Gather 1.10.0 — Release

The nutrition figures were wrong, and the servings they were divided into were
not servings. Both are fixed, along with everything that turned up while
looking — including one bug that meant deleting anything in Gather had never
worked.

This is the largest release so far.

A serving is now a serving

Recipes reported "a serving" by taking everything in the pan and dividing it by
whatever the author typed at the top. A chicken alfredo built from a pound of
pasta, a pound and a half of chicken and two cups of cream said four
servings, so Gather told you one plate was 1,060 calories. That is a
restaurant dinner, not a portion.

Servings now come from the FDA's reference amounts — the same table that
decides what "1 serving" means on every nutrition label in an American
supermarket. That alfredo reads 1 cup (250 g), about 8 servings.

Scaling no longer inflates it. Cooking a double batch used to make one
plate twice as big on paper. Cooking more food makes more servings, and now
that is what it says.

Your daily limits now mean something. They were comparing a
restaurant-sized plate against one person's whole day, so a day of three meals
that each served four counted twelve portions against one person — the warning
fired constantly and told you nothing. It only speaks up when a day is
genuinely over now.

Nutrition that was simply wrong

• Heavy cream carried light cream's figures — 195 calories and 19 g of fat
  per 100 g instead of 340 and 36. Anything creamy under-reported nearly half
  its fat, and saturated fat worst of all: 10 g where the truth was 22.
• "Broccoli florets" counted as a whole 500 g head. Three florets came to a
  kilo and a half.
• A head of lettuce counted as 300 g, whether iceberg or romaine. They are
  755 g and 626 g, so a salad built on one counted less than half of itself.
• Aubergine and corn on the cob were both a little light.

Watermelon, honeydew, cantaloupe, pineapple, cherries, asparagus, summer
squash, kiwi and nectarines had no weight at all, so any recipe counting them
by the piece was quietly missing them. They are all in now, along with broccoli
spears and stalks and cauliflower florets.

Everything was checked against USDA's own figures — including the entries that
turned out to be right. Cucumber, onion, cabbage, carrot, celery, peppers,
courgette, tomato, banana and a clove of garlic were all already correct and
have been left exactly as they were.

Things you buy without a recipe

Nobody imports a recipe for cereal. Usually needed is a row above your
shopping list: milk, bread, coffee, whatever you actually buy. One tap adds it.

It learns. The things you add become the things it offers, in the order you
buy them, and anything already in your trolley disappears from the row — so it
shrinks as you shop.

Anything you never want offered has an × to silence it for good. Useful
when an import has left something odd in your history, since deleting the
shopping item does not stop it being suggested — the suggestion never came
from the list.

Leftovers

• A portion can be dragged onto a day. It could not before — the drop was
  refused silently, so nothing happened and nothing said why.
• A meal cannot be marked as made before the day it is planned for. Marking
  Friday's dinner on Tuesday emptied your pantry and put portions in your
  fridge that nobody had cooked.
• "Mark as cooked" now says made, and the tray of what is in your fridge
  says In the fridge rather than "Already cooked". Nobody cooks a sandwich,
  and since meals can now exist without a recipe at all, half of what sits
  there was never cooked in the first place.

The calendar, on a free account

Two changes, and one of them takes something away.

You keep a month of history instead of a fortnight. Days up to 30 back are
now fully yours to edit and record on, where the limit used to be 15.

Beyond 30 days, meals are hidden until you unlock. They were previously
visible but not editable. The day still tells you it is holding them — "2 meals
· Unlock to see" — because a day drawn empty would be telling you nothing
happened, which is not true. Nothing is ever deleted, and CSV export stays
free, so your record remains yours whether you buy anything or not.

Locked days now look locked, instead of looking like somewhere you could drop
a meal. And they carry one padlock rather than two.

Send to Phone now needs the link

The little server that sends your list to your phone answered anybody who
asked. On your own wifi that is a small thing. Through a public tunnel it was
your shopping list and your week on an address anyone could load.

It now requires the link Gather gives you, and that link changes every time you
start it — so an old one stops working. Nothing about how you use it changes.

Setting up AI, if you want it

AI is optional and always has been. Setting it up assumed you knew what an API
key was.

• The local option comes first, marked No account needed. It runs on
  your own computer, costs nothing, and nothing you write leaves the machine.
• Every provider now says what it costs in plain words, and a button opens the
  exact page its key lives on.
• OpenAI and Anthropic say outright that a ChatGPT or Claude subscription does
  not cover this — API access is billed separately. It is the most expensive
  misunderstanding available, and it was not written down anywhere.

Fixed

• Every confirmation in Gather did nothing. Deleting a recipe, an
  ingredient, a shopping item or a backup, clearing out several at once, and
  removing a stored AI key all put the question up and then refused to act on
  the answer. It had never worked in an installed copy. That is why deleting
  something could appear to be ignored.
• Dragging anything over a day on the calendar could throw before the day had
  decided whether it would accept the drop, leaving that day unable to accept
  anything at all.
• Items added from the new shopping row showed "1 undefined" beside them.

Gather 1.9.0 — Release

Gather 1.9.0 — local-first meal planning, nutrition and shopping lists. Everything runs on your machine: no account, no subscription, no telemetry.

Gather can be bought now, and the line between free and premium has been
settled properly rather than left where it happened to land.

Premium unlocks with a licence key

Buy the Lifetime Premium Unlock once and you get a licence key by email. Paste
it into Settings and premium is on — on up to three devices, so a household
buys once rather than each person buying separately.

It works offline for good. Gather checks your key when you first enter it
and then leaves you alone. No connection needed to keep what you paid for: not
on a plane, not with the wifi off, not if the licence service is having a bad
day, not a year from now. Nothing expires and nothing counts down.

Updating Gather never disturbs it. Install a new version over the top and your
licence is still there.

You can move a device off your licence at any time from Settings, which frees
that slot for a different machine.

Sending your list to Kroger is now part of premium

Free Gather connects to Kroger and shows you live prices for your store —
that has not changed, and you can see exactly what your week costs before
deciding anything.

Sending the finished list straight to your Kroger cart is part of the
Lifetime Premium Unlock, alongside arranging your list by your store's aisles
and comparing prices across stores. Those three go together: they are the
difference between a list you carry round a shop and a shop that is already done.

What free still does

Everything that makes a meal plan. Up to 60 recipes, import from any recipe
site, a fortnight of planning at a time, shopping lists with real quantities,
allergen and dietary warnings, nutrition per serving and per batch, kitchen
mode, leftovers, your cooking log, live Kroger prices, backups, and sending
your list to your phone on your own wifi.

What premium adds

• Sending your shopping list to a Kroger cart
• Your store's own aisle order, and comparing prices between stores
• Every AI tool — the fridge wizard, the smart recipe importer, and filling in
  what Gather does not know about an ingredient
• Plan My Week
• A full month on the calendar instead of a fortnight
• Everyone in the household, with their own needs
• An unlimited recipe library
• Cookbook PDF export
• Backups to a folder you choose, including a synced one
• Pantry tracking and price history

Fixed

• A failed AI connection test no longer reports success. "Test & enable"
  did only the second half of its name: any text in the API key box was
  announced as "AI integration enabled", and the first thing you asked for came
  back as a raw error from the provider. It now checks the key really works,
  and says what went wrong in the provider's own words if it does not.
• A model your provider has withdrawn now says so, and names the one to use
  instead, rather than failing with a page of JSON every time.
• The model list no longer offers models that cannot write. Image, speech,
  music and transcription models were being listed as choices; picking one
  failed two screens later for no visible reason.
• A slow AI provider that stopped responding mid-answer reported a confusing
  decoding error instead of a timeout.

Install

Download Gather-1.9.0-Release-x64-setup.exe below and run it. Existing installations offer this update themselves the next time they open.

Gather 1.8.0 — Release

Gather 1.8.0 — local-first meal planning, nutrition and shopping lists. Everything runs on your machine: no account, no subscription, no telemetry.

A full audit of everything 1.7.0 shipped, and the fixes it turned up. Two of
them were safety bugs in the allergen warnings, one was a live supermarket
credential sitting in plain text, and several were numbers that were quietly
wrong on the screen you cook from.

Allergen warnings could be erased by an unrelated word

The worst thing found, and the reason for this release.

A harmless word standing next to a dangerous one could delete the warning
entirely. "Sea salt crusted shrimp" reported no shellfish at all. So did
"seaweed salad with shrimp". "Butternut squash gratin with parmesan" and
"rice cake with cheddar" reported nothing whatsoever.

Worse, a recipe with no warnings is awarded a positive diet label — so a
shrimp dish was labelled vegan.

Both are fixed, and the fix was checked against 12,920 food names: 1,424
warnings restored, none lost. 213 everyday dishes that the app simply did not
recognise — roux, chowder, cobb salad, quiche, liverwurst, philly cheesesteak —
are now known.

If you already have Gather installed, your saved food list is corrected on
update.

Cooking figures that were wrong

• Peanut butter was priced as dairy butter, so a cup counted 216 g instead
  of 256 g — about a sixth of its calories missing.
• Kosher salt was treated as table salt, which doubled the sodium.
• "3 cloves of garlic" counted as 135 g — three whole heads.
• Bare "celery" counted as a 400 g bunch, so "2 celery, diced" was 800 g.
• A bell pepper was counted as a ground spice.
• 28 things reported a confidently wrong weight where none was knowable —
  "lemon juice" counted as a whole lemon. They now say nothing rather than
  something wrong.

Calories you can actually use

Recipes showed the calories of the whole pan — a box of pasta, a jar of
sauce, a pound of beef. Nobody eats that. Recipes now lead with a serving,
with the batch figure underneath.

This also fixes the daily limits, which were comparing a whole recipe against
one person's daily cap: a day of three meals each serving four counted twelve
portions, so the warning fired constantly and meant nothing.

Choosing units instead of typing them

The unit box was free text, and a unit Gather did not recognise meant the
ingredient counted for nothing — silently. "tblsp", "Cups" and "oz." all
did that. It is now a list, grouped into things you count, things you pour and
things you weigh, and one button puts the whole recipe into metric or US.

Ingredients also start as one of the thing rather than 100 g. You do not eat
a hundred grams of bun.

A meal that is not a recipe

Every square on the calendar used to have to point at a recipe you had written
up. Leftover chili over a hot dog is a real dinner, and nobody is going to
author it as a recipe first.

There is now a Something else button beside Plan recipe: name it, pick a day,
and optionally say it came from leftovers. Sandwiches, cereal, lunch meat,
last night's curry — anything assembled rather than cooked.

Saying it came from leftovers takes that portion out of the fridge, so it cannot
be planned twice, and adds nothing to your shopping list, because that food was
already bought and cooked.

Leftovers

• You say what is left, in servings or containers. It used to be assumed
  from the recipe's yield, which is how the planner came to offer portions that
  were not in the fridge.
• They can be planned by clicking, not only by dragging a small card onto a
  small calendar square.
• An ingredient can be a leftover — the tub of taco filling, not just a
  finished dish.

Kroger

• Broccoli no longer adds broccoli soup to your cart. The first search
  result was being taken and saved permanently, with nothing checking it was
  even the right food.
• The connection stops claiming to work when it does not. Sign-ins are now
  renewed before a request rather than after one fails, and a connection that
  genuinely cannot recover says so instead of failing silently.
• Your shopping list can follow your store's own aisles, where Kroger
  publishes them, falling back to the order you arranged yourself.

Fixed

• Kitchen mode opened as a small panel with two scrollbars instead of
  filling the screen.
• Recipes opened in Celsius even with Gather set to US units.
• The AI settings forgot your model every time you opened them.
• Restoring a backup promised an undo that did not exist. It exists now, and a
  damaged or too-new backup is refused instead of leaving Gather unable to open.
• Deleting a backup never worked if you had chosen your own backup folder.
• Nine places where a failure showed nothing at all — the spinner stopped and
  the screen looked unchanged.

Security

Your Kroger sign-in was stored in plain text in the same file backups copy.
If you had backups pointed at a synced folder, a live supermarket credential was
going with them. Both tokens are now in the operating system's credential store,
and existing installations are moved across automatically.

Install

Download Gather-1.8.0-Release-x64-setup.exe below and run it. Existing installations offer this update themselves the next time they open.

Gather 1.7.0 — Release

Gather 1.7.0 — local-first meal planning, nutrition and shopping lists. Everything runs on your machine: no account, no subscription, no telemetry.

The big one. Gather now keeps a cooking log, so it knows what you actually make
and what is left in the fridge — and there are seven new features built on top
of that, plus backups, so nothing you have entered is trapped on one laptop.

What's new

• "I cooked this." One click on a planned meal logs it, takes what it used
  out of the pantry, and keeps whatever was left over as portions you can plan.
  Nothing is guessed from a date passing: a meal you planned and did not cook
  never empties your shelves.
• Leftovers. Drag a portion onto any day and it fills that meal —
  and nothing is added to your shopping list for it, because you already
  bought and cooked it. Rice and seafood get one day; everything else four.
• Backups. A complete copy of everything: recipes, plans, prices, pantry,
  licence. Taking one is free, always. Unlocked, you choose the folder — point
  it at Dropbox and two machines stay in step — and it happens once a day on its
  own. Restoring keeps your current data beside it, so it can be undone.
• Your store's aisle order. Put the categories in the order you actually
  walk your shop and the list follows, per store. No more four laps for the milk.
• Compare stores. Price the same basket at up to four stores. Kroger,
  Ralphs, Fred Meyer, King Soopers, Smith's, Fry's, QFC and Food 4 Less are all
  the same account. It only compares items every store could price, so a shop
  that simply does not stock your meat cannot look cheapest.
• Price tracking. Gather has been recording what you pay, with the amount
  and the store, since you installed it. Now it shows you: what each thing
  normally costs, whether today's price is high or low, where the money goes,
  and what your weeks add up to.
• Everyone in the household. Add the people you cook for, each with their
  own allergies. Every recipe is checked against all of them and every warning
  says whose it is — so a house where one person avoids nuts and another avoids
  gluten finally gets both sets of warnings.
• Your rotation. What you cook on repeat, the good ones you have not made
  since spring, what you have never tried, and what this week is leaning on.
• Notes and ratings on any recipe, with the date you last cooked it.
• Kitchen mode. Full screen, large type, tick off steps as you go. Free.
• A much better cookbook PDF. Chapters (by meal, tag or rating), an
  ingredient index, a "what contains what" allergen page almost no cookbook has,
  a larder list, and your own notes printed on the recipe.

Fixed

• The pantry could only ever be emptied by hand, so it drifted out of date
  the moment you cooked anything — and your shopping list is netted against it.
• Dependency versions in the project lockfile had been rewritten by mistake
  during two earlier releases.

Changed

• Prices are compared by unit price, so a 500 ml bottle and a 2 L one can be
  told apart.
• Your default store now lives in a proper list you can add to and switch
  between.

Install

Download Gather-1.7.0-Release-x64-setup.exe below and run it. Existing installations offer this update themselves the next time they open.

Gather 1.6.0 — Release

Gather 1.6.0 — local-first meal planning, nutrition and shopping lists. Everything runs on your machine: no account, no subscription, no telemetry.

This one is about the app being right rather than approximately right: recipes
written in the units you actually cook in, calories that count every ingredient
instead of quietly skipping some, and a shopping list that knows what your own
store sells things in.

What's new

• Choose your measurements. Settings now has a US / Metric switch, and it is
  sent to the AI rather than applied afterwards — so recipes come back written
  in cups and °F, not converted into "1.06 cups" and "392°F". Switching a recipe
  between systems converts its oven temperatures too, using the numbers a
  cookbook prints rather than the raw formula.
• The shopping list learns your store's pack sizes. Every Kroger price
  refresh already tells Gather the real size on the shelf — "16 oz", "1 gal",
  "6 ct / 12 oz" — and it now keeps it. Sizes you set by hand are never
  overwritten.
• Check my library. Gather answers almost every ingredient from its own
  offline tables. For the handful it genuinely cannot — an unusual import, a
  sauce nobody has heard of — this asks your AI provider, shows you the answers
  before anything is saved, and remembers every one so the same question is
  never asked twice. It only ever fills blanks; nothing you or USDA supplied
  gets overwritten.

Fixed

• Calories were under-counted on any recipe with whole vegetables in it.
  "2 red bell peppers, 1 red onion, 1 zucchini" contributed nothing at all to
  the totals, because a count could not be turned into a weight. Gather now
  knows what about 120 everyday foods weigh — a bell pepper, an onion, a garlic
  clove, an egg — so they count.
• AI recipes came out in grams with a 200°C oven, for a kitchen using cups
  and Fahrenheit.
• Switching a recipe to Imperial produced amounts nobody can measure: 1 tsp
  of oregano became "⅓ tbsp" and ½ tsp of salt became "0.17 tbsp". Teaspoons are
  teaspoons again, and metric no longer reports a teaspoon as "4.93 ml".
• Ingredients called "1/2 teaspoons garlic powder" and "/about 12 ounces
  shredded cooked chicken" were piling up in the catalog — a recipe's whole
  written line saved as a food's name. New imports are cleaned, and the ones
  already saved are tidied up on first launch and merged with the real
  ingredient they duplicate.
• Plan My Week asked how many recipes you wanted after you had already told
  it the days and the meals. It now works those out, and picking all three meals
  fills breakfast, lunch and dinner for every day of the run.
• Shopping totals could be a penny out from the lines above them. All money
  is counted in whole cents now, in memory and in the database.

Changed

• The recipe unit toggle says US rather than Imperial — a UK imperial pint
  is a different size, so the old label was wrong twice over.
• Prices are stored as exact whole cents alongside the existing decimal columns.

Install

Download Gather-1.6.0-Release-x64-setup.exe below and run it. Existing installations offer this update themselves the next time they open.

Gather 1.5.0 — Release

Gather 1.5.0 — local-first meal planning, nutrition and shopping lists. Everything runs on your machine: no account, no subscription, no telemetry.

This release is mostly about the app knowing more about food. It ships a real
allergen database, learns what a shop actually sells so the grocery list stops
asking you to buy half a teaspoon of cumin, and adds 226 everyday ingredients
the catalogue was missing — mascarpone, prosciutto, sriracha, gochujang,
pomegranate and the rest.

What's new

• Allergen detection that works. Gather now knows what is in roughly 700
  foods across all 14 allergens that have to be declared in the EU, plus meat,
  pork and alcohol. It knows mozzarella is dairy, pesto is tree nuts,
  Worcestershire sauce is fish, mayonnaise is egg and prosciutto is pork — none
  of which it knew before. It also knows almond milk is not dairy and
  buckwheat is not gluten, so the warnings are worth reading.
• Warnings say why. "Contains fish" on a jar of Worcestershire sauce now
  tells you which ingredient triggered it, and whether the food definitely
  contains the allergen or usually does.
• Four allergens Gather had no way to record: mustard, celery, lupin and
  sulphites. Plus pork and alcohol, which vegetarian, halal and sober cooks were
  all asking about through a tag that did not exist.
• The shopping list tells you what to buy. It used to print the recipe
  amount, so it asked for "0.5 tsp ground cumin", "2 clove garlic" and "1.5 tbsp
  tomato paste". It now says 1 jar, 1 head, 1 tin — with the recipe
  amount underneath, so you do not buy four jars for four teaspoons.
• 226 new ingredients, chosen because they are what people actually cook
  with: 43 dairy and cheese, 36 meat and seafood, 76 pantry staples, 33 spices
  and blends, 28 fruit and vegetables. Nutrition is USDA's wherever USDA has it.
• Filter the ingredient library by where things came from. Gather's own
  catalogue, things you added, and the ones that arrived attached to a recipe —
  which is why "(4 ounces each) chopped green chiles" was in there.
• Plan a recipe without picking a date. "Plan" on a recipe card no longer
  demands a day. The meal waits under Unscheduled beside the calendar until
  you drag it onto one.

Fixed

• Importing a meal-plan CSV created every recipe twice — one usable and one
  empty. Worse, the planner pointed at the empty one, so an imported week
  contributed nothing at all to the shopping list. Existing libraries are
  repaired on first launch.
• Ingredients named things like "(4 ounces each) chopped green chiles".
  Can sizes, "divided", "drained and rinsed" and "such as Gruyère" no longer end
  up in the ingredient's name. Names already saved are cleaned up.
• Choosing an AI model did not save it. Picking gemini-3.6-flash and
  leaving the screen kept the old model, so the next request failed with a 404
  naming a model the dropdown was no longer showing. Selecting now saves.
• The AI model list is fetched when you open Settings, instead of making you
  press "Test connection" every single visit. If your provider has retired the
  model you had stored, Gather switches to a current one and tells you.
• "Write me new ones" in Plan My Week was greyed out unless you already had
  three recipes saved — on the one mode whose entire purpose is working without
  a library.
• The pantry offered to add things to your shopping list that were already on
  it, which quietly gave you two of everything.
• Kidney beans were flagged as meat and butternut squash as dairy, along
  with a handful of similar false alarms found by running the new rules over
  every food that ships with the app.

Changed

• The pantry's What to buy panel is now Shortfall after this pantry. It
  shows the arithmetic — what the meals need, what your shelves cover, what is
  left — and points at the shopping list rather than duplicating it.
• Recipes and meal plans no longer create a placeholder entry in your library.
• Release notes are written by hand from now on, which is why this one reads
  like a person wrote it.

Install

Download Gather-1.5.0-Release-x64-setup.exe below and run it. Existing installations offer this update themselves the next time they open.

Gather 1.4.0 — Release

Gather 1.4.0 — local-first meal planning, nutrition and shopping lists. Everything runs on your machine: no account, no subscription, no telemetry.

Changes since v1.3.0

• An offline nutrition reference, and release notes that say what changed
• Prove the import ceiling only ever applies to a free library
• Say so when a file has more recipes than the library holds
• Draw the free line: a fortnight, no pantry, and a library ceiling
• Do not shop for what is already in the cupboard
• The shopping list is for a trip, not for all of history
• Import fixes: real amounts, real nutrition, no console flash
• AI: live model lists, recipes on request, and a week from nothing

Install

Download Gather-1.4.0-Release-x64-setup.exe below and run it. Existing installations offer this update themselves the next time they open.

Gather 1.3.0 — Release

Gather 1.3.0 — local-first meal planning, nutrition and shopping lists.

Everything runs on your machine. No account, no subscription, no telemetry.

• Plan meals on a calendar, and watch the shopping list build itself
• 1,000-food nutrition catalogue from USDA FoodData Central
• Kroger prices, and send your list straight to a Kroger cart
• Track what is in the cupboard, and what you are about to run out of
• Works completely offline

Download Gather-1.3.0-Release-x64-setup.exe below. Existing
installations update themselves from this release.

Gather 1.2.0 — Release

Gather 1.2.0 — local-first meal planning, nutrition and shopping lists.

Everything runs on your machine. No account, no subscription, no telemetry.

• Plan meals on a calendar, and watch the shopping list build itself
• 1,000-food nutrition catalogue from USDA FoodData Central
• Kroger prices, and send your list straight to a Kroger cart
• Track what is in the cupboard, and what you are about to run out of
• Works completely offline

Download Gather-1.2.0-Release-x64-setup.exe below. Existing
installations update themselves from this release.

Gather 1.1.0 — Release

Gather 1.1.0 — local-first meal planning, nutrition and shopping lists.

Everything runs on your machine. No account, no subscription, no telemetry.

• Plan meals on a calendar, and watch the shopping list build itself
• 1,000-food nutrition catalogue from USDA FoodData Central
• Kroger prices, and send your list straight to a Kroger cart
• Track what is in the cupboard, and what you are about to run out of
• Works completely offline

Download Gather-1.1.0-Release-x64-setup.exe below. Existing
installations update themselves from this release.