If you've landed here from a pin or a search and you're not sure what you're looking at: 6 Dinners is a free weekly meal-planning site. Every Saturday we post six new dinners and one shopping list that covers all of them. That's the whole idea — no account, no app download required, no paywall.
What you actually get each week
Six dinners, picked as a set rather than one at a time. We spread proteins and cuisines across the week so nothing repeats two nights in a row, and we look for ingredients that show up in more than one recipe on purpose — a bag of spinach or a can of beans used in two dinners costs you nothing the second time. Every recipe is written from scratch for the site, not pulled from somewhere else, so the six of them are built to work together instead of just sitting next to each other.
We also estimate the total grocery cost for the week (aiming for a real, everyday-ingredient budget, not specialty items you'll use once and throw out), so you know roughly what you're signing up for before you shop.
One shopping list instead of six
This is the actual point of the site. Instead of reading six recipes and writing your own list, the ingredients from all six dinners are combined automatically into one categorized shopping list — produce, meat, dairy, pantry, and so on — with duplicate ingredients merged into a single line instead of listed six separate times. Check items off as you shop, or download the whole week (every recipe plus the list) as a PDF or Word doc to bring with you.
Scale it to your household
Every recipe and the shopping list scale together, from 1 serving up to 12, right on the page — no mental math to halve a recipe written for a family of four, or double one written for two. Change the number once and everything downstream, ingredient quantities and the estimated total, updates with it.
Don't want that week's menu? Build your own
Not every week's theme fits every household. The Build Your Own Week tool lets you pick a protein for each dinner slot — chicken, beef, pork, seafood, turkey, vegetarian, or "surprise me" — and skip any slot you don't need, then pulls six (or fewer) real recipes from the full archive and builds the same combined shopping list around them. It's the whole site, minus having to wait for a week whose menu happens to match what you're in the mood for.
Install it like an app
The site works as an installable app on your phone or computer (a PWA, if that means anything to you) — add it to your home screen and it opens like any other app, with the current week's page saved for offline use. No app store, no separate download.
Why it's free
There's no subscription and no ads on the page. If 6 Dinners saves you a trip to the store or an hour of planning, there's an optional buy me a coffee link, and a separate kitchen tools guide with affiliate links to the actual cookware we use (clearly disclosed there) — but neither is required to use anything on the site.
Who this is actually for
Anyone who cooks dinner on a weeknight and would rather not decide what that means from scratch every day: people meal-planning for a family, people cooking for one or two who are tired of recipes written for four, and anyone who'd rather spend ten minutes on a Saturday than twenty minutes every weeknight deciding what's for dinner.
How to actually start
This week's menu is the fastest way to see the whole thing in action. If you'd rather pick your own proteins first, start with Build Your Own Week instead. Either way, every week we've ever published is browsable in the past weeks archive, and this page will still be here if you just wanted to understand what you were looking at before committing to anything.