Households: Plan and Shop Together

Lyfify now has Households. Share a meal plan and a grocery list with the people you live with, choose exactly what you share, and keep your personal data yours. Plus a long list of upgrades that came with it.

Written by Simon Gravgaard · 5 min read

Sep 26, 2026

Why households

Lyfify exists to take some of the mental load out of running a home. But until now, every account was an island. If two of you cooked from Lyfify, you each had your own plan and your own list, and someone still had to text "did you already buy milk?"

Households fix that. Invite the people you live with, and you get one shared space for meals and shopping. Your personal data stays exactly where it is.

This is the biggest thing I have built for Lyfify so far. It touched almost every part of the app, so the rest of this post covers the other upgrades that came along with it.

How it works

A household is a separate space that sits next to your personal one. The switcher in the header flips all of Lyfify between Personal and Household. Same screens, same features, different data. The household's name and colour sit in the header, so you always know which space you are in.

• Create one from Settings → Household. Give it a name and a colour.
• Invite people with a link. Each link works once and expires after 7 days. Lyfify can email it for you, or you can send it yourself.
• Members see display names only, never each other's email addresses.
• One household per person, with one owner. The owner handles invites, members and deleting the household. Everyone else can plan, cook and shop just like the owner.

A household holds up to 2 people on Free and Basic, 5 on Plus and 10 on Max. See Pricing for the rest of what each plan includes.

You choose what you share

Joining a household never pulls in your library. Everything you already have stays private until you share it.

• Share a recipe from the ribbon on its card, or from the recipe page.
• Share a collection, and every recipe in it is shared too. Add a recipe to a shared collection and it comes along. Take it out and it goes back to private, unless you shared it on its own.
• Household recipes belong to the household, and any member can edit them. A member's shared recipe stays theirs. Others can cook from it and plan with it, but only its owner can change it.
• Recipes in Household view say whose they are, and a filter shows just the shared ones.

If unsharing something would pull a recipe out of meals the household has planned, Lyfify asks first. If you go ahead, those meals turn into notes instead of quietly disappearing.

One meal plan, one grocery list

The household gets its own meal plan. Everyone can plan at the same time without overwriting each other.

• Who's eating is set per meal. It defaults to everyone, and you can pick just the people eating that day. Meal cards show their faces.
• Servings follow who's eating, and you can still change them after.
• Planning from your own recipes is part of the picker. Choosing one of your private recipes shares it, and Lyfify tells you so.
• Meal reminders have their own switch for household meals, and only fire for meals that include you.
• Favourites stay yours, but on shared recipes you can see who else loves them.

The grocery list is built from the plan, and every tick is its own small record. Two of you can shop at once, in different aisles or different shops, and nobody's ticks get lost.

Leaving, and what happens to your recipes

When you leave, Lyfify asks two questions. Should the household keep your recipes that are in its plan? And would you like copies of the recipes that were shared with you? Nothing gets deleted silently. Meals that lose their recipe become notes, so the plan still makes sense.

If the owner deletes the household, its data is destroyed for good. Members' own recipes are not touched.

Storage and AI credits

• Storage: the household's data counts toward the owner's plan, and Storage shows the split between personal and household.
• AI credits: everyone pays from their own plan by default. On any paid plan, the owner can turn on Members can use my AI credits. Members use their own credits first, then the owner's, anywhere in Lyfify.

Privacy

Household data is encrypted at rest on Lyfify's servers with its own household key, the same way your personal data is. It is not end-to-end encrypted, and I would rather say that plainly. The Privacy Policy has the full details, including what other members can see.

Everything else in this update

Households needed changes under the hood, and a lot of smaller things got better along the way.

Meal plans and groceries

• Meal plans are now stored one meal at a time. You won't notice anything, except that edits on two devices no longer fight.
• The grocery list is worked out from your plan and what you've done, instead of being stored as one big list. Existing lists and plans converted automatically.
• Undo on the grocery list now removes exactly the purchase you meant to undo.
• Backups include your grocery ticks and custom items.

Recipes and collections

• Quick Add on collections. Pick tags, meal types, effort and cook time, and add every matching recipe in one go.
• Recipe rows in lists, search and the meal pickers now share one design, with cleaner spacing and controls.

Settings and sync

• Settings changed on two devices at once now merge, instead of the newest change winning.
• Sync updates reach every device more reliably, even after a burst of changes.
• Settings got a tidier layout, with a Help Center group that includes the Privacy Policy and Terms.

Account

• The header shows your name and initial, so you can see which account you're signed in with at a glance.
• Fixed a case where Continue with Google could land on a Page Not Found screen.

Try it

Open Settings → Household, create a household, and send an invite to someone you cook with. If something feels off, or you have an idea for what households should do next, email me at [email protected]. I read everything!