Aioli vs PlateJoy: what to use now that PlateJoy is gone

PlateJoy is gone. The app was pulled from the Play Store in March 2025, and the service officially shut down in July 2025, four years after parent company RVO Health acquired it from founder Christina Bognet. The domain no longer resolves. Customer support had been quiet long before that.

If you used PlateJoy and you’re looking for somewhere to go, that’s the question this post tries to answer. Aioli is one option, but it isn’t a one-to-one replacement, and a few of the things PlateJoy did don’t have an obvious successor at all.

What PlateJoy did well

Worth saying clearly: PlateJoy was a serious product. The 50-question intake was unusual — most meal planners ask about diet and allergies and stop. PlateJoy asked about kitchen equipment, cooking skill, schedule, family routines, and managed health conditions. That depth fed plans that genuinely felt personal.

It supported fourteen-plus diet types, including ones most apps skip — low-FODMAP, diabetic-friendly, renal, Mediterranean. The recipe library was nutritionist-designed, not crowdsourced or AI-generated. And the CDC-recognized Diabetes Prevention Program helped over twenty thousand people manage prediabetes. That’s a clinical credential most meal planners don’t have.

If you used PlateJoy for any of those things specifically — the medical-grade dietary management, the clinical program, the dietitian-vetted recipes — Aioli is not a replacement. Be honest with yourself about what you needed.

Who Aioli is for

Aioli is consumer meal planning. The App Store positions it as a personal AI meal planner and that’s accurate. You set up a profile — family size, days, meals per day, allergens, cuisine preferences, dietary type, how adventurous you’re feeling — and Aioli generates the week with recipes and step-by-step instructions, then aggregates the shopping list.

It’s iOS only as of v1.1. Free tier covers a 3-day plan and one generation per day. Premium adds 7-day plans, unlimited generations, food images, and visible price estimates per item.

What it isn’t: a substitute for a registered dietitian. The dietary preferences are real — vegetarian, vegan, keto, gluten-free, dairy-free, allergen filters — but an AI-generated recipe is not the same as a recipe vetted by a nutritionist for a managed condition. If you have prediabetes, kidney disease, or any condition where the meal plan affects health outcomes, see a dietitian and use a tool credentialed for it.

Where Aioli fits as a PlateJoy alternative

If your reason for using PlateJoy was “I don’t want to think about dinner” — not “I’m managing a condition” — Aioli is in scope. The personalization isn’t fifty questions deep, but the eight axes (family size, days, meals, diet, allergens, location, cuisine, adventurousness) cover most of what determined PlateJoy plans for healthy users.

It’s also lighter to set up. PlateJoy’s intake was famously thorough; that was a feature for some users and a barrier for others. Aioli’s onboarding is closer to a couple of minutes than a quarter-hour.

If you were using PlateJoy for general weekly planning and the dietitian angle was a nice-to-have rather than a requirement, Aioli covers the everyday case.

Where Aioli doesn’t fit

If you used PlateJoy for the medical or clinical depth, Aioli isn’t the right tool. Specifically:

You’re managing a condition where diet is part of treatment — diabetes, kidney disease, celiac, severe IBS, eating disorder recovery. Aioli’s allergen filtering helps with avoidance, but plans aren’t reviewed by a registered dietitian.

You need a low-FODMAP, renal, or other prescribed diet specifically. Aioli supports common dietary types but not the clinical-grade subset PlateJoy had.

You’re on Android. Aioli is iOS only.

You valued the human nutrition coach element. Aioli doesn’t have that. The model is “AI generates plans based on your profile” — full stop.

For these cases, the honest pointer is your dietitian, or a service explicitly built around managed conditions. There isn’t a clean drop-in recommendation, and pretending there is wouldn’t help you.

The honest verdict

PlateJoy worked because it took meal planning seriously enough to add a clinical layer. Most apps in the category — including Aioli — don’t have that, and aren’t trying to.

If you used PlateJoy to answer “what’s for dinner” and the rest was secondary: Aioli is worth a try. The free tier gives you three days of planning without a card on file, and you’ll know within a week or two whether it works for your household.

If you used PlateJoy because the dietitian and the program mattered: don’t substitute Aioli. See a dietitian directly, or look for a tool that explicitly states clinical credentialing — that’s the part of PlateJoy’s value that’s actually gone, and we won’t pretend otherwise.

Aioli is good at what it does. It isn’t trying to be everything PlateJoy was. For some readers, the honest answer is “neither — go talk to a professional,” and that’s fine too.