ShelfLife is a mobile app for iOS and Android that scans grocery receipts and automatically assigns expiry dates to every item, alerting you before food turns and suggesting recipes to use it up. It is built by one person and is currently accepting waitlist signups for an early TestFlight build.
What is ShelfLife?
ShelfLife is a food waste prevention app that turns a photo of a grocery receipt into a dated, categorised inventory. It reads each line, strips brand names, determines category and quantity, and estimates a shelf life for every item. The app runs on iOS and Android, works offline, and lets you export your data as JSON or CSV at any time.
Key Features
- Receipt scanning — Snap any grocery receipt, and every line becomes a dated, categorised item in about eight seconds, with no manual entry needed.
- AI expiry dates — Every item gets a shelf life based on type, storage location, and your household's eating pace; five fallback layers (device cache, shared cache, Gemini AI fallback, USDA offline database, and a multi-provider AI cascade) keep it working on a plane with no signal.
- Rescue Mode — When items expire tomorrow, get emergency recipes, zero-cook fixes, and freezer-save instructions for 20+ ingredients like Use-It-Up Stir-Fry and Kitchen Sink Soup.
- Household sharing — One invite code lets everyone in the household see the same fridge, assign items, see who used what, and avoid duplicate purchases; unlimited members on Pro.
- Smart alerts — Notifications at 7, 3, and 1 day before expiry, with quiet hours.
- Eat This First — Ranks items by urgency, recipe match, and value.
- Savor Score — Measures freshness, consumption speed, velocity, diversity, and consistency, with streaks and 17 badges across 4 categories.
- Data export — One-tap JSON and CSV export on every plan; your inventory lives on your device first and syncs second.
Who is it for?
- Busy households — Families who buy fresh groceries and forget them at the back of the fridge; ShelfLife shows what's expiring and what to cook tonight.
- Frequent shoppers — Anyone who wants to avoid buying a third jar of mustard because the household can't see what's already there; shared inventory and assignment help.
- Meal planners — People who want recipe suggestions built from ingredients they already own, plus a Batch Cook Calculator that orders cooking steps and estimates CO₂ saved.
- Budget-conscious cooks — Users who want to stop throwing away the $1,500 a year the average U.S. family of four wastes, with a Waste Calculator that tracks money, CO₂, and water avoided.
What can you do with ShelfLife?
- Use leftover ingredients creatively — The Leftover Alchemy feature offers 12 chef-written transformations, such as turning wilted greens into pesto and stale bread into rescue crumbs.
- Plan meals around expiring items — Recipe matching suggests dishes based on what's in your kitchen, and Rescue Mode gives emergency meals when expiration is imminent.
- Track your household's waste — The Waste Calculator gives a monthly report of money saved, CO₂ avoided, and water saved; the Food Time Machine shows a then-vs-now story of your fridge.
- Get playful daily insights — Daily Fridge Fortune offers a "mood" reading and storage hacks, while the Flavor Pairing Oracle suggests which ingredients pair well with what you own.
How does ShelfLife work?
The onboarding is camera-first: you point your phone at a grocery receipt, and the AI reads every line, assigns a category and quantity, and builds your inventory. It then estimates expiry dates based on the item type, your storage habits, and your household's pace, refining each estimate when you mark items used or binned. Alerts arrive at 7, 3, and 1 day before expiry, with one-tap rescue when you've left it late.
Pricing
ShelfLife is freemium. The free plan is $0 forever and includes tracking up to 25 items, unlimited receipt scanning (saved items count toward the 25), manual and barcode add, basic recipe matching, Rescue Mode, Eat This First, Savor Score, streaks, badges, and full data export. Pro costs $6.99 per month or $59.99 per year and adds unlimited items, unlimited receipt-scan saves, household sharing with unlimited members, and full AI expiry estimates. A 3-day free trial of Pro is offered at launch with no card required.
Alternatives
- NoWaste — Requires manual entry of every item, which the ShelfLife site says causes most people to quit within a week.
- FridgePal — Relies on a barcode database so loose produce and store brands are invisible; ShelfLife estimates shelf life for items it has never seen.
- CozZo — Shut down because it was cloud-only; user data was lost, whereas ShelfLife is local-first and exports on demand.
FAQ
Is ShelfLife free?
Yes. The free plan is $0 forever and tracks up to 25 items. Pro is optional at $6.99/month or $59.99/year, and every install includes a 3-day free Pro trial with no card required.
Does ShelfLife work offline?
Yes. The app runs fully offline: your inventory is stored on your device first, and it has a local USDA dataset as a fallback for expiry estimates. Syncing happens when you want it to.
What happens if ShelfLife shuts down?
The site promises that every plan has one-tap JSON and CSV export, your inventory lives on-device first, and the export format will be published so another app could read your data.
ShelfLife is coming to iOS and Android. The website includes a live demo of the receipt scanner that runs in your browser, and early access is via a TestFlight build for waitlist members.
How accurate are the expiry dates?
ShelfLife doesn't rely on printed sell-by dates. It assigns a shelf life based on the item type, where you store it, and how fast your household eats, and it refines the estimate each time you mark something used or binned.
