A free grocery list app with no account and no ads
If the sign-up wall or the ads pushed you off the popular grocery apps, here is one built the opposite way.
If you have searched for a shared grocery list app, you have met the pattern. The list itself is simple and mostly free. The catch is somewhere else: you have to make an account to share with the person you live with, or the free version carries ads, or the app quietly adds items you did not put on the list.
I built Grocery List as the version without any of that. This is an honest comparison, including the places where the paid apps genuinely do more.
Where the popular apps put the friction
Across the well-known shopping list apps (Bring!, AnyList, OurGroceries, Out of Milk, Listonic), sharing a list is usually free, but it is gated behind a mandatory account. Revenue comes from ads, some of which push sponsored items straight into your list, and from subscriptions for extras like recipes, meal plans, item photos, and removing the ads. The most common complaint is not a hard paywall on sharing. It is the sign-up you did not want and the ad load you did not agree to, sitting on top of a simple list.
How Grocery List is different
- No account. You share a list with a link or a QR code, phone to phone. There is nothing to sign up for.
- No ads, ever. Your list contains only what you typed. Nothing sponsored, nothing auto-added.
- Your data stays with you. Shared changes pass between your phones encrypted end to end, through free public relays I do not run and cannot read.
- No paywall. The whole app is the free app. There is a donate link and nothing behind it.
Where the paid apps still do more
I would rather be straight with you than oversell. The big grocery apps have years of extra features: recipe import, meal planning, barcode scanning, aisle ordering tuned to specific stores, and desktop apps. Grocery List does one thing, the shared list, and does it without the account and the ads. If recipe planning is the reason you open one of the others, that app may still be the better fit for you, and that is fine.
Try it
Grocery List is on the App Store and Google Play, free, for iPhone and Android. It is open source, so every privacy claim above is something you can check rather than trust. It is supported by the people who use it: no ads, no subscription, just a donate link if it saves you enough hassle to be worth a few dollars.