I posted the first version of OnlyRecipe here about four years ago [1], and the response was incredible. The feedback in that thread shaped a lot of what I wanted to build next. That initial momentum proved that the core problem (ads, life stories, and clutter on recipe blogs) needed a solution.
Progress since then has been slower than I hoped — I had some health issues and was building on and off — but I kept coming back to this project because I genuinely love working on it. I’ve been working on the project on and off, fitting development in whenever I could. This post represents a huge personal milestone.
Here’s what’s new after all this time:
Import from Videos: Import directly from TikTok, Instagram, Youtube and Facebook videos
Import from Handwritten recipes: Import from handwritten notes and screenshots
Unit Conversion: A highly-requested feature. Instantly convert US Customary (cups/oz) to Metric (grams/ml) for any extracted recipe.
Grocery Lists: Consolidate ingredients from multiple saved recipes into a single, clean shopping list.
Meal Plan: Plan your weekly meals in advance
Controls: Full recipe editing, PDF export, printing, and cross-device sync
Mobile-First Design: While the web view (linked above) is great for quickly seeing the result, the mobile apps have dedicated native controls for cooking mode (e.g., screen stay-awake, timers, and offline access).
In-App Browser: Directly import from any site within the app and many more...
To see these features in action quickly (small gif/videos), check it out on the landing page [2]
The link above is a deep link to a live demo on the web app.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the new utility features and the performance of the parser! Try it out here [5]
Very cool! it does get a bit confused about number words that aren't amounts, like "3 large russet potatoes, peeled and halved lengthwise" becomes "3 large russet potatoes, peeled and cut in 0.50 lengthwise" which when scaled up becomes "cut in 1 lengthwise"
Very minor point, in the grand scheme of things: when converting measurements from imperial to metric, I would be astonished if many recipes need more than two significant figures. When the recipe says "391.32 gram strained greek yogurt" I would not expect disaster to befall me if I only supplied 391.31g.
A more major point is that I don't seem to be able to select text to copy and paste. I had to type out "391.32 gram strained greek yogurt" like some sort of caveman. And that makes me wonder what a screen reader would make of it...
For recipes, I prefer to use approximate round figures when talking in terms of metric and American customary. So, 1 fl oz is 30 ml, a pound of flour is 450 g, etc.
These are much easier to measure, scale, and remember. There are very few contexts where minute differences matter, and I don't think you're going to find a material crossover figure between those that want recipe help and those that are working on the kind of stuff where it matters.
This reminds me of making a trip to a jeweler when I was < 10 years old, and noticing that they had a weighing scale that seemed to be down to decimal points of a gram (which I guess counts when you're weighing gold, etc).
And the numbers kept changing even when the scale was empty. I think I had a whole conversation with my grandpa about why that was happening, and we came up with "probably just variations in air/breeze around the scale causing them to change"
No idea if that's actually what it was, but it's plausible if you're doing sub-gram weighing?
Also, depending on the ingredient, it makes more sense to use cups as a measurement of volume, not mass, when converting to metric. E.g. liquids, yoghurt etc.
Another thing: although not strictly metric, but European recipes also use tablespoon and teaspoon as measurements for smaller volumes, so no need to convert this.
Just my two cents, other than that very nice work!!
An Apple press release about how much gold they could recover from recycled iPhones pissed me off so much. And all the "journalists" just copied and pasted the number with too many significant digits...
It said "Apple recovered 2204lbs of gold" from recycled iPhones. Guess who just did a plain conversion from a tonne (1000kg) to lbs.
The whole environmental report from Apple had more numbers, and you could clearly see that they were all converted from metric to imperial and made to look really precise...
"We recovered two thousand and four pounds of gold!" sounds a lot more precisely calculated than "we recovered about 1000kg of gold" ("Not 2203lbs, not 2205lbs, but 2204lbs!"). And no journalist caught this...
This is amazing, and at first glance it is going to solve many of my problems. I see offers to start a free trial but nothing about pricing. The sign up page doesn't work well with my password manager, I imagine you need to add auto fill hints to the textboxes, looks like your using flutter, so add these to each textbox you want to autofill: https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/material/TextField/autofillH..., it should also work with mobile
The app looks very nice. Small suggestions: Show the price of the premium plan when not logged in. Many users may not entertain an app depending on the price, and logging in shouldn't be needed to see it.
Also the ability to halve recipes would be great, sometimes you just want to make less.
Should the measurements be included in the instructions or just left out to avoid that? Instead of "add 1/2 teaspoon of ingredient", just say "add ingredient".
growing up, we had the old red/white gingham Betty Crocker cookbook where the scaled measurements were written in the book. the instructions never had any of the measurements in them. based on that, it just feels natural to the point of adding the scaling into the instructions seems overly complicated. just took a look at couple of other recipe examples, and they all leave out the measurements in the instructions.
It's great to see other people working on this. It's a problem that needs solving, and you've solved it in a meaningful way. I have been building https://spoonme.kitchen/ for a couple of years now (but with a different focus) to help solve this problem and a few others that are meaningful to me.
One aspect that I've been really wrestling with is how can we make the end user experience of seeing a recipe better, while still providing meaningful income to the recipe creators who labor so much to share their stuff with us. I'd be interested in your thoughts on this. That to me would be the very meaningful, positive change: that end users get a better experience, and creators get paid. That's been my overarching goal and motivation.
- Browser history seems to go in a circle (at least in Chrome); try use the browser's native "back" arrow a few times after clicking through the link you shared from HN.
- Transition animations and element "load-in" animations make the whole thing feel slow and hard to use. As it is, I'm frustrated trying to look through recipes or moving through pages.
I think it’s first time I’ve seen stuff like tablespoon, teaspoon, cup converted when changing to metric. These are very normal units to use in Europe when cooking. We don’t measure teaspoons by the grams when we make food. If measuring flour or something then of course grams would make sense.
Are you still taking suggestions? You should have a "random recipe" button that loads something random from your database. Right now, your product is very one-dimensional: Someone has a specific problem, they find your solution, they use it. But, adding another dimension for people who don't have that problem is a good idea. And I think a random recipe button will naturally open you to finding what that second dimension is.
Funny timing, I've been building something like this for my own use -- but your feature list has everything I wanted :) How much do you charge? Would love to know without downloading an app
This is great, but it seems to be missing the requisite 5000 word backstory detailing the author's summer trips to their grandma's farmhouse where the recipe originated or the vacation to a foreign land where the author had a personal encounter with the dish's chef who, after much cajoling, revealed the secret recipe. Without the backstory, each recipe feels ungrounded and detached from time, place, and even reality itself.
59 comments
[ 0.15 ms ] story [ 1428 ms ] threadI posted the first version of OnlyRecipe here about four years ago [1], and the response was incredible. The feedback in that thread shaped a lot of what I wanted to build next. That initial momentum proved that the core problem (ads, life stories, and clutter on recipe blogs) needed a solution.
Progress since then has been slower than I hoped — I had some health issues and was building on and off — but I kept coming back to this project because I genuinely love working on it. I’ve been working on the project on and off, fitting development in whenever I could. This post represents a huge personal milestone.
Here’s what’s new after all this time:
Import from Videos: Import directly from TikTok, Instagram, Youtube and Facebook videos
Import from Handwritten recipes: Import from handwritten notes and screenshots
Unit Conversion: A highly-requested feature. Instantly convert US Customary (cups/oz) to Metric (grams/ml) for any extracted recipe.
Grocery Lists: Consolidate ingredients from multiple saved recipes into a single, clean shopping list.
Meal Plan: Plan your weekly meals in advance
Controls: Full recipe editing, PDF export, printing, and cross-device sync
Mobile-First Design: While the web view (linked above) is great for quickly seeing the result, the mobile apps have dedicated native controls for cooking mode (e.g., screen stay-awake, timers, and offline access).
In-App Browser: Directly import from any site within the app and many more...
To see these features in action quickly (small gif/videos), check it out on the landing page [2]
The link above is a deep link to a live demo on the web app.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the new utility features and the performance of the parser! Try it out here [5]
[1] Original post from Jan 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29795482
[2] Landing Page: https://get.onlyrecipeapp.com
[3] iOS App: https://apps.apple.com/in/app/only-recipe/id1602130759
[4] Android App: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nsqr.onlyr...
[5] Web app: https://onlyrecipeapp.com
A more major point is that I don't seem to be able to select text to copy and paste. I had to type out "391.32 gram strained greek yogurt" like some sort of caveman. And that makes me wonder what a screen reader would make of it...
These are much easier to measure, scale, and remember. There are very few contexts where minute differences matter, and I don't think you're going to find a material crossover figure between those that want recipe help and those that are working on the kind of stuff where it matters.
And the numbers kept changing even when the scale was empty. I think I had a whole conversation with my grandpa about why that was happening, and we came up with "probably just variations in air/breeze around the scale causing them to change"
No idea if that's actually what it was, but it's plausible if you're doing sub-gram weighing?
Another thing: although not strictly metric, but European recipes also use tablespoon and teaspoon as measurements for smaller volumes, so no need to convert this.
Just my two cents, other than that very nice work!!
It said "Apple recovered 2204lbs of gold" from recycled iPhones. Guess who just did a plain conversion from a tonne (1000kg) to lbs.
The whole environmental report from Apple had more numbers, and you could clearly see that they were all converted from metric to imperial and made to look really precise...
"We recovered two thousand and four pounds of gold!" sounds a lot more precisely calculated than "we recovered about 1000kg of gold" ("Not 2203lbs, not 2205lbs, but 2204lbs!"). And no journalist caught this...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/apple-ton-of-gold-recycling_n... including a link to the full report. Appropriately from a website cosplaying as journalism
When I sign up, I get an error when confirming my email: This site can’t be reached The webpage at https://api.onlyrecipeapp.com/?code=XXX
Good work, looks very promising.
Also the ability to halve recipes would be great, sometimes you just want to make less.
The linked recipe is a great example. The 1/2 teaspoon in step 1 is never modified regardless of the scale of the recipe.
Also scale should go below 1 (like .5).
growing up, we had the old red/white gingham Betty Crocker cookbook where the scaled measurements were written in the book. the instructions never had any of the measurements in them. based on that, it just feels natural to the point of adding the scaling into the instructions seems overly complicated. just took a look at couple of other recipe examples, and they all leave out the measurements in the instructions.
One aspect that I've been really wrestling with is how can we make the end user experience of seeing a recipe better, while still providing meaningful income to the recipe creators who labor so much to share their stuff with us. I'd be interested in your thoughts on this. That to me would be the very meaningful, positive change: that end users get a better experience, and creators get paid. That's been my overarching goal and motivation.
Some nits/notes:
- Browser history seems to go in a circle (at least in Chrome); try use the browser's native "back" arrow a few times after clicking through the link you shared from HN.
- Transition animations and element "load-in" animations make the whole thing feel slow and hard to use. As it is, I'm frustrated trying to look through recipes or moving through pages.
You have confirmed the two issues that others are also facing.
I'll definitely look into this
- instead of grams I would like also tell me how many americano coffee cups more or less than looking for scale.
- I wanna scale down - if serving is for 6 people i want to scale down to to servings
[comment about issue that is present in original recipe removed]