Family Sharing — Shared Grocery List & Meal Plan Controls

Transferring household ownership

Only one Owner exists per household at any time. To transfer ownership: Owner opens Settings → Family → Transfer Ownership, selects a current Member, and confirms. The selected Member is immediately promoted to Owner with full admin rights; the previous Owner is demoted to Member. Transfer is irreversible without the new Owner's cooperation — if you need to reclaim ownership, the new Owner must initiate a second transfer back. Use transfer when: handing off household management to a partner, the primary account holder changes device ecosystems, or a household restructures after a move or separation.

Locking Instacart checkout and preventing accidental orders

The Owner can enable "Lock checkout to owner" in Settings → Family → Instacart. When locked: Members and Household Guests can build and edit the shopping list, but the "Shop on Instacart" button is disabled on their devices — only the Owner's session shows the live checkout button. Use this if: a teenager has Member access to add groceries but should not be able to place a $200 order, an au pair can see the list before a store run but should not be checking out digitally, or you want one person to review the combined list before anything goes to Instacart. Unlock at any time from the same screen.

Dietary profile merging — how household-wide restrictions work

Each of the up to 8 household members sets their own dietary profile in Account → Dietary Preferences. The household AI uses the union of all "applies to household" profiles: if one member flags a nut allergy, the shared AI chat and meal-plan calendar filter suggestions for that allergy across all 21 weekly meal slots — regardless of which member's session is active. The filter is a convenience, not a guarantee: if anyone in the household has a food allergy, always check the full recipe and the ingredient labels before cooking, because the AI can miss an ingredient. Per-member "personal only" restrictions apply only to that member's individual recipe suggestions and do not constrain the shared plan. Conflicts are visible: the AI shows a "Filtered for household restrictions" badge when a recipe was excluded on behalf of another member, so no one is surprised by missing results. To see which restrictions are active across the household, open Settings → Family → Dietary Restrictions.

Household lifecycle — member departure and data retention

When a member leaves (Settings → Family → Leave Household), or the Owner removes them (Settings → Family → Members → Remove): the departing member's personal recipe bookmarks and personal-only dietary preferences leave with them. The household retains the shared list, pantry inventory, and meal-plan calendar — items the departing member added are attributed to "Former member" in the activity feed. If the Owner leaves, the household is deleted and all shared data is purged from AislePrompt's servers within 30 days. Members are notified in-app when the household dissolves. To archive the shared shopping list before departing, export it from the Shopping List page before leaving.

Recovering from a sync conflict or missing update

Household data syncs in real time over a WebSocket connection. If a member's device loses connectivity while editing the shared list, edits buffer locally and sync automatically when connectivity resumes — typically within seconds of reconnection. The activity feed (Settings → Family → Activity) shows every edit in order with timestamps, so you can identify if a re-sync overwrote a recent change. To manually force a refresh: pull down to refresh on the Shopping List or Pantry page. If two members edited the same list item offline simultaneously, the last server-received write wins — the activity feed will show both edits so the discarded one can be restored manually.

Ready to shop together?

Once your household is set up, build one shared cart and send it to Instacart in one tap. Every household member's recipes and pantry subtractions feed into a single deduplicated list; the Owner reviews and checks out in one session. Build shared shopping list →

Works with every AislePrompt feature

Meal Plan → — share one week's calendar across all household devices · Shopping List → — one owner reviews before Instacart checkout · Pantry → — shared pantry subtracts owned ingredients from every member's cart · Kid-Friendly Dinners → — picky-eater recipes the whole household can agree on.

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