CartTally, Auckland (2026)

24/06/2026

Planning dinners gets harder when your household has food rules.

Allergies, intolerances, gluten-free, dairy-free, picky eaters, strong dislikes, budget pressure, random pantry bits that need using up.

It adds up quickly.

I’m offering 5 free dinner-planning sessions for NZ families who are juggling this kind of thing.

It’ll be a simple 10 to 15 minute chat where we build one practical dinner plan and shopping list for next week, based on your actual household.

No need to test anything by yourself.

No sales pitch.

Just bring the messy real-life stuff:

• what people can’t eat
• what people won’t eat
• what you already have at home
• your rough grocery budget
• which nights need to be easy, leftovers, or takeaway

I’m building CartTally, a meal-planning tool for real NZ households, and these sessions help me understand what actually makes dinner planning easier.

You get a usable plan and shopping list.

I get to learn where the process helps and what still needs work.

Comment or message me if you’d like one of the 5 spots.

08/06/2026

CartTally is now in private alpha.

That means the product is no longer being judged by whether the screens exist. It’s being judged by whether real households can use it to plan dinner for an actual week.

The problem we’re working on is simple, but layered:

Budgets.
Allergies.
Dislikes.
Pantry leftovers.
School nights.
Supermarket reality.
The 5pm “what are we eating?” question.

CartTally is built around those constraints first. Not as a generic recipe app. Not as an AI toy. A practical meal planner for NZ households.

I’m looking for a few more alpha testers next week's meal plans, especially families, allergy/intolerance households, meal-kit quitters, and budget-conscious shoppers.

The ask is small: try the app, generate a weekly dinner plan, and tell me honestly where it helps or gets annoying.

Plus, as a bonus, if you are accepted as an alpha tester, you'll receive free CartTally Plus for life, once we launch. That's $9 a month, free forever, for 15 minutes of your time.

Comment or message us if you’re interested, or sign up at https://www.carttally.co.nz/

01/06/2026

Bit of a milestone for CartTally last Friday.

I opened the actual app up to the first full testers.

Not the waitlist, not a preview, not me clicking around on my own machine and convincing myself everything is fine.

Real people are now getting into it and trying to use it properly.

That’s a strange feeling after months of building it in spare hours around work, family, and the usual dinner chaos that started the whole thing in the first place.

A lot of the work leading into this wasn’t especially exciting from the outside.

Reviewed recipes.
Shopping list fixes.
Pantry behaviour.
Week switching.
Support paths.
A more honest approach to grocery estimates.

The pricing bit has probably been one of the bigger lessons.

I’d love CartTally to know the exact checkout total one day. But for this first tester release, the more useful goal is giving people a sensible estimate without pretending it’s perfect.

That feels like the right level of honesty for alpha.

The aim right now is pretty simple: help people build a week of meals that fits their household rules, uses what they already have where possible, and gives them a rough idea of the shop before they commit.

Still early. Still plenty to tidy up.

But getting it into real hands feels like a proper step forward.

Now I get to find out what survives contact with actual households.

04/05/2026

Last week’s CartTally work was mostly behind-the-scenes.

Not shiny new features, more the important boring bits.

Making meal plan rebuilds safer.
Improving error messages.
Tightening privacy checks.
Setting up backup and deletion processes before real households start testing.

Very glamorous stuff 😊

But CartTally deals with real household details: allergies, dislikes, pantry items, budgets, meal plans and shopping lists.

That everyday data still deserves care.

Because a meal planner that respects your rules should also respect your privacy, your time, and the fact that nobody needs extra app drama at 5pm.

-Jordan

30/04/2026

Budget-aware meal planning sounds like a maths problem.

This week, building CartTally, it felt much more like a translation problem.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to score recipes better, estimate grocery totals earlier, and nudge a weekly plan closer to budget without making it weird.

All useful work.

But before any of that can matter, the app has to understand that the way households describe food is not always how supermarkets sell it.

People say things like:
beef mince
ground pork
beef stock
tortillas
whatever’s in the pantry that’s close enough

Supermarkets, meanwhile, have their own naming, pack sizes, product variants, and a special talent for making simple ingredients look more complicated than they need to be.

A big chunk of this week went into tightening that translation layer inside CartTally.

Teaching the planner to better understand what an ingredient actually is, what it should match to, and when it should admit it is not confident enough yet.

That last part matters.

I did start using budget more directly in planning this week, but only softly.
Because if the pricing signal is still patchy, pretending it is precise is worse than being honest about the uncertainty.

That feels like the real product lesson.

If CartTally is going to help households plan around budgets, allergies, preferences, pantry stock, and the usual dinner-time chaos, it has to respect the messy way real kitchens describe food.

Turns out “meal planning that respects your rules” also means respecting the language behind those rules.

-Jordan

25/04/2026

“Broad” and “trustworthy” are not always the same thing.

That’s probably the clearest product lesson I had this week while building CartTally. Sometimes the app gets (temporarily) better by doing less.

I spent part of the week narrowing CartTally’s alpha test pricing data down to three Auckland stores and making that smaller setup more trustworthy.

Which is obviously less exciting than saying “look how much coverage we have”. But it’s also a lot more honest.

Because CartTally isn’t meant to be a demo. It’s meant to be useful in a real household. And in a real household, shaky pricing breaks trust fast.

If the shopping total feels off, or the store assumptions are fuzzy, people don’t just question the pricing. They start questioning the whole product.

Fair enough too.

None of it is especially flashy. But I’m increasingly convinced that this is where the real product work sits. In making sure the core promise will actually hold up when someone is tired, hungry, and trying not to blow the grocery budget.

That’s made CartTally feel clearer this week, not smaller.

-Jordan

19/04/2026

There’s a particular kind of dinner-time chaos I keep thinking about while building CartTally.

It’s just after 5pm. Everyone’s hungry. You technically have food in the house, but not quite the right food. One person won’t eat what you planned, another can’t, and somehow the simple plan from Sunday now needs renegotiating midweek.

That’s the moment I’ve been thinking about this week.

Because the more I work on CartTally, the clearer it gets that making a meal plan is only half the job.

The harder part is everything around it:
what’s already in the pantry
whether the week still fits the budget
which supermarket you actually shop at
and whether tonight’s meal is familiar, safe and fast enough to actually get on the table

A lot of this week went into tightening the connections between those pieces.

Not in a flashy new-feature sort of way. More in a “remove a few small annoyances so dinner feels less chaotic” sort of way.

The bigger shift was making CartTally behave more like one system:
pantry stock should affect the shopping list
store preference should affect price estimates
household settings should actually shape the plan
and the app should make tonight obvious, not make you go hunting for it

What’s become clearer is that dinner stress is mostly a coordination problem, not a recipe problem.

People don’t need a meal planner that looks clever. They need one that respects the rules they already live with, without making them repeat those rules across five different screens.

Oddly enough, the simpler the surface gets, the more capable the product feels.

Less clutter.
Less “figure it out yourself.”
More “here’s tonight, here’s the budget, here’s what your pantry already covers.”

-Jordan

16/04/2026

One thing became very clear while building CartTally this week:

For this project, making a meal plan is only half the job.

The tidy version sounds simple enough:
pick meals, spread them across the week, keep the budget in range. Sorted.

The less tidy version is everything that happens after that.

What’s actually in the pantry.
What got cooked.
What needs to come off the shopping list.
What looks like the same ingredient, but very much isn’t.
And whether the supermarket pricing is solid enough to trust in the first place.

A lot of this week went into tightening that side of the product:
pantry logic, shopping list syncs, cooked-or-not-cooked handling, and a slightly ridiculous amount of ingredient normalisation.

Proper glamorous startup stuff 😊

It also led to one useful decision: pulling back supermarket coverage in places where the pricing confidence just wasn’t good enough yet.

That felt like the right call.

Because more coverage isn’t automatically a better product. If the numbers can’t be trusted, the plan can’t be either.

The clearer CartTally gets, the more I think the value isn’t in producing a nice-looking weekly plan.

It’s in building a planning system that still holds up once real life gets involved.

Budget. Pantry. Safe meals. Allergies. Preferences. The usual dinner-time chaos.

That’s the bit I’m trying to get right.

If meal planning apps usually fall over for your household, I’d be curious which part breaks first. Let me know in the comments — it might just make its way into CartTally.

-Jordan

CartTally

24/06/2026

08/06/2026

01/06/2026

04/05/2026

30/04/2026

25/04/2026

19/04/2026

16/04/2026

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