A free AI weekly meal planner built by a French developer: the Facebook post got only 3 likes, and a month later 5,500 households a week were using it

Popotam is a weekly meal-planning tool built by Jérémy Pierre, an indie developer from Clermont-Ferrand, working alone in French. Tell it how many people you're feeding, what they won't eat and how much time you have, and it plans a week of lunches and dinners, then gives you a shopping list sorted by supermarket aisle. It's completely free, requires no sign-up, has no ads, and has no partnership with any supermarket. It has only a little over two thousand installs on Google Play; the real center of gravity is the web. It isn't making money and doesn't plan to. What's worth watching is how one person, in a category where everyone charges, held a position with "truly free" plus 400+ web pages. Below: how it got started, who's competing, and what you can take away.

A post nobody responded to

On Oct 2026, 2 at 5:06 pm, Jérémy Pierre posted a long message in "La cuisine, c'est la vie !", a French cooking Facebook group with 29.1k members:

"Hi 🙂 I built an app to plan my own meals, shopping and rotating recipes! I hope this post isn't an imposition, it's just shared for free, and I'll delete it if you'd prefer... It's called Popotam, and it's free. You tell it how many people are eating, what they don't eat and how much time you have, and it plans your whole week... or a whole month."

It ends with "completely free, no account needed" and "I'm building this on my own for fun, it's not finished, and I'll keep adding features". By Nov 6, the post had 3 reactions and 1 comments, one of which was him adding the website link (Facebook group post page, 11-06).

Yet over the same period, the "meal-weather" page on popotam.fr said: "This week, 5,523 households" were using it to plan meals. The site's public ledger showed 15,921 weekly plans saved on the web, with users swapping dishes 23,631 times (popotam.fr/transparence, 11-06). People didn't come from that post.

What it is

Open popotam.fr and the first line on the homepage reads "Your week's meals, and the shopping list that follows them", with a bold line below: "No account, no brainpower needed." Three steps: answer a few questions (household size, allergies, favourite foods, budget), and it picks a week from 279 pre-priced recipes, then gives you a shopping list grouped by aisle with rough prices, ticking items off in the store. Don't like a dish? Tap to swap it for another.

A few features are deeper than this size would suggest:

• Batch cooking: cook a whole week's food on Sunday afternoon. It builds minute-by-minute schedules based on how many burners you have, whether you have an oven, and whether you have a Cookeo multicooker: "14:00 wash, peel, chop; 14:24 into the oven at 180°C for 30 minutes... 15:45 five dishes done". Shelf life follows official food-safety guidelines.
• Grandma's recipes: photograph a handwritten recipe card, or record her reading it aloud, and it turns it into a recipe you can slot into the weekly plan. "Three cups of flour" is converted automatically to 190 g, with the original text kept alongside. The homepage example is "Mamie Jeanne's yogurt cake", with a one-minute audio clip.
• Bring your own AI: if you don't want its built-in generation, it gives you a prompt to paste into your own ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude, and you paste the reply back to turn it into a plan and list.
• Autopilot: the next week is planned automatically every night. The meal-weather page says 74% of the households it counted this week turned this on.

The Play version is the website in an Android wrapper. The Google Play buttons on the site all carry the tracking tag utm_source=popotam.fr, suggesting most Play installs were sent over from the web.

How big it really is

The bar for the free chart in French food and drink is low: around a hundred installs a day gets you to #30. That's too small to call it "taking off." A more accurate description is that it's just getting started, with steady momentum. The web version went live around mid-September (the French startup directory Les Pépites Tech already had an entry for it on Sep 20, where the author wrote that it had "over three thousand meal plans in a few weeks"). The Play version shows a listing date of Oct 10, but a post from Oct 2 already says "it's on Play too," so the store date was probably reset.

Where do the 5,000 households come from?

Mostly search, *inferred*. Its sitemap has 418 pages, roughly in four groups:

• Comparisons: "Popotam or Jow," "Popotam or Romi: is a weekly menu worth paying for?", Pimzi and Mealime comparisons, "five free weekly menu apps";
• Alternative pages: URLs like /alternatives/pimzi, targeting searches for "Pimzi alternative";
• Use-case pages: "weekly menu under 50 €," "printable weekly planner," "clear out the fridge," "what to cook tonight";
• Holidays and seasons: a Christmas menu page for 51, a Halloween page for 49, an autumn recipe page for 35, plus a recipe library of 1,056 dishes.

Search "popotam planning repas gratuit sans compte" (free meal planning, no account), and nearly the top dozen results are its own pages. Competitors help too: Citron, which does recipe import, listed Popotam as a free alternative in an Oct 28 "Pimzi review." Download sites like AlternativeTo and Softonic also picked it up automatically.

There's some posting, but not much. Besides the Facebook post above, it also posted on Reddit's r/batchcooking: "a free app that plans your week's meals and batch-cooking schedule (no ads, no account)." The date and engagement aren't visible *unverified*.

Channels it doesn't use: No press coverage. Nobody has mentioned it on X in nearly 60 days. Searching "popotam" on TikTok returns hippo meme videos (popotam sounds like "hippopotamus" in French), which have nothing to do with it. The install curve is flat, not like someone is running ads.

Mealime's shutdown didn't help much. The long-running US meal-planning app Mealime was shut down by Albertsons in Oct 21, and Popotam quickly published a Mealime comparison page and recipe import. But daily Play installs didn't jump around Oct 21, and Mealime's users are mostly English-speaking, so the effect on Popotam was small.

Why people come, and why they stay

"Truly free" is rare in this category in France. Pimzi, which budgets around supermarket prices, costs 49.99 € a year or 12.99 € a month. Romi, Basta (which specializes in batch cooking), and the new Yuma are all paid. Jow is free, but it earns commissions by putting ingredients into carts at partner supermarkets with one tap. Popotam's LinkedIn bio says: "No partner stores. Everyone buys wherever they want, the market, the corner butcher, anywhere." For people searching "free weekly menu" or "Pimzi alternative," that's exactly the answer they want.

AI is cheap enough for one person to afford. The transparency page lists costs line by line: the AI cost of generating a week's menu is 0.23 cents. Over the last 30 days, AI spending totaled 64.56 €, plus 20 € for servers and the Apple developer fee, for roughly 111 € a month across the whole site. Keeping it free depends on this year's round of model price cuts *inferred*. The same page also says "this spending is growing": three weeks ago AI cost 15.41 € in a week, and the most recent week it was 19.01 €.

Retention is automatic. 7,868 weekly plans were generated automatically overnight, close to the 7,222 that users generated by tapping "generate" themselves. So half of the usage requires the user to do nothing after opening the app.

Frequent updates, and each one is a new page. Over the two weeks from Oct 22 to Nov 5, it shipped 9 batches of updates: dinner-party menus, Christmas, reusing lunch and dinner, calorie targets, grocery prices across countries, and photo and voice import of family recipes. Each batch can become a new landing page.

The data page is a hook for media *inferred*. The Barometer publishes weekly what French households are planning: a weekly budget of 25 € per person, about 1.59 € per meal, 47% of meals are vegetarian (though only 7% of households are vegetarian), and the most-planned dish is lentils with rice. Numbers like these are easy for bloggers and journalists to cite, but nobody has yet.

Who it's competing with

This table tells two things. First, the French weekly-menu slot is already crowded: in October alone, Piatto and Yuma appeared as similar products, both growing faster than Popotam and both charging. Second, Popotam is the only one holding the "free" position, and a free position can only be held by one player, and it also means no revenue.

How many people know about it

Very little. No press coverage, 0 posts on X, 0 videos on TikTok. Revenue is public, but it's only 86 € in donations, which doesn't attract copycats. So far it has only shown up in a few French cooking groups, r/batchcooking, and competitors' SEO articles. Nobody has copied it that I can see.

If it were you

Verdict: C. Don't build this product as is. The weekly menu category is already packed, paid competitors are growing faster, and this one chose not to earn money. What's worth taking is its approach: go truly free in a small-language category where everyone else charges, make the costs public so people trust you, and then use hundreds of comparison, alternative, and holiday pages to capture search.

Good fit for: a solo developer who can write lots of native-language long-tail pages and likes building tools for the web, who wants to build users and reputation first without rushing to charge; or someone who already has a paid product and wants a free entry point to bring people in.

Bad fit for: anyone hoping to sell menu-app subscriptions (the French market already has Pimzi, Basta, Yuma, and Piatto, and the English market is even more crowded); anyone who only builds apps and doesn't write web content (its traffic comes from the web and search, not app stores); anyone who doesn't do paid acquisition but wants to match the growth of players like Piatto.

How to do it: Pick a language that doesn't yet have a "free, no account" player (German, Italian, Dutch, and Polish are all worth checking first). Prioritize the web, and keep the app store listing as a thin shell. Write the recipes by hand first and price them yourself; let AI handle only combining and swapping, which can bring the cost of a week's menu down to a fraction of a cent. At launch, build "automatically plan next week"; it's the only retention mechanic that doesn't depend on you.

How to get users: First list every paid competitor in your country and make a "X or you" page and a "free alternative to X" page for each. Then map out three months of holiday pages (Christmas, New Year, Easter, Eid). Finally, build a stats page updated weekly for media to use. You can post in Facebook groups, but don't expect much: Popotam got only 29 reactions in a group of 3k people.

When to start: Holiday pages need to go live one to two months ahead to get indexed in time. If you start now, you can catch the mid-December Christmas search peak; if you miss that, the next one is January's "New Year diet menu."

Signs you've misread it: ① Three months later the web product still has only 5,000 to 6,000 weekly active users and hasn't grown, which would mean the "free + SEO" path has a very low ceiling; ② it adds a paywall or ads, which would mean free can't sustain it, since its transparency page already shows costs rising; ③ Google search fills with AI overviews that answer "weekly menu" directly, and clicks to long-tail pages drop; ④ the reverse: the Barometer's user count doubles before Christmas, or French media start citing its data, in which case this approach is worth more than it looks.

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Data and sources: Google Play install counts and French chart rankings (10-11 to 11-06; figures before mid-October are third-party estimates); popotam.fr homepage, /transparence, /barometre (read on 11-06; page data is generated in real time); the Facebook group "La cuisine, c'est la vie !" 10-02 post; the Les Pépites Tech listing (created 9-20) and LinkedIn company page; Citron's "Pimzi review" (10-28); competitor install counts are Google Play 11-06 data, and Pimzi's price comes from Citron's comparison page.