BigOven Recipes & Meal Planner

I specifically use this for Keto/Low Carb diet planning and I love it. I’m sure it works just as well with other plans as well. As I chose Low Carb preference, everyday the home page shows new recommended Low Carb recipes for me. Love that. With the pro I can organize all my recipes just how I want them. I can create my own recipes or make others Keto. I love that I can control exactly what ingredient it is reading to give me correct nutritional amounts. Love the meal planning. I took off a star because the recipe import feature doesn’t work very well. Mostly from Wordpress sites, which most bloggers use these days. They need to develop a wordpress plugin like Yummly did to make it easy for us to post to BigOven and it would also promote their app. I just did not like Yummly, so I manually do most recipes. Fortunately, most recipes I find are already in Big Oven! This thing does not lack for choices in low carb / Keto recipes. It’s truly mind boggling. I could not see where we could link one recipe into another and if you could add it’s nutritionals. For example, Eggs Benedict, would love to incorporate or at the least link to my low carb hollandaise sauce. Now it could be here but I haven’t figured it out yet! Anyway, I have tried all the apps on the market and this really is the best one I have come across. The most recipes, nutritionals, meal planning, grocery list, organization.

This app seems like a dream come true in a lot of ways – I got it because I wanted to be able to add my recipes from my books to a digital format. But when you upgrade to the pro membership, you have to purchase recipe scans, which quickly run out. Then you have to buy more. A lot of people i’ve already complained about this, so whatever. That’s not my main issue anyway. This app is full of glitches. If you rate a recipe, and then change your mind about how you feel about that recipe, if you try to change the rating, the app simply shuts down. It seems that you can’t alter anything, once you finalize it. You can’t change your own recipes, even if you make an error. And you can’t remove recipes from a collection- if you try to, then it deletes ALL of the recipes in that collection. I can’t give up on this app, because I’m already too invested in it. It has all of my recipes in it. It would be way too troublesome to try and switch to a different app, but I am sick and tired of the glitches. I’m tired of paying money every month for this app, when there are so many problems with it. Why won’t people fix it?? I know I’m not the only person complaining about these things. But it seems like the people who made this app just don’t care. They’ve got you by the balls, and they know it.

I use this app almost every week to plan meals for the week, and it automatically builds my grocery list which I can then open at the store and check items off the list as we go through the store. I upload recipes from the internet that I like, and use the search capabilities to get recipe ideas. The support is good too. I wish the iPhone app grocery list made it a little harder to check things off. I often inadvertently mark something off the list just by scrolling down the list using my thumb on the side of the screen. It has an undo button but when I’m at the store I dont always notice it until I’ve left the store and don’t have everything on my list. It should have a confirm button or some second step before crossing it off the list. Thanks!

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Using the app was a bit clunky at first because some of the features were not available on the basic version, so you had to upgrade to the pro which I did not want to do before extensively testing this app. A lot of my questions to the customer service were answered by simply suggesting that I allow them to make the changes for me on their end, which is a bit strange given the fact that I want to be able to make all of my own changes. The customer service team did not seem at all concerned with my frustration, I was unable to link the Web app with the mobile app and that once again was tackled with a “why don’t you do it this way“ and so after a few hiccups I decided that I wasn’t going to mess around with it anymore. And once again The customer service department did not seem to care that I was going to look for a different app and not continue to use this one. So I cannot recommend this app to anyone for that reason, I recommend that you guys find an alternative.

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A lot of resources has gone into the making of this app and service. I wanted an app specifically designed for scanning and cataloging recipes. Unfortunately, after signing up for the pro service to use the 30 day trial, the app/service didn't do what I wanted. You are limited in the number of recipes you can scan unless you pay more. And if you want to add community recipes to your own book, you can't edit them in any way. I attempted to cancel my subscription via their support center (I was less than 30 days into the trial) but I still got charged for the full pro service. After filing a second ticket, I still have gotten no response to either request. The service and app might have a lot of resources put into their importing algorithms and community contributions, but their support center is in dire need of help. I cannot recommend Big Oven to people.