Product Launch
anonymous
1 points
1 comments
Posted29 days agoActive26 days ago
OnlyRecipe
onlyrecipeapp.commatureweb_appconsumers, home cooks
Key Features
recipe simplificationad removalcustomizable serving sizes
Tech Stack
JavaScript
Key Features
Tech Stack
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]
[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
- many recipe sites let you check/uncheck things you want to print. I'd love to print just [ name, ingredients, instructions ] without [ photo, metadata/servings/nutrition/etc. ]. I much prefer one page recipes to two pages.
- on desktop, some text-break like "6 servings" breaks to 2 lines
Thank you for pointing it out
There are many learnings:
1. The most unexpected thing that I learned was the absolute nightmare it is to set up subscriptions.
I initially thought it would be a simple task. I started off with writing APIs and webhooks for Play store and App store.
But then as I got into the specifics things got complicated very quickly.
The combinations of subscriptions (monthly/yearly, AI and non-AI), cancellations, cross device subscription sync, how to handle trials, how to manage subscription states of users, and then when users upgrade, that's another few cases to handle.
There were just too many cases to handle.
I then just used a third-party provider (RevenueCat). They have handled all the complexities beautifully.
2. Supabase self-host is another nightmare in itself. Just the sheer amount of configs needs (through the .env file) is insane. They have intentionally made it so difficult to configure.
3. Setting up SMTP and sending emails is actually a very tiring and cumbersome process. AWS SES is just too much work. Mainly the domain reputation (emails always landing in spam) and also there are not many providers that give a generous trial.
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...
Regarding selection of text, that has been a problem with flutter. I will find a way to make it selectable.
There is an alternative. You can share the recipe or click print. There you would be able to select it.
Or, you could share the recipe and it would be copied to your clipboard.
I know that is not exactly what you want, but it will solve the purpose for now.
I'll fix it soon. Apologies.
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.
But-- if you use weight measurements and attend to precision, you'll have to adjust a lot less and you'll come much closer to the best possible output.
King Arthur Flour have a short video[0] demonstrating the wildly different weight measurements from measuring a "cup" (the same cup size across samples).
Measuring liquids by volume is totally fine because you generally won't get a large difference between two different cups of water (although I still generally measure that by weight as a personal preference).
For things like sauces or marinades, you use a much smaller amount, and approximate is generally fine.
To be clear, I'm not disagreeing with your general premise, everything would be much easier if all recipes used weights for powder-like-ingredients. But recipes that actually have weights listed are few and far between, I find.
Every recipe on King Arthur that you linked has weights.
I realize how I sound, but there is a very big difference in a couple of percentages of flour, and you'd definitely mess up a beginner with the difference with the amount of flour.
Especially for bread where saturation percentage is important, weight/mass measurements is absolutely necedsary.
It's not like scooping out rice or sugar, where a cup is a cup (assuming you're careful to use a measuring cup and fill it exactly level).
The issue is that flour is quite compressible. So if you've opened a fresh bag and scooped out a cup from the top, you'll get quite a different amount than if you dig in the cup and compress the flour against the side of the bag.
It's not like scooping out rice or sugar, where a cup is a cup, assuming you're careful to use a measuring cup and fill it exactly level.
I'm not sure of the exact error margins (there is research on these things though if you care to look) but at a guess I'd say you should expect 15% error margins on scooping white flour even if you're extremely careful to fill the measuring scoop to the same level each time. Probably a bit less on heavier flours.
Note, I run a bakery, although I'm not a baker myself. But I am the one focused on making sure we have repeatable processes, as much as that's possible for sourdough!
Volume measurements are extremely innacurate and should be avoided for pretty much everything in baking, except maybe water. Not a big deal if you're baking at home - bread with +-15% flour will be totally edible - but if you want repeatable bread quality, use a scales with accuracy to 0.1g. You can buy one for $20 that's good enough for home use.
If you're going to weigh even one thing, weigh the salt. Small variations can have a big effect on yeast activity and final bread flavor. Volume measurements of salt are not at all accurate because crystal sizes vary a lot. People assume (even some bakers that I've met!) that salt is just added to bread for flavor, but it's more like a chemical reaction rate control dial, and you need to be very accurate in how much you turn that dial.
https://foodwishes.blogspot.com/2010/03/how-to-measure-cup-o...
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?
This was a scale in a jeweler in India. It might have been in the late 80s or mid-90s. I might be misremembering too. So take my anecdote with a grain of salt.
This seems likely to me.
Oh, come on. Surely the scale wasn't that precise.
Mine takes a little while to notice when I'm adding something like a tenth of a gram of yeast to a recipe.
Yes, even dust particles landing on the scale can impact the reading, which is why when you're measuring really small things and want to be precise, you usually have a little glass/plastic cube around the entire thing too.
Also frequently used for people who measure drugs for various purposes.
These weighing instruments with draft shields are usually called analytical balances: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_balance
But with such scales, low sample rates and averaging are key.
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!!
Hmmm... What kind of cup? :-)
US "legal" cup (240ml) US customary cup (246,6ml) metric cup (150ml) UK cup (170,5ml)
1. People are bad at measuring volume. This has been tested. There is much more variance in amounts measured by volume than be weight. See "science and cooking" (ferran adria).
2. Using a scale means doing a lot fewer dishes! (measuring cups, spoons, etc.)
3. It's faster, try it!
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.
That's a reverse proxy configuration error. I just fixed it.
Please try registering again.
Chef John doesn't
This page probably does not have the standard recipe attributes that are needed for parsing the recipe.
I am adding a fallback mechanism for such cases. The text will be parsed using LLM like ChatGPT.
Should be released by tomorrow. Cheers!
I am fixing many such issues right now. Should be at par with the mobile apps soon.
I have actually added same transition as mobile apps. But there shouldn't be lags ideally. I'll have a look.
Also the ability to halve recipes would be great, sometimes you just want to make less.
Will make these changes and release soon.
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.
1. I'll often use the ingredients list (and quantities there) before cooking to ensure that I have everything I need ahead of time. Depending on what ingredient it is, I might not mise en place it. In those cases, a step that says "add ingredient" would require me to go reference the list in the beginning, losing a bit of context.
2. It's not often, but I've followed a few recipes that require a particular ingredient in 2 different steps in different amounts.
Example: https://imgur.com/7qXRNTH
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
Conversion, Scaling, and Measurement
Conversion to weights from volume (e.g., converting '1 cup of flour' to grams). One developer noted they'd look into generic conversion feasibility.
Scaling a recipe (e.g., adjusting ingredients for 1.5x or 2x the batch size).
Unit Choice: Offering a clear choice between metric and imperial units.
Unit Specificity: The ability to differentiate between US and non-US cups for accurate conversions.
Data Structure: Displaying ingredient data with consistent units in a database to enable easy batch size adjustments and visualization of value changes.
Structured Data and Presentation
C4E Format: Converting recipes to the format used on Cooking For Engineers.
Process Visualization: Displaying the entire recipe process using Gantt charts or a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) / graphviz to illustrate dependencies between steps.
SEO/Integration: Incorporating JSON-LD support for better recipe recognition and advanced features.
Printability: Generating dedicated print-friendly pages.
Standard Layout: A simplified, standardized layout for better readability across all recipes.
Sharing: A feature for sharing recipe "image cards" (screenshots) with friends.
Management, Search, and Tools
Shopping List: Creating a grocery list from the scraped ingredients.
List Filtering: The ability to exclude common ingredients (salt, pepper, olive oil) from the automatically generated shopping list.
Nutrition: Generating automatic nutrition labels.
Personal Database: The capability to ingest every recipe from every cookbook into a personal, searchable database.
Search Function: Allowing search for recipes instead of just requiring a URL input.
Sync/Backup: Enabling server-sync and export/import of recipes.
Timers: The option to set a timer linked to the time specified in a recipe step.
Custom Lists: Allowing users to create their own categorization rules for ingredients on shopping lists.
Platform and UI
Dark Mode: Adding a dark mode for late-night cooking.
iOS Integration: Implementing a Safari extension feature for the iOS app to open recipe pages automatically within the app.
Video Parsing: The capability to parse recipes from YouTube URLs or videos.That's a great insight. I'd definitely look into it.
Thank you
Have a recipe of the day. Rotated per 24 hours.
So we can all enjoy and refine a recipe together
Thank you
https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1017089-maple-shortbread...
Outside of a story like that, there is no reason to include war in your recipe. Cooking is about nurturing and sustaining homeostasis. There is something fundamentally wrong about taking other people's suffering and making it about one self -- it is narcissistic which spoils like cookies made with butter after several weeks of travel.
I don't know if it's to prevent mass theft of content (oh no, the thieves would have to go through the text and cut off the stories. Although nowadays the biggest IP thieves have built systems to automate this..)
A ton of these sites were bought up and they all look the same now and run the multiple floating ads, especially a wide banner at the -bottom- which is a perfect misclick monetizer.
Not only has it a built-in recipe browser that will immediately extract the recipe from websites, but it can also OCR them from cookbook photos!
Do try out the new version and let me know what you feel about it.
I had planned only for Paprika app. But adding Plantoeat should be doable.
I'll keep you posted.
I created an account, but when I clicked on the confirmation link in the resulting E-mail, it took me to a log-in page that said, "Sign in to api.onlyrecipe.com:443.
I wasn't surprised when I used my sign-up info and got nothing but a Kong error for my troubles. So... looks like sign-up is not yet working.
Curious as to how you get around some of the anti-scraping measures like Cloudflare. I put in a recipe blog (https://www.maangchi.com) that usually blocks me with Cloudflare but your site was able to scrape it just fine.
My home IP has not been blocked yet since I regularly do human-like operations from it. Hehe.
But on a serious note, you can try services like Bright Data or Apify that have a ton of residential IPs. So if you see a cloudflare block page, just rotate the proxy.
But currently the only competition I consider is Paprika. They have been in this game for over a decade.
I am going to add recipe imports directly from Paprika soon too. For people who would migrate from Paprika to Only Recipe.
I know it's a long shot, but I am going for it. :)
Glad to hear it. Thank you. Do give this new version a try. It is wayyy better than the first one.
i dont have ingredient x, but i do have y, which is close enough
like, i just ran out of browb sugar, but i do have some melases or honey
Should be fixed soon.
I am looking into it.
Please make the recipe page scrollable with arrow keys or pgUp pgDn.
Get rid of the image so the entire list of ingredients is visible.
The metric conversion seems off as there are very different amounts for the number before the listed ingredient and after it (in parentheses)... I'd paste an example but your page does not allow text selection.
Make the text selectable.
We can't just guess the recipe's teaspoon standard and blindly convert everything to mL.
Suggestion: similar to what you've done with your HN link, it would be nice to have some suggested URLs in a dropdown on the homepage searchbox to give new visitors something to try immediately, to get a feel for what it does (without having to leave the site & find their own link to trial the functionality with).
Also - minor bug report: I've imported 1 recipe (by clicking your HN link) but the upsell popup tells me I've imported 4 recipes.
Also fixing the bug.
Thank you
https://onlyrecipeapp.com/recipe-details?canonicalUrl=https:...
- 12 ounces bread flour became just "12 ounce" - Yield of 2 dozen cookies became just "2 servings"
Also, not really a bug per se, but the site contains both metric and imperial measures already, and I see that you only take the imperial units and convert them on demand. For some of the measures, like for the butter, the difference is significant. Not huge, but enough to be noticeable.
All that said: this is pretty great. I've actually been thinking about making a recipe app for quite a while now, and I see the most interesting features I thought of you have implemented. Scraping recipes on demand, interactive timers, recipe scaling. Really cool!
Only idea I had that I don't see here is automatically estimating nutrients and calories. But that's probably for the best: When I tried making the aforementioned app, I started by diving right into that particular rabbit hole, and, well... I still don't have any recipe app to show for it :p Here be dragons!
Seriously. I also feel like you're owed an apology for having had to write this in the first place.
I'm coming at "figuring out the Kitchen" for what is almost the first time in my life in I-wish-I-were-in-my-mid-40s[0] and I'm thinking "The Internet in the Early 00s was pretty good for that." And then I fire up a browser on desktop while making a grocery list and once you filter for "things that are obviously AI Hallucinations representing partial recipes", I'm met with one or all of the following: (1) Pages and pages and pages of obviously made-up nonsense anecdotes about the discovery of this magical, uh, air fryer grilled chicken marinade, (2) a pretty haphazard set of instructions that don't bother to include ingredients separated with pleasant units and conversions, but hide them throughout with quantities like "a few tomatoes" here, "an onion" there, (3) which doesn't seem to impact the 4.8 stars after hundreds of "user ratings.". (4) And rather than help these miserable imprecise, ingredient-less recipes with pictures of what "until moist and brown" might appear, you're going to show me a bunch of chopped ingredients in separated bowls that I don't have and then a picture of it finished, delicately decorated in whatever-or-another sauce, and "HEY, here's some lady who's cooking something unrelated to the recipe in this neat little video window I popped up for you! Let's watch the top of her head and this bowl of something on mute for a little while!"
Good God, man, it's like they've optimized the design to break people with ADHD. Some sites were so bad, it felt like "the actual recipe I was looking for" was obfuscated on the page like sketchy sites will hide the "actual Download button" somewhere unexpected and give you a big green "Download" button that leads to revenue. And that's not even getting into the weird bad on some of these AI-churn sites. I end up opening a notepad on the side and refactoring the things that seem like they might work from time to time, but I popped a few recipes in there, including a Chili recipe that "barely had any problems other than layout and annoying cooking lady videos" and just turned it into the perfect representation of that recipe.
I don't know what the original feedback was, but beyond how clear and organized laid out the recipe, here's what I saw as really useful little touches (I'm half wondering if some were even intended): (1) Besides my affinity for circled numbers, I lose my spot when referring to recipes so I like to print out the ones I really like, laminate them, and mark 'em up with the whiteboard markers I have for fridge notes as I go, you gave me a wonderful spot for that -- I'm so prone to re-read/second-guess where I'm at when I need to "put a bunch of things together at the last moment", that was the first thing I noticed, (2) Your highlighting did the same thing for making my grocery list (I DoorDashed it, today) -- it's so much more readable and "easy to find my spot" the way it appears on my desktop compared to any other site, (3) Because of your choice positioning, I can scroll down slightly and see the ingredients and all of the instructions without having to touch this thing, again, while I'm cooking if I use the tablet in the kitchen.
Oh, and thank you for making it just work in the browser. I hate using my phone for this kind of thing and I'm not even crazy about using my tablet for it.
[0] The backstory being unexpected, but very much desired, custody change led to me cooking for my children all of the time, including one who struggles with weight. I was blessed without that struggle, I eat "whatever" atrociously (not picky), and about what I burn, I'm under-weight and my blood work is perfect. One of my kids is identical, just not the one that sounds exactly like 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.
[comment about issue that is present in original recipe removed]
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