Your kitchen already knows what's for dinner.
RandPlates turns what you have into what you cook: pantry to plates, priced in rands, planned offline. No account. No server. No data costs.
Every door, one tap away
the full story on every screen — nothing dead-ends60 seconds to your first plan
The fast lane does it for real — you end on an actual priced plan, not a demo.
Add 3 things you have
Tap the starter chips — real ingredients go into your real pantry.
See what you can cook
The matcher ranks real dinners from your items, priced per plate.
Show me dinners →Plan the whole week
Fill the week inside your budget and get the priced shopping list.
Plan my week →Prices last verified: … · every price carries its date — see the honesty layer
The full guide
eight short walkthroughs — tap one openWatch one dinner happen
Real data, sample kitchen. Tap Next — the demo uses the same engine the app uses.
1 · Pantry — stock your kitchen
Record what's in your cupboards; each entry gets a verified R price attached.
Search anything you have
Type in English or vernacular — "pap", "wors", "morogo" all work. Search ignores accents and most typos.
Tap to add
Each suggestion shows how it's usually bought (a 1 kg bag, a dozen). One tap puts the pack in your pantry.
Adjust amounts
Hold + / − to set what you actually have. "Running low" marks itself automatically when recipes would empty it.
2 · Matcher — cook tonight
Match your current stock to recipes, see missing items and per-plate cost.
See your matches
Every recipe shows Match % (how much of it you already own) and the true cost per plate.
Read the missing list
Missing items are priced with real shelf prices — so "88% match" always comes with a rand amount to finish it.
Cook, and it's logged
"Cook" checks your stock first, spends the ingredients, and writes the cook into your history.
3 · Planner — the week, priced
Plan seven meals, each priced, and get an aisle-sorted grocery list ready.
Set a weekly budget
The planner fills 7 dinners inside it, using what you own first, buying the rest.
Swap any day
Don't like Tuesday? Tap the day and swap it for another match — the budget updates live.
Get the slip
The shopping list renders as a real till slip — aisle-sorted, priced, checkable, ready to paste into WhatsApp.
4 · Price Explorer — check before the shops
Search any item, see its dated R price — ✓ checked in-store or ≈ an honest estimate.
Search any ingredient
Real SA prices with how it's sold (pack, tin, bunch) and which store tier the price came from.
Trust the date, not the guess
Every price carries a freshness chip. Old prices say so — RandPlates never pretends a price is fresh.
5 · Recipe Decoder — paste any recipe
Turn any forwarded WhatsApp recipe into a priced ingredient list you can shop.
Paste from anywhere
A WhatsApp forward, a blog post, a photo caption. The decoder reads amounts, units and steps.
Fix anything
Extraction is a proposal, not a verdict — title, servings, ingredients and steps are all editable.
Save into your library
Saved recipes get prices, match % and cook buttons like any built-in one.
6 · Cook Log — your cooking history
See every meal you've cooked, with per-plate cost, streaks and averages.
Every cook, priced
Streaks, averages and what each plate really cost you — computed from your history, not typed in.
Reopen any meal
Tap a past cook to see its steps again — no digging through the matcher.
7 · Offline & install — the whole point
Run it offline; everything stays on your device, no server needed.
It works with no signal
Prices, recipes and your pantry live on your phone. Router off, dead zone, data finished — still cooking.
Install it like an app
Android: menu → "Install app". iPhone: Share → "Add to Home Screen". No store, no update fees.
8 · Settings & About — make it yours
Change preferences, read the story behind RandPlates and report any price errors.
Your data stays yours
Export, import or erase everything — one tap, one file. Nothing is uploaded anywhere.
Talk to the builder
Found a wrong price? The About panel takes price corrections and feedback directly.
Your pantry
The heart of the app. Add what you have; everything downstream re-computes.
Add ingredients
In your kitchen
The Matcher
Prices as of —
Tune your match
Max per plate
Any priceResults
Week Planner
The crown jewel: 7 dinners inside your budget, one shopping list.
Your Weekly Meal Plan, Priced Right
Set your budget, stock your pantry — RandPlates ranks a week of dinners by real cost per plate. Search a staple below, tap it to compare retailers, then cook it.
How RandPlates prices your week
Every ingredient here carries a price — nothing is left blank. Each price is honestly tiered: ✓ checked means a person verified it against the store — on the shelf, at the till, or on the retailer's own app; ≈ estimate means it was researched from Checkers, Pick n Pay, Shoprite and comparable products, and it's marked as an estimate until someone checks it in-store. The date appears next to every price, and anything older than a month is marked old. We don't pull live feeds, so prices may shift — spot a wrong one and it gets re-verified.
You set the budget. We do the maths. Enter what's in your pantry and what you can spend this week, and RandPlates shows you what you can cook — ranked by ingredient overlap and real cost per plate. It's built as a cheap meal plan South Africa can actually use: offline, fast, no sign-up. You get seven days of meals that stay inside your budget, plus one consolidated shopping list to take to the spaza or supermarket.
What to cook with pap you already have
Your pap, rice, or morogo should lead the plan, not sit at the back. The engine checks what you already have and pushes those recipes to the top, so you use what's in your kitchen first. You'll see how much of each recipe you already cover, what's still missing, and the cost per plate in Rands and cents, lined up so you can compare. Less waste, more of your staples doing the work.
R500 grocery list or R400 — built for your budget
Whether you're planning a R500 grocery list or a tight grocery list for R400, you need numbers that match the till slip. RandPlates builds budget meals for a week South Africa can shop for — one list, total cost, priced from real local retailers. Every ingredient shows quantity and price, every meal shows cost per plate. If a plan goes over, it tells you and shows the next best fit inside your budget.
Every ingredient priced: ✓ checked in-store or ≈ researched estimate — each row shows its own date and source.
Cook Log
Streaks, badges and level progression — the Fan Zone DNA, applied to real cooking.
Decoder Lab
Paste a TikTok caption or recipe text — the deterministic parser drafts a structured recipe. Unresolved lines go to a review queue before saving.
Paste a caption. We’ll turn it into rands and plates.
How the Decoder Lab works
What this does
Paste a messy TikTok caption, get a proper recipe draft with real rands per plate. Same caption will always give you the same draft — no AI, no guessing, just the same rules every time.
The review queue
If a line is vague — “a pinch”, a promo, a typo — it won’t guess. It moves that line to your review queue so you can fix it. Nothing dodgy auto-saves; that’s how we keep your plates honest.
Where the data lives
Everything lives on your phone. No account, no server, no one else seeing your pantry. Even offline, it still works.
What “unpriced” means
Unpriced just means we don’t have a checked shop price for that line yet. The recipe still saves, that line just counts as R0 for now. When the registry gets a real price, your plates update.
Settings & About
Your setup for your kitchen. Budget defaults, pantry, and your data — all stays on this phone.
Your kitchen profile
Feeds the Planner's plate counts and every recipe card's default cook size.
Servings set the Planner's plates and every recipe card's default cook size. Leave blank to always match people in the house.
Budget defaults
The weekly budget sets the Matcher's "money left" line and the Planner's dial. The ceiling caps what any single plate may cost. Change either and both views re-rank on the spot.
Look & feel
Every theme restyles colors, fonts and shapes end to end. A theme's fonts download once when you're online; colors always work offline.
Your data — your kitchen stays in your kitchen
Your pantry, cook log, and meal plans live only in this device's IndexedDB. Nothing leaves your phone. We don't send it to any server.
Prices come from the app's public data files. No accounts. No logins. No cookies. No cross-site tracking.
We do count one thing: anonymous, aggregate usage — how many times the app opens, how many meals get planned. No names, no device IDs. Cookieless beacon. We tell you plainly because that honesty is part of the deal.
Your data is yours. Export it, import it, delete it — whenever you want.
Checking storage…
Import merges: for every record the newer version wins, so restoring an old backup never overwrites newer cooking. Your kitchen lives only on this device — export a backup before uninstalling the app or clearing browser data.
Erase just one thing
Each erase asks first and only touches that one collection.
About RandPlates — built in public
RandPlates is a free, offline-first dinner planner for South African kitchens. You tell it what's in your pantry and what you can spend; it ranks what you can cook tonight and plans a priced week. No account, no server — everything stays on your phone.
How prices are researched: real retailer prices captured in-store and cross-checked online (Checkers, PnP, Shoprite) — never AI guesses. Every price carries an honesty tier: ✓ checked (verified in a real store) or ≈ estimate (researched, not yet in-store verified). It's on the card, so you always know what you're trusting.
Who builds it: I'm a final-year engineering student who saw South African kitchens scrambling for affordable meals. I used AI to stitch RandPlates together — but every price comes from a real till slip, a shelf check, the retailer's own app, or a clearly-marked estimate. Never an AI guess. No ads, no sign-up, no tracking — just your kitchen, your data.
This is a build-in-public project — the wins and the regressions get posted as they happen.
Contact
Feedback, support, corrections — or spot a wrong price? Tell me and I'll re-verify it.
Price data
Prices last verified: … · file
version …
Real retailer prices, no AI guesses. Browse every line in the
Price Explorer.
Your usage — Pulse
Aggregate counters kept on this phone only — nothing is sent anywhere.
Matcher runs: 0 · weekly plans generated: 0 · meals cooked: 0 · recipes decoded: 0
Install
Install RandPlates from your browser menu ("Add to Home Screen") for offline, in-aisle use.
RandPlates is budget-first and local-first. You add what you have and what you can spend. We rank recipes by what you already have and real ZAR cost per plate — R7.16, not "affordable" — then plan your week inside your budget and give you one priced till slip to shop.
Built by Tadiwanashe Chopamba — a student engineer who builds AI-native products in public and documents the whole journey on LinkedIn. RandPlates is the successor to Pitch26 · v1.0.0.