Feedback wanted: AI that handles the "what's for dinner?" mental load
Hey Product Hunt community! 👋
I'm building something to solve a problem my family faces every single day, and I'd love your feedback.
The problem:
Every household has someone carrying the invisible mental load of meals. It's not the cooking that's exhausting — it's the deciding. 21 meals a week. Remembering who eats what. Knowing what's in the fridge. Figuring out quick meals for busy nights.
My wife carried all of this. When I'd ask "how can I help?" she still had to manage me. That's not really helping.
What I built:
HOH (Home Operations Hub) — an AI that learns your household and takes over meal planning.
🍽️ Builds weekly meal plans based on your family's actual preferences
🔄 Adapts when life happens ("I'm exhausted" → 15-min backup meal)
📱 Sends daily SMS to everyone with the plan (no more "what's for dinner?")
🧠 Learns what you like over time
🥫 Tracks your pantry and suggests meals before food goes bad
🛒 Creates grocery lists minus what you already have
Where I'm at:
Early beta — collecting founding users and feedback.
My questions for you:
Does this solve a real problem for you or your family?
What's missing that would make you actually use this?
Any feedback on the landing page?
🔗 https://www.homeoperationshub.com/
Thanks for any feedback — I'm building this based on what real families need.
Replies
This idea is AMAZING and the first thing I thought of seeing this was "no way this isn't already available."
My feedback:
PLEASE make it open-source from the start. For devs like me, the most frustrating thing about an app can sometimes be "there's this one feature that would be great but the single guy running this project hasn't had time yet and I would do it for him for free if he'd let me." I'm not saying this is you--just that it becomes inevitable that one person cannot keep up perfectly with every feature request. Also, this allows feedback like "I saw you're using this one AI model for this task, I have had a much better experience using this model so you might want to consider it."
a. It is still COMPLETELY POSSIBLE to monetize an open-source app. Simply don't build releases as installer files or apks. 99% of people who just want to use the app are not going to go to the trouble of building and deploying your code just to get a working app for free; they want an easy, managed solution that they can actually use in their house. Also, the vast majority of end users for this would have absolutely no clue how to do such a thing. Personally, I would gladly pay a small fee to use a project like this even though I could run it myself; it would be far harder than it's worth to self-host, and also, in the case of mobile apps, you can't just run the app on an iPhone; about the only way to practically get it would be through the app store.
One example I recently came across is https://www.longcut.ai/; it's open source AND paid. If I decide that I want more usage out of it, I would definitely just pick one of the pricing options and pay him for it. Why would I go to all the trouble of setting up Supabase and hosting it myself when I could just pay $3? The time required would far outweigh the money.
Enough said about that now :D. Features I would add, based on the lists on the web:
Leverage AI to enable smart scanning of everything, not just receipts. This would enable taking a picture of some groceries and automatically saving "5 cans of Bush's black beans, 2 red onions"; most useful for random stuff you already have and leftovers in the fridge.
Maybe you're already doing all of this but the website didn't mention it. I would use Gemini for this, as whatever the numbers might say, I have still found it to be the best at real-world image tasks, beating both OpenAI and Anthropic's models.
No lock-in on shopping lists; easy printing, export, SMS, etc.
More will probably occur to me but those are the main two I noticed.
Landing page:
Not enough detail. I have a pet peeve with one-page websites because they have a habit of not giving near enough detail about the product and when you click on the top links that you would expect to give more pages with more info, it just redirects you back down to the info you already read. Could be workable if you make the one page long enough; I just haven't seen a really good implementation of a one-page website yet. Of course I understand at this point you probably don't have enough info to fill more than one page, so it makes sense at the moment.
Another problem with this type of website: no "about" page. If I use (especially pay for!) a product, I want to know who's behind it. Of course I get concerns about privacy; I just feel that it's a human touch that really makes things stand out to consumers because we are missing that type of thing so much in the age of AI.
This is a great idea and I'd love to see where this goes! I wish I had this now in my own house--we've never been able to do much, if any, meal planning and "eggs and bacon because we don't have a better option for dinner" is a fairly frequent weeknight scenario :D.
@lincoln_brown1 Thank you for great feedback. I will add 'About' section right away and look to open source this as well. This is better as many families requires lot of optimization
Amazing idea, this would be useful for A LOT of people
The biggest headache about this as I user I believe would be keeping track of what's in the pantry and what's in the fridge, unless you can physically track it somehow then people would need to list what they have left regularly, I think mainly for this reason either a voice-first UI or a voice-first mode of the app would be essential
Good luck!
@bertmatt Thanks. Agreed, voice-first as an input is what we are looking to start with.
vibecoder.date
If you add Uber eats, doordash, postmates, or any delivery service for groceries as an integration people will flock to this.
@build_with_aj Thanks. that is on the roadmap