There's a sixth app coming. It's called Settle, and it's a FODMAP-aware meal planner for people with sensitive guts. This post is the why, the how, and what I'm building over the next three weeks.
The gap I keep hitting
GutLedger tells you what your gut doesn't like. ListLedger keeps the household shop organised. But there's a step missing in the middle: actually planning meals around what you can eat.
The FODMAP world is full of "here's a list of safe foods" PDFs and £8 monolith apps with 80 built-in recipes you can't add to. What it doesn't have is the simple, universal thing: I see a recipe on Pinterest or TikTok or BBC Good Food - can I have it cleanly imported, the dodgy ingredients flagged in colour, and the shopping list pushed to my list app? That's Settle.
Why this app and not the other five
I had six ideas on the shortlist. A few were better businesses on paper - a generic meal planner has 10x the addressable market. The reason Settle won is strategic fit:
- It uses GutLedger's 470+ FODMAP food database as its core feature (instant credibility, no cold start)
- It makes ListLedger useful from day one for FODMAP users (ListLedger has the typical "empty list" problem)
- The whole audience already trusts the brand from GutLedger
- The Expo + IAP stack is the same one I've shipped four times
A generic meal planner would be Settle competing against Paprika, AnyList, Plan to Eat - all 5-10 years ahead. FODMAP-aware meal planner is a niche with one credible competitor (Real Plans + FODMAP Everyday, which is subscription-only at ~£100/yr).
Building in a deep niche where the rest of my stack already wins is more sensible than chasing the bigger market and losing.
The name
I spent a couple of hours on naming because everything good was taken. MealLedger felt obvious but didn't say anything. Larder, Hob, Mise, Pantree - all gone. Most names that hint at "calm" or "soothe" felt clinical.
Settled on Settle because it does double duty: settle your stomach (the gut-health signal) and settle in for dinner (the meal-planning context). Short, common English word, no app on the App Store currently using it for this category. Strapline: "Meals that don't fight back."
What's free, what's paid
The FODMAP filter is free. That part isn't a debate. Hiding the differentiating feature behind a paywall is how niche apps fail - the App Store screenshots need to show Low/Medium/High badges so people understand what they're looking at.
The paid tier (£4.99 one-off, same as the other Cyber-Jack apps) unlocks the things people hit a wall on:
- Unlimited recipe imports (free is 3 per week)
- Unlimited saved meal plans (free is 1)
- ListLedger auto-fill
- iCloud/Google Drive sync
- FODMAP-substitution suggestions ("swap garlic for garlic-infused oil")
People pay for more of what they already love, not for unlocking what they've never seen.
The risky bit: recipe import has to work
The whole app falls over if importing recipes from real URLs doesn't actually work. So week 1 isn't building the app - it's proving the parser.
The plan is three stages, in order of reliability:
- JSON-LD schema.org/Recipe - most cooking sites embed this for Google. Free, instant, surprisingly common (BBC Good Food, NYT Cooking, Bon Appetit all parsed cleanly in under a second on my test rig)
- recipe-scrapers Python library - 583 supported sites with handcrafted parsers, fallback for ones missing JSON-LD
- Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite - strips the page HTML and asks an LLM to extract the recipe. Works on anything readable, costs nothing on the free tier for individual use
If hit rate isn't at least 90% on 30 random recipe URLs from my own Pinterest feed by end of week 1, I pause and rethink. No point shipping the prettier version of an app that fails the basic job.
The three-week MVP
Week 1 - validate the parser
- Stand up the parser as a standalone service
- Test on 30 real URLs from my Pinterest
- Register settle.cyber-jack.uk
- Create the settle-app repo
Week 2 - app scaffolding
- Expo project + recipe list UI
- Paste URL input + share sheet (iOS extension)
- Weekly plan view (drag recipes onto Mon-Sun)
- Bundle the GutLedger FODMAP DB
Week 3 - cross-app + IAP
- ListLedger deeplink handler (and matching scheme on the ListLedger side)
- IAP wiring at £4.99 Pro
- Submit to App Store + Google Play
Realistic outcome
I'm not expecting Settle to be the breakout. The honest ceiling is 1k-10k installs over a year, leveraging the existing GutLedger user trust and the content pipeline already pushing FODMAP material on Pinterest and TikTok. That's a successful niche app, not a hockey stick.
But if it works it does three things at once: useful product, credibility boost for GutLedger, and makes ListLedger pay off for the FODMAP slice of its audience. That's worth three weeks.
I'll write about week 1 next week - particularly whether the parser hit rate is good enough to keep going.
Numbers this week
- Commits: 14
- Apps live: 2 (GutLedger, ListLedger)
- Apps in testing: 1 (Odomo)
- Apps in dev: 2 (Inkframe, Settle)
- Hours spent: 22