WFD vs eMeals: easy to start, hard to cancel

Disclosure first: we make What's For Dinner?! (WFD). eMeals is one of the longest running meal planning services around: dietitians build the weekly plans, the plans feed grocery pickup at Walmart or Kroger, and you pay a subscription for the service. Plenty of subscribers like the convenience, and its iOS rating is healthy.

Its complaint record tells a more specific story, and it is worth reading before you hand over a card number. The figures below come from public records as of this writing; what we make of them is our view.

Where the complaints cluster

On Google Play, eMeals sits at 3.9 stars, the weakest score among the big meal planners. But the sharper record is at the Better Business Bureau: around 150 complaints in the last three years, and fully half of them about billing rather than the product.

The complaints describe a pattern. One filed in May 2026 walks through the cancellation flow: you have to click cancel across "numerous screens", with small greyed out buttons, and at the end the customer was left genuinely unsure whether the cancellation had taken. Others describe free trials that converted to charges of $64.94 despite the customer saying they cancelled in time, a cancellation made after one week that was billed anyway, and annual renewals of $99 and more landing without a reminder email. One App Store reviewer put it plainly: no friendly heads up that the renewal was coming, just the charge.

To be fair to eMeals, some of these cases end in refunds, and the product complaints, app glitches and usability gripes, are a small minority of the record. The consistent theme is that people found it much easier to become a customer than to stop being one.

Two models, not two feature lists

There is a product difference underneath the billing one. eMeals is a push model: experts decide your week and send it to you. That solves the planning labour, but it decides for your household rather than with it. The dietitian does not know that your partner will veto the Tuesday fish, and when they do, you are back in the "what do you want, I don't mind" loop the subscription was supposed to end.

WFD starts from the belief that the deciding is the part worth fixing, and that it should be shared. Everyone in the household swipes on meals on their own phone. When two of you say yes to the same meal, that is dinner, matched rather than assigned. Matches build the weekly plan, the plan builds the shopping list, and nobody is eating a stranger's idea of their week. The plan is then yours to edit, swap, lock and shop from, with a step-by-step cook mode at the end of it (a week inside it). And it does not depend on everyone taking part: the plan builds from whoever has swiped, so the partner who vetoes the Tuesday fish but never opens the app blocks nothing (how that works).

The billing difference is structural

WFD is free to download and free to use: swiping, matching and the weekly plan cost nothing, with no time limit. Full Access is one subscription, with a 3-day free trial, and it is bought through Apple or Google rather than through us. That distinction matters more than it sounds: store billing means the renewal reminders, the payment handling and the cancel button all live in your App Store or Google Play account, run by Apple and Google's rules. Cancelling is two taps on a screen that belongs to your store, and its design belongs to Apple or Google rather than to any app developer. There is no phone line to call and no sequence of screens to click through, because we never touch your card at all.

A dinner app sits inside your family's routine and your bank statement, week after week. Both of those are places where boring and predictable is the entire job. That is the standard WFD is built to, and if the nightly deciding is the part your household actually struggles with, here is how the matching works. If eMeals overhauls its cancellation flow, tell us and this post gets updated.