How to use InventoryImp on the Free plan

The Free plan is the whole app for running your kitchen: what you have, where it is, what to cook and what to buy. Nothing here has a time limit. This is a tour of what's included and where each thing lives.

Add your food

Go to Inventory and use Add items. On the Free plan you can:

• Scan a barcode with your phone's camera. InventoryImp looks the product up and fills in the name, brand and size. On a computer, a USB or Bluetooth barcode scanner works too.
• Search for a product by name, or Type it in yourself.
• Import a CSV file from a spreadsheet or another app, or Paste a list that you tidied up with your own AI (see Have your own AI? Here's how to use it).

Each item can have a quantity, a best-by date, a place, a low-stock level and a storage goal. Open any item to fix its details. If you're in a household, choose Add to: Household or Just me - personal items are never shown to anyone else.

Say where things live

• Inventory → Places: set up your pantry, fridge, freezer, cupboards and their shelves once. Then just pick them from the Location list when you add food. Rename or remove a place and the food filed there moves with it.
• Inventory → Storage shows everything shelf by shelf, with what to use first at the top.
• Inventory → Shelf labels prints a QR code for a shelf. Scan it to see what should be there, check it, or put things away by scanning each one.
• Inventory → Item labels prints labels for jars, buckets and freezer bags, with the batch date.

Use it up before it goes off

• The dashboard shows what's expired, expiring this week and running low.
• Tap the minus button on an item when you use some. Set a Storage goal (like a 3-month supply) and the Storage page shows how close you are.
• Turn on email reminders in Account → Notifications: food expiring within 3 days, items running low, ingredients missing for this week's meals, and a monthly storage check.

Recipes

• Recipes: add one by hand, import one from a link (most recipe sites work for free), or Search the web. You can also bring in a recipe your own AI wrote out (the Use your own AI - free tab).
• What can I make? matches recipes against what you have, and Find recipes searches by ingredient. Add whatever's missing to your grocery list in one tap.
• Public recipes from other cooks show up too, and you can share your own.
• Start cooking shows one step at a time in big type, with timers. On the website, turn on Hands-free and it reads each step aloud and listens for "next".

Plan your meals

• Meal plan: drag a recipe onto a day, or tap a day to pick one.
• Don't know the day yet? Put it in Meals to plan and drag it onto a day later.
• Planning a meal sets its ingredients aside from your inventory, so you see what you're short on. One tap adds the missing items to the grocery list.
• Kitchen view keeps today's meals up on a tablet, and Account → Meal plan in your calendar puts your meals in Google, Apple or Outlook calendar.

The grocery list

• Grocery list: type items in, paste a whole list, or add them from recipes, the meal plan and low-stock items.
• Add the stores you shop at and sort items by store. Scan as you shop checks items off as they go in the cart, and Put away what you bought adds them to your inventory.
• In a household, everyone shares one list - and you also get your own My list.

Share with your household

Account → Household: make an invite code and share it. Housemates share the household's food, grocery list and meal plan, and your recipes if you turn on Share my recipes. You can be in more than one household, switch between them at the top of the Inventory, Grocery list and Meal plan pages, and merge two households when people move in together.

On your phone

• Get the app from Google Play (the iPhone app is coming), or add the website to your home screen.
• The Android app has home screen widgets for the grocery list, today's meals and food to use soon: Account → Phone widgets.

Your data

Account lets you download everything as a file, or delete your account and everything in it. You can also use InventoryImp from your own Claude or ChatGPT, free - see Have your own AI? Here's how to use it.

What the Home plan adds

The Home plan does the typing for you with AI - receipts, photos, Say it, recipe reading and more - and has no ads. See How to use the Home plan.