Product & apps
WFD vs SideChef: who is the customer?
SideChef's app last shipped an update in March 2025, while its business pages sell cart value to brands. Reviewers describe paywalls, lost accounts and ignored diet filters. WFD answers to the household, and no one else.
Disclosure first: we make What's For Dinner?! (WFD). SideChef is one of the bigger names in cooking apps: around eighteen thousand step-by-step recipes with photos, timers and voice guidance, grocery integrations with Walmart, Instacart, Amazon Fresh and Target, and partnerships with nearly every large appliance maker. It has been around since 2014 and passed a million Android installs.
Its reviews tell a story that the feature list does not, and we would read them before trusting any app, ours included, with a weekly routine. Everything quoted below is public and dated; the story we see in it is our opinion.
What the reviews describe
Start with the money asked of you. An App Store reviewer wrote back in 2020 that the app "forces premium content into your feed, without the option to hide it unless you pay an annual amount of $49.99." The pricing has held: the Play listing still offers premium at $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year today.
For one group of users the pricing felt personal. SideChef built and operated the app for the popular Budget Bytes recipe blog, then shut that app down in July 2023 and pointed its users at SideChef instead, with saved recipes not transferring. People who had bought the Budget Bytes app outright found themselves facing a subscription; a December 2023 review reads, "I originally paid for this app while it was BudgetBytes. It then changed to SideChef and now charges for a premium membership." SideChef's own termination notice confirms that users who had signed in with Facebook, Google or Apple had to re-register from scratch and that personal data was deleted. As late as February 2026, a reviewer describes still being locked out: no matter how many password resets, the app will not recognise the account.
The product itself draws a specific complaint that matters a lot in a food app, and it spans years of reviews: the personalisation does not hold. A 2018 reviewer set gluten free, grain free, vegetarian and sugar free filters and was recommended wheat pastries, wheat pasta and meat dishes. A 2019 reviewer set dairy free and low carb, and the first recommendation was cheesy buffalo wings. For anyone filtering for an allergy rather than a preference, that gap is serious.
The shopping side has its own reports: a review from March 2026 describes ingredients that "couldn't" be added to a Walmart cart, failing with try-again errors even after reinstalling.
And through all of this, at the time of writing, the app's most recent update on either store is from March 2025. The reviews kept arriving. The releases stopped.
Follow the money
None of this is mysterious once you look at who pays SideChef. Its funding has come substantially from appliance makers: a six million dollar Series B from LG, with AB Electrolux and V-ZUG among its investors. Its business pages pitch brands and retailers, not cooks, advertising retail media campaigns, shoppable recipe technology, and results like "$260M Cart Value generated to date." The same page lists its clients: eleven appliance brands, six retailers, and packaged-food giants.
That is a legitimate business. But as we read it, the person cooking dinner stops being the customer and becomes the audience being delivered. In our view, the reviews above read like the natural result: premium pushed into the feed, a catalogue built for basket size, and a consumer app that can sit unchanged for over a year because the revenue lives elsewhere.
Built for the people holding the forks
WFD has one customer: the household using it. There is no brand campaign to serve, no cart value target, and no appliance ecosystem to feed. The business model is a single optional subscription, and the free app stays genuinely usable forever.
The point of the app is different too. SideChef assumes you already know what you are cooking and guides you through it, solo. WFD exists for the step before that, the one that causes the nightly argument: everyone in the household swipes on meals on their own phone, a mutual match decides dinner, matches build a weekly plan everyone can see, and the plan builds one shared shopping list that adapts when the week changes. The catalogue stays small enough for humans to check every meal, because a dinner app earns trust by being right, week after week. Built in the UK, by a couple, for couples and families.
| What's For Dinner?! (WFD) | SideChef | |
|---|---|---|
| How dinner gets decided | Everyone swipes, a mutual match decides | You browse and pick, alone |
| Household mode | The whole product: shared plan, shared list, own accounts | None; single-user planner |
| Diet preferences | Small human-checked catalogue | Reviews describe filters being ignored |
| Who else is a customer | No one | Brands, retailers and appliance makers, per its own business pages |
| App updates | Actively developed | Last store update March 2025, at the time of writing |
If a guided cooking mode with appliance control is genuinely the thing your kitchen is missing, SideChef is the app built around that idea. If what your household is missing is an answer to "what do you want?", that is the problem WFD was built to end, and here is how the matching works. And if SideChef ships an update that changes any of this, tell us and we will revise it.