The average American household spends roughly $500 per month on groceries. That number keeps climbing. But your phone already has the tools to fight back. The right combination of free apps can put $200 or more back in your pocket every single month without changing what you eat or where you shop. Here are the apps that actually deliver real savings and the stacking strategy that makes them work together.
Grocery prices have risen approximately 25 percent since 2020, and they are not coming back down. The USDA projects food-at-home prices to increase another 2.5 percent in 2026. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure data, the average American household now spends about $500 per month on groceries. For a family of four, the USDA moderate-cost plan puts that figure closer to $1,100 to $1,500 per month depending on the ages of the children.
Here is the good news: grocery spending is one of the most controllable expenses in your budget. And unlike five years ago, you now have a mature ecosystem of free apps competing to save you money. The trick is not picking one app. The trick is using several of them together, because they each target a different source of savings.
The apps in this guide fall into three categories: cashback apps that pay you after you shop, price comparison apps that help you find the lowest prices before you shop, and meal planning apps that reduce food waste so you buy less in the first place. Used together, they cover every angle of grocery savings.
Ibotta is the most popular grocery cashback app in the United States with over 50 million downloads. It works at more than 2,000 retailers including Walmart, Kroger, Target, Costco, Albertsons, Sam's Club, and most regional grocery chains. The premise is simple: you earn cashback on items you were already going to buy.
How it works: Before you shop, open the Ibotta app and browse available offers. Activate the ones that match items on your shopping list. After shopping, either scan your receipt with the app's camera or link your store loyalty card for automatic cashback matching. If you shop at Walmart, you can link your Walmart account directly and skip receipt scanning entirely. Your purchases are automatically matched against active offers.
What you earn: Typical offers range from $0.25 to $5.00 per item. Ibotta frequently runs bonus offers and team challenges that boost earnings higher. Consistent users report earning $30 to $50 per month on regular grocery shopping. Power users who actively seek brand-specific offers can earn more.
Cashout: Once you accumulate $20, you can withdraw to PayPal, Venmo, or directly to your bank account. There are no fees for withdrawal. You can also redeem for gift cards.
Ibotta is the first app you should download because it has the largest retailer network and the most consistent offers. It is completely free with no subscription tier, no premium version, and no hidden costs. Ibotta makes money from the brands that pay for placement in the app, not from users.
The key to maximizing Ibotta is activating offers before you shop and checking the "Any Brand" offers, which give cashback regardless of which brand you buy. These are the easiest offers to redeem because you do not need to switch brands or buy anything special. Any Brand offers on common items like bread, eggs, milk, and produce can add up to $10 to $15 per trip without any behavior change.
Fetch Rewards is the lowest-effort grocery savings app available. Every receipt you scan earns points, regardless of what you bought or where you shopped. There are no offers to activate beforehand, no specific brands to buy, and no hoops to jump through. Just scan and earn.
How it works: After any shopping trip, open the Fetch app and snap a photo of your receipt. The app reads the receipt, identifies participating brands, and awards points. You earn a minimum of 25 points per receipt, but purchasing items from Fetch's partner brands earns significantly more. Special Offers boost individual items to thousands of bonus points.
What you earn: Regular grocery shoppers typically accumulate 10,000 to 30,000 points per month, depending on brands purchased. That translates to $10 to $30 in gift card value. Fetch also accepts receipts from restaurants, gas stations, hardware stores, and most other retail purchases, so your earning potential extends beyond groceries.
Cashout: Redeem points for gift cards starting at 3,000 points (roughly $3 value). Popular options include Amazon, Walmart, Target, Apple, Starbucks, and dozens more. The selection of gift cards is one of the largest among cashback apps.
Fetch Rewards is the perfect companion to Ibotta because you can scan the exact same receipt in both apps. Ibotta gives you cashback on specific items, and Fetch gives you points on the overall receipt. There is zero conflict between them. Scanning a receipt in Fetch takes about 5 seconds, and since every receipt earns something, there is no reason not to use it.
Fetch also runs referral bonuses and periodic promotions where specific products earn 5 to 10 times the normal points. Check the app's Special Offers section each week before shopping to see which brands are running boosted point promotions. You do not need to activate these offers. Just buy the item and scan the receipt.
Checkout 51 operates on a weekly offer cycle with new deals every Thursday. It covers groceries, household goods, and gas. The app has a clean, straightforward interface and its offer list does not overlap much with Ibotta, which makes it ideal for stacking.
How it works: Browse the weekly offers in the app. Buy qualifying items at any store. Upload a photo of your receipt. Checkout 51 verifies the purchase and credits your account. Offers range from brand-specific savings on items like Nivea, Welch's, Bounce, and Triscuit to broader category savings on produce and pantry staples.
What you earn: Individual offers typically range from $0.25 to $3.00 per item. Checkout 51 also runs weekly Pick of the Week offers on common produce like bananas, onions, or avocados where the cashback is a flat $0.25 to $1.00 regardless of brand. Gas savings offer up to $0.25 per gallon at participating stations.
Cashout: Minimum balance of $20 to cash out via check mailed to your address. The payout method is slower than Ibotta or Fetch, but the unique offers make it worth running alongside the other apps.
The biggest advantage of Checkout 51 is that its offers are largely different from Ibotta's. Where Ibotta might have a cashback offer on Tide detergent, Checkout 51 might have one on Bounty paper towels from the same shopping trip. By running both apps, you are effectively doubling the number of cashback opportunities per trip.
The produce offers are particularly useful because they are brand-agnostic. Every week there is at least one offer for common fruits or vegetables at any store. These small amounts add up meaningfully over the course of a month, especially for families buying produce multiple times per week.
Flipp is a different kind of grocery savings app. Instead of giving you cashback after you shop, it helps you find the best deals before you leave the house. Flipp aggregates weekly flyers, circulars, and ads from hundreds of stores near you into one searchable app. It is the digital replacement for those newspaper ad inserts.
How it works: Enter your zip code and Flipp shows you every weekly ad from stores in your area, including Walmart, Aldi, Kroger, Costco, Dollar General, Meijer, CVS, and hundreds more. You can search for specific items like "chicken breast" and Flipp shows you every store's price so you can shop where the deal is best. You can also add items to a shopping list within the app and Flipp will flag matching deals.
What you save: According to Flipp, users save an average of $46 per week on groceries by shopping the best advertised deals. Even conservative use, like checking Flipp for your top 5 most expensive grocery items each week, can redirect $20 to $40 per trip to the cheapest store for those specific items.
Extra features: Flipp integrates with store loyalty cards so you can clip digital coupons directly within the app. It also supports coupon matching where you can pair a manufacturer coupon with a store sale for maximum savings.
Flipp is most powerful when used at the beginning of your weekly shopping routine. Spend five minutes browsing the flyers for your regular stores and searching for your staple items. Many people discover that a different store has dramatically better prices on specific items they buy every week. Over the course of a month, shopping the flyers consistently saves $80 to $160 per household.
Flipp also helps with meal planning. If chicken thighs are on sale at one store and broccoli is discounted at another, you can plan your dinners around what is cheap this week rather than deciding first and paying whatever the store charges. This sale-driven meal planning approach is one of the most effective grocery savings strategies that people underuse.
Basket takes price comparison further than Flipp by showing you real-time, item-level prices at every store near you. Not just the sale items. Everything. The prices are crowd-sourced from the Basket community, meaning real shoppers update prices as they shop, creating a constantly refreshing database of local grocery prices.
How it works: Create your shopping list in the Basket app. Basket instantly shows you the total cost of your entire list at each nearby store. You can see exactly which store has the lowest total, or which combination of two stores gives you the best deal if you are willing to make two stops. Prices vary 30 to 40 percent between stores on any given week.
What you save: Basket users who compare prices before shopping report saving 15 to 25 percent compared to shopping at a single store. For a household spending $500 per month on groceries, that translates to $75 to $125 per month in savings, simply by knowing where items are cheapest.
Best for: Shoppers who have two or more grocery stores within reasonable driving distance. If you live in a suburban area with a Walmart, an Aldi, a Kroger, and a Costco all within 15 minutes, Basket shows you exactly how to split your list for maximum savings.
Basket is especially useful for catching unadvertised sales. Stores frequently discount items without putting them in the weekly flyer. These in-store markdowns only show up when someone in the Basket community scans the price. If you shop at popular stores in your area, the price data in Basket is usually quite current and reliable.
One practical approach: use Basket for your weekly staple items and Flipp for sale-driven purchases. Between the two apps, you have complete price visibility on both regular-priced and discounted items at every store near you. This combination alone can save $100 or more per month.
Mealime attacks grocery spending from a completely different angle: waste reduction. The average American household throws away 30 to 40 percent of the food it buys, according to USDA estimates. That is $150 to $200 per month going straight into the trash. Mealime eliminates most of that waste by generating precise, waste-minimizing meal plans with auto-generated grocery lists.
How it works: Tell Mealime your dietary preferences, household size, and any food allergies. The app generates a weekly meal plan with recipes designed to cook in about 30 minutes each. It then produces an exact grocery list for the entire week. The meal plans are intelligent: recipes share ingredients across multiple meals so nothing sits unused in the fridge. If Monday's recipe uses half a bunch of cilantro, Wednesday's recipe uses the other half.
What you save: Households that meal plan consistently spend 20 to 30 percent less on groceries than those that shop without a plan. For a $500 monthly grocery budget, that is $100 to $150 in savings. The primary savings come from three sources: eliminating impulse purchases, using every ingredient you buy, and avoiding duplicate purchases of items already in your pantry.
Pricing: The core Mealime app is free and includes a full library of recipes and meal planning tools. Mealime Pro costs $5.99 per month or $49.99 per year and adds features like nutritional tracking, advanced filters, and exclusive recipes. The free version is fully functional for basic meal planning and grocery list generation.
Mealime works best as the foundation of your weekly grocery routine. Build your meal plan on Sunday, export the grocery list, then cross-reference it against Flipp and Basket to find the best prices on the specific items you need. This three-step process (plan meals, compare prices, then shop) consistently produces the largest monthly savings of any approach.
Even if you do not follow the meal plans religiously, the grocery list feature alone is transformative. Having a precise list means you walk into the store knowing exactly what you need. You do not wander the aisles. You do not grab items that look good in the moment. You do not buy a second jar of mayo when there is already one in the fridge. That discipline, powered by the app, saves more money than any cashback offer.
Your grocery store's own app is one of the most overlooked savings tools. Store loyalty programs have moved almost entirely to digital apps, and the savings available through digital coupons and personalized offers are substantial. These loyalty apps stack perfectly with every cashback app because the savings are applied at the register before you even scan your receipt.
Kroger Plus is free and gives you access to over $600 worth of digital coupons each week. Load coupons to your loyalty card through the Kroger app and the savings apply automatically at checkout. You also earn one Fuel Point for every dollar spent on groceries, redeemable for up to $1 off per gallon at Kroger fuel stations. For a family spending $200 per week at Kroger, that is 200 fuel points per week, which translates to $0.20 off per gallon every fill-up.
Kroger Plus works at all Kroger-owned banners including Ralphs, Fred Meyer, Harris Teeter, King Soopers, Fry's, QFC, and Smith's. The digital coupons are the same across banners. Important note: as of 2025, Kroger points expire at the end of the month after you earn them, so redeem fuel points regularly.
Albertsons for U is a points-based loyalty program where you earn one point per dollar spent. At 100 points, you get $1 off groceries. You also earn 2 points per dollar spent on gift cards, and Albertsons periodically runs multiplier events where you earn 2 to 5 times the normal points. The app also has weekly digital coupons that stack with manufacturer coupons. Albertsons for U works at Safeway, Vons, Jewel-Osco, ACME, Shaw's, and all other Albertsons-owned banners.
Target Circle is free and offers personalized deals based on your shopping history, plus 1 percent back on every Target purchase (excluding gift cards). Target also runs regular "Target Circle Week" events with steep discounts on groceries. For households that buy a portion of their groceries at Target, the Circle app adds meaningful savings that compound with Ibotta and Fetch receipts.
Walmart+ costs $12.95 per month or $98 per year. It includes free grocery delivery on orders over $35, fuel discounts at Walmart and partner gas stations, and early access to promotions. For households that spend $200 or more per month on groceries at Walmart and also buy gas frequently, the fuel savings alone can offset the membership cost. Walmart+ is the only paid program on this list, but the delivery convenience and fuel discounts make it worthwhile for heavy Walmart shoppers.
Here is a realistic breakdown of what each app saves per month for a household spending roughly $500 on groceries. These numbers assume consistent use but not extreme couponing behavior. Conservative estimates represent casual use, and high estimates represent active optimization.
| App | Type | Cost | Monthly Savings (Low) | Monthly Savings (High) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ibotta | Cashback | Free | $20 | $50 |
| Fetch Rewards | Points/Gift Cards | Free | $10 | $30 |
| Checkout 51 | Cashback | Free | $8 | $25 |
| Flipp | Deal Finding | Free | $30 | $80 |
| Basket | Price Comparison | Free | $20 | $60 |
| Mealime | Meal Planning | Free | $30 | $60 |
| Store Loyalty App | Digital Coupons | Free | $20 | $50 |
| Total | Free | $138 | $355 |
The low estimate of $138 per month assumes you use each app casually without going out of your way. The high estimate of $355 per month assumes you actively check all apps before each shopping trip, plan meals around sales, and redeem every available offer. Most consistent users land somewhere in the $180 to $250 range, which is where the "$200+ per month" headline comes from.
Notice that the price comparison and meal planning apps (Flipp, Basket, Mealime) account for the largest savings. Cashback apps give you money back on purchases you already made, but price comparison apps prevent you from overpaying in the first place. The two approaches are complementary, which is why using both types together produces the best results.
Get free budget trackers, meal planning templates, and money-saving checklists designed to work alongside your grocery apps.
Get Free Tools →The real power of grocery savings apps is not in using one of them well. It is in stacking all of them together in a simple weekly workflow. Here is the exact routine that consistently saves $200 or more per month. It takes about 20 minutes per week.
This entire process becomes second nature within two or three weeks. The Sunday prep takes 10 to 15 minutes. The post-shopping receipt scanning takes about 2 minutes. For less than 20 minutes per week, you save $200 or more per month. That is an effective hourly rate of over $600. No coupon book comes close.
Ibotta's Any Brand offers give you cashback on categories like "any bread," "any eggs," or "any milk" regardless of which brand you choose. These are free money because you were buying these items anyway. Always activate every Any Brand offer before you shop. They often pay $0.25 to $1.00 per item and they stack with store loyalty coupons.
If your store has a fuel rewards program, strategically time larger purchases. Buying a $25 gift card at Kroger earns 2x fuel points. Filling prescriptions at the in-store pharmacy earns bonus points. Some weeks, Kroger runs 4x fuel point events on gift cards. Buying a $100 Amazon gift card during a 4x event earns 400 fuel points, which is $0.40 off per gallon on your next fill-up. If you fill a 15-gallon tank, that single purchase saves you $6 in fuel.
Most stores allow you to use one store coupon and one manufacturer coupon on the same item. Your store loyalty app provides store coupons. Ibotta and Checkout 51 function as manufacturer rebates. This means a $3 box of cereal with a $0.75 store coupon, a $1.00 Ibotta rebate, and Fetch Rewards points could net you the cereal for under $1 effective cost. This triple-stack is completely legitimate and is how experienced savings shoppers routinely cut their bills by 40 percent or more.
Loss leaders are items stores sell at or below cost to get you in the door. Flipp makes it easy to spot these deals because they are the featured items in store flyers. When chicken breast hits $1.99 per pound or ground beef drops to $2.99 per pound, buy several packages and freeze them. You save the discounted price now and avoid paying full price later when you need protein for a weeknight dinner.
Fetch Rewards accepts receipts from restaurants, gas stations, convenience stores, pet stores, hardware stores, and most other retail purchases. Every receipt earns at least 25 points, and many non-grocery receipts contain partner brands that earn bonus points. Scanning every receipt from every store is a habit that adds an extra $5 to $10 per month in gift card value for almost zero effort.
Apps save you money only if you do not spend the savings on additional impulse items. Set a clear monthly grocery budget based on your household size and location. Track your actual spending against that budget each week. When the apps save you $50 in a week, that $50 should stay in your account, not get spent on premium ice cream because you "saved so much." The goal is to reduce total spending, not to spend the same amount on fancier items.
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