SuperPlan: Stocard Founders Return With a New Shopping List App
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After loyalty cards comes the grocery list: The team behind the loyalty card app SuperCards, most of whom built Stocard, has just launched SuperPlan. The free app for iPhone and Android combines a shared shopping list with a recipe collection and uses A.I. to turn recipes from social media, cookbooks and handwritten cards into ingredient lists.
“The shopping list itself is free without limits: create, share, sync. That costs us very little per user. The real costs come from the A.I. features, meaning voice input and photo and recipe import. For those there is a weekly free allowance, and we expect around 90 percent of users to stay on the free tier for good. Anyone who needs more takes Premium,” said Mark Himmelsbach, a co-founder who works from Gmunden, Austria. At launch in Austria, Premium costs €1.99 per week or €29.99 per year, each with a one-week free trial. “We don’t bill per token, Premium is a flat price. We don’t disclose specific margins. But the subscription is calculated to cover the A.I. costs of Premium users and to support the free offering, without any advertising.”
Recipes From TikTok, Cookbooks and Grandma’s Index Cards
The basics cover what users expect from a shopping list app: suggestions while typing, thousands of products with icons and automatic sorting into categories, even for items the app does not recognize. Lists are shared via link, all members see changes in real time, and the app also works offline.
The real focus is A.I. Recipes can be imported from Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest or websites, while cookbook pages and handwritten recipe cards are simply photographed. According to the makers, the app can even read yellowed pages and handwriting. With one tap, the ingredients land on the shared list, scaled to the desired number of servings.
The list can also be filled by voice, via a forwarded WhatsApp message or voice note, or with a photo of a paper list. The team trained the speech recognition specifically for shopping: “Uh, five tomatoes, no, six, and milk” is meant to become six tomatoes and milk. No account is required, and there are no ads.
From Stocard to Klarna to SuperCards
SuperPlan is made by Berlin-based Super Apps Studio GmbH, founded by David Handlos (C.E.O.), Florian Barth and Mark Himmelsbach. In 2011, Mr. Handlos co-founded Stocard in Mannheim, Germany, with Björn Goß. The app put loyalty cards on smartphones and reached around 60 million users worldwide. Mr. Himmelsbach helped build it from the start.
In 2021, the Swedish fintech giant Klarna bought the start-up for about €110 million. Klarna mainly used Stocard as a gateway to millions of users for its own shopping and payments offering, folded the brand into Klarna and eventually shut down the standalone Stocard app. Stored loyalty cards moved to the Klarna app, which frustrated many users because of its focus on buy now, pay later and data sharing.
Former Stocard staff stepped into that gap with SuperCards, an ad-free loyalty card app that requires no registration and now has around four million users. SuperPlan is the studio’s second product and follows the same principle: no account, no ads, revenue from an optional subscription.
Established Competition
Breaking in will not be easy. In German-speaking countries, the Swiss app Bring! has dominated for years, also offering shared lists, recipes and partnerships with platforms such as Chefkoch. Internationally, SuperPlan competes with apps like AnyList, Listonic and ReciMe, which specializes in importing recipes from social media. Supermarket chains also offer their own apps with shopping lists. SuperPlan is betting that A.I. recognition of voice, photos and handwriting will make the difference in everyday use.
