Hi everybody! I’m a developer from Germany and I made a recipe app called RecipeSesame. https://recipesesame.app/
I know you’ve probably seen a few of these apps already. You paste a link from a website, a reel from YouTube, Instagram or TikTok, or a post, or you take a photo, and the recipe lands in your cookbook.
This is the app I wish I’d had when I started cooking. I was living in a WG (a shared flat) back then, and we wanted to eat as well as we could for as little money as possible (the prices are for Germany for now). So I built it with a household in mind: you share the recipes, the shopping list and the meal plan with the people you live with, and everyone’s allergies and diets are saved so you can plan around them. When you have people over, you can make a gathering, and for a potluck, guests add what they’re bringing.
It runs in the browser because I switch between my phone and my computer all the time. It’s in German, English and Spanish because I speak those, and in French because I’m learning it. Greek is there because a friend helped me test the app, her mother wanted to use it too, so I added it for her.
Since this is Buy European, I want to be honest about what’s European and what isn’t. The data is saved in Frankfurt, the AI that reads the recipes is Mistral (France), and the sign-in emails go through Mailjet (France). But the hosting is Cloudflare and the database is Supabase, both US companies, and the CAPTCHA is from Cloudflare too. The European options I looked at all needed a monthly payment, and since this is a hobby I don’t earn anything from, that didn’t fit yet. I’d love to move over eventually.
There are no ads, no tracking cookies and no third-party analytics. It’s free, and the running costs are small enough that I cover them myself. If it ever grows to the point where that no longer works, I might add a paid option, but everyone already using it keeps what they have for free.
If you try it, I’d really like to hear what you think, especially if a recipe doesn’t import well. Or if there’s something you’d like it to do!
Disclaimer: I’m the developer of this app.
TLDR: relies heavily on non european infrastructure/services, but at least it is being disclosed
If you’re looking for a great open-source alternative – also built in Germany, also available hosted for a small fee: https://tandoor.dev/ (not affiliated)
This. Also OP’s app looks almost exactly like one of tandoors clients, https://github.com/kitshn-app/kitshn
Wow, it really is very similar. I hadn’t seen this app. I suppose that’s a result of using Material Design 3 guidelines… I think the same happened with Material Design 1 and 2 as well, all apps started to look the same.
There’s also KitchenOwl. Free to use, open source to srlf-host.
Looks a lot like cooked.wiki
There is also https://github.com/nextcloud/cookbook/ which is an exellent open source alternative.
Sehr kühl
Can’t find any source code, so this is probably not a free software project, but self-advertising of a product that will get monetized later.
Hope someone will prove me wrong.
Well, its in ‘Buy European’, not in ‘Free Software’. And it’s an app to steal recipes.
There’s also that risk of selling out, which is a common business model.
Hey! Yeah, you’re right, I should’ve gone with a different title. I originally built it for myself and my family, thought it turned out pretty well, and figured I’d share it. But, yes, you’re still right. I changed the title.
Like I mentioned in the post, there are no tracking cookies, ads or analytics. The costs are low right now, so I can cover them myself, even with a decent number of users. If a ton of people suddenly start using it, I might need to add some kind of paid option at some point, but everyone already using it keeps what they have for free. I also put that in the terms.
You can also export all your recipes at any time and not lose anything.
I think, in line with your transparency, you could publish hosting costs and accept donations to keep the lights on instead of implementing a paid tier. You may lose a lot of goodwill by doing what a lot of people would interpret as a freemium bait-and-switch.
Vibe coded I guess?
There’s a difference between telling Claude to code everything and having it help you while you question everything it does.
How is it different exactly? I don’t use any LLM coding stuff, so I am wondering.
I wouldn’t call it vibe coded, but yes, I do use AI while coding. I’ve been developing software for about 15 years, and nowadays I use AI to help me code faster. If you find something that doesn’t work, tell me and I’ll try to fix it as soon as possible.
So it is vibe coded. Just because you have experience in the field doesn’t change that the code is mostly created via vibes.
I didn’t look at the app, and I certainly won’t use non open source app, but there is difference between vibe coded and ai assisted. Maybe OP can share how exactly he uses the AI?
Sure, I’ll try to be as transparent as I can. In my experience as a software developer, over the years there’s been a lot of reinventing the wheel. Things like dialogs, menus, panels, lists, drawers opening and closing, etc. are pretty standard stuff. I use Vuetify for the basic Material Design components and Tailwind for styling, and sometimes getting the two to play nicely together means overriding Vuetify’s CSS, which can be pretty tedious. That’s the kind of thing I’m happy to let AI handle.
Another example, I recently added bulk deletion to the library. The whole flow around selecting multiple items, showing checkboxes, having a “select all” option, keeping track of what’s selected, etc. is such a common pattern that AI can put most of that together very quickly. For stuff like that, I don’t really see a difference in quality whether I write all of that myself or have AI help with it.
I write a lot of the text in the app myself, but I can be a bit too verbose, so AI helps me shorten and tidy it. The translations were done with AI and mostly checked by me, and the Greek one was also checked by my friend’s mother. I would like to add more European languages, but at the moment I don’t have a good way to verify them properly.
For things where the actual behavior matters more, like making sure users can only access what they’re supposed to, or that every ingredient ends up in a valid recipe step and nothing gets lost, I sometimes start by having AI write the tests. I go through those first and make sure they actually describe what I want the feature to do before building it, as in “test-driven development”. AI has a tendency to rewrite tests to match its own implementation if you let it, which is how you end up with bad code.
There are of course more examples, but that would probably go too far into detail. So yeah, AI helps me with development, and I still write and fix code myself. The parts that always stay with me are deciding what to build, how it should work and look, and making sure it actually behaves the way I intended.
This turned out to be longer than I expected, but I know this is a sensitive subject and I wanted to be as transparent as possible.
We might have different definitions of what vibe coding is, but fair enough. What’s your concern with it? If it’s quality or security, I’m happy to answer whatever you want to know.
Lemmy hates AI (and for good reason). Just something to keep in mind when posting here.
What’s your concern with it?
The means don’t justify the ends. Also it causes brain rot.
