first and foremost criterion for choosing a meal planning application is that the platform should allow you to easily analyze, modify and adapt meal plans, nutritional recommendations, and recipes according to client needs.

Second, it is important to consider applications that have extensive nutritional databases and diet reference values that can help analyze many foods from around the world. The app also allows you to add an unlimited number of your own foods and recipes.

Third, the ease of customizing the meal plan according to ethnic tastes. Faster implementation of preference requests from select clients should be complemented by the app.

What Features Matter in Meal Planning Application?

There are a lot of essential features that actually matter in the meal planning application.

Extensive nutrient database
Quick search and preview nutrient function
Preview of reports on the nutrient breakdown and client education
Possibility to modify and compare meals with the set goals.

What affects the cost of developing an application?

The cost of developing a meal planning app doesn’t just depend on development time and hourly rates. This depends on a number of factors, including the difficulty of finding talent, the complexity of the product, and post-release support spending.

App Development Team

Depending on the requirements of the project, an offshore or local development team can be basic or expanded. The application development team typically includes a business analyst, solution architect, one or more developers (depending on the platform), a project manager, a quality assurance professional, and a UI / UX designer. And even if you’re going to save money on the user interface (no vivid colors, no menu with subtle features, no eye-filling animations, just the basics), you still need the right user experience. Therefore, you must employ a UI / UX designer at least part-time.

Technical Complexity

There could be millions of features that add technical complexity to the project. For example, we have built a platform for last-minute hotel reservations with a sophisticated search filtering algorithm linked to real-time discounts. When we built it, there was no filter integration available to use, so developing the algorithm on its own was the only option. This has led to additional development time and, as a result, higher application costs. Some other common examples of technically complex elements are:

Backend Development

You may be designing a large dynamic application for millions of users who exchange huge amounts of information in real-time and definitely want their data to be synchronized across platforms and stored in the cloud. In this case, you will definitely need a backend that can withstand heavy loads and run smoothly in any circumstances, which means more time spent designing and building a complex application architecture. In addition, you will need more programming languages to create the application backend, which means you will have to pay for more diverse professionals.

Niche Third-party Integrations

Plenty of third-party integration can increase your development speed, including vulnerability-related integrations. However, third-party integrations, especially niche integrations, sometimes provide inconsistent and complex documentation. This can give you more time to think about how to integrate them into your application. In addition, you may have to pay a fee for using the services.

In-app purchases

To meet the needs of the entire audience, business owners typically integrate as many payment options as possible. And that's a nice approach. The thing is, you need to be prepared to pay separately for each payment option you implement: in-app purchases, PayPal, Stripe, Braintree, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and more.

Hardware Components

Suppose you are working on a transportation application that uses an electronic logging device (ELD) to accurately track the driving hours of vehicles in your fleet. Or you can say you want to build a smart home system that relies on the tools of the Internet of Things. To do this, you need to buy or rent ELD or IoT devices for software testing, so you also need to consider the cost of this hardware.

Meal Planning Application Development Cos

The question remains open. How much does it cost to build an application?

Key findings suggest that application development costs range from just $ 5,000 to $ 500,000, according to up-to-date industry surveys. We created a detailed study of the cost of building the application, which lists estimates based on the characteristics of the widely used application, the complexity of the design, and the stages of software development. As a result, our conclusion supports the main findings regarding the cost of developing the application. The cost of developing a meal planning app like FoodPlanner will be between $ 5,000 and $ 15,000. Let’s take a look at splitting the function cost estimate of the Meal Planner app.