Building a Meal Prep App For Mom

Lovable hosted a SheBuilds at Plug and Play in Frisco, Texas on International Women’s Day—Sunday, March 8th. When I first saw it on LinkedIn from Chris Medina, founder of AI Women Leaders, I was excited.

Two reasons.

1. I love AI. I love the possibilities of what we can create when good people have this tool in their hands.
2. I’ve been yearning for more women in tech in my life. I don’t get to work with any in my day-to-day, so it always makes me happy to see other women in tech. The field feels kind of lonely at times, but seeing a whole event for not just women in tech but in the AI space brought me a lot of joy.

When I showed up to the event, it was packed with this energy that I can’t even explain. Smiles all around, friendly and kind people. I met Julia in the elevator trying to find the room, and we became friends. She had a lot of valuable insights to give me on my app idea and things I wasn’t even thinking about—which just blows my mind again with how creative women are. And then to hear her app idea for caregivers? Again, just a reminder of how nurturing women really are and how thoughtful we are. I heard many other ideas throughout the day, all impactful, big ideas. I loved every second of it.

Building for Mom

In celebration of International Women’s Day, who better to build my app for than my lovely mom, who has asked me for help with her diet? She’s seen me in my fitness journey the past five years—how much I’ve learned about nutrition and spent countless hours in the gym, outside, anything fitness-related. I have been so grateful to have gone through this fitness journey: discovering my body, learning to love my body, and really pushing it to its limits to now be in peak fitness levels at my dream body, feeling like my happiest and healthiest self. I’ve realized along the way that nutrition is way overcomplicated; it’s actually quite simple, and I want to make it simple for everyone else going through their fitness and health journey.

My app idea: generate weekly meal preps based on your health and fitness goals. As someone who works five to six days a week, my mom only has one day to really prep her food for the week. As myself, who’s also a busy professional with a social life and understands the importance of meal prepping to set myself up for success for the week to hit my goals and just be prepped for success with my nutrition—I was super excited to build this.

The Lovable Build

Now, I’ve used Lovable in the past—exactly a year ago, before they had a lot of the features that they do now. Back then it was an MVP where it was literally just vibe coding. Now they have Lovable Cloud, design features, built-in analytics, publishing, and hosting. Very cool to see the progression in just one year, and I know that this entire platform was built from vibe coding because I listen to a podcast of their main vibe coder. Anyway, point is the platform has gotten really impressive.

As I start with all my projects, I do the planning up front. So I spent 30 minutes in Perplexity planning and prepping the user flow, MVP features, and user personas. I just went back and forth a few times, always asking “What am I missing at the end?” That’s my favorite thing to ask during plan mode—because it asks me questions I didn’t even think about, and we can just collaborate on this together. At the very end, I asked for an optimized prompt for Lovable, and I dumped it into Lovable with an image that had the colors and typography that I wanted for the design system. In 4 minutes, I was mind blown at the iteration.

Feedback & Ideas to Marinate On

I shared the app with others, and everyone was very excited about it and gave pretty good feedback—even said they’d be willing to pay $3 a month for it from something that I built in one hour. Some other constructive feedback was that it’d be nice if the meals were more diverse in cuisine. Right now it’s set up for just American meals, strictly because there is a lot more calorie consideration when you add different sauces and extra ingredients. I’ve definitely had my own meal prep meals that are a Vietnamese variation that can still be healthy, not too many ingredients, so not overcomplicating the grocery list and the cook time. I’m definitely going to iterate on that.

Some other ideas I’m marinating on:

• Potentially linking Instacart to get exact grocery cost per city, and maybe even importing that into Instacart to order—not just Instacart, but other grocery stores or platforms as well
• Allow the user to pick their macro percentages if they wanted to—I want to add more customization. Right now it’s set up for you to match the fitness goal that you want, so all the math is done for you. Customization and personalization is key
• Having a meal vault where you can save the meals that you like and keep them in a vault
• You can lock the meals that you like
• If not, you can regenerate or add in meals from your meal vault
• Store all the user preferences so that they don’t need to enter them every time—one of the laws of UX I learned recently

There’s so much that I want to do. You know when you start a project and you just keep coming up with ideas? I feel like I’m in that phase right now, and it’s so fun—but also just one step at a time. Lovable made that really easy. Connecting to authentication was one prompt.

Lovable tip

Use plan mode for complex features. Even though it’s one credit per plan mode, it’s only one credit—so the plan could include three small features in one, and it’s still going to one shot that pretty well since it’s using Claude. Any other iteration is dependent on what it’s asked for in terms of how many credits are being used. Simple text changes are like point 1.5. Same for design, etc. It’s all on their website, but I was curious about this because you only get 5 free credits a day after their promotion for International Women’s Day of free all day ends. I was wondering how feasible it would be to maintain this on Lovable and Lovable Cloud specifically?

Migration & Next Steps

Turns out that pricing is going to change at the end of Q1, which is at the end of this month. Don’t know if it’s timed with International Women’s Day. I’ve seen a lot of vibe coding platforms like this have huge hackathons, and the platform gets better after the hackathon because of the usage—testers they’ve had that they can iterate and make better wherever it broke—but then pricing does usually increase, which makes sense. In my case, I don’t want to pay when I already have a Cursor subscription. So now, next steps are going to be migrating off of Lovable Cloud.

The steps I’ve been taking:

1. Cloning the repo
2. Migrating the Supabase into a new Supabase project that I created—because Lovable Cloud connects to an instance of Supabase, it doesn’t make it easy to just migrate over. There is no Supabase project that you maintain when you use Lovable Cloud; they maintain it for you, so to access Supabase, it’s not possible. You just see the data through the Lovable Cloud UI.
3. Same goes for the API connection that I have with OpenAI to generate the meals and the grocery list. Now I need to create my own API key and connect it.

So yeah, I definitely would not recommend starting with Lovable Cloud if you don’t plan to use it—which costs $25 a month and then additional usage for the AI as their first tier. But that is the next step, and luckily I don’t have too many users yet, so the process should be pretty painless. I only have four users from when I initially shared it to a few people.

Here’s the url: https://mealprepfriend.netlify.app/

I had a great time at this event, and I loved being able to build with other women. It’s amazing that I was able to take an idea and turn it into an MVP with Lovable.