culin
a kitchen diary. paste a link, share from safari, or photograph the page. cooking mode walks you through dinner.
5
strategies
4
surfaces
3
languages
what it is
a recipe app built around what people actually do with recipes: find one, save it, cook from it, and remember afterwards whether it was any good. paste a link, share in from safari, or photograph a page from a cookbook — culin keeps the ingredients and the steps and drops the life story. cooking mode walks you through dinner with the screen kept on and the timers already wired to the steps that need them.
the hard part
what took the longest
extraction. not the demo — a clean json-ld recipe site parses in an afternoon. the months went into the long tail: pages with no structured data, recipes buried under an essay about someone's grandmother, paywalled articles, a photograph of a stained cookbook page. five strategies run in order and the user is never asked to try again a different way. the fallbacks are invisible.
what we kept
reusable in the next one
- 01
a five-strategy extraction pipeline that falls through structured data, html heuristics, and a signed-in cloud extractor without re-asking the user.
- 02
a global recipe cache so a url is extracted once for everybody — which is why free users make the service cheaper to run rather than more expensive.
- 03
a discovery feed built only from what enough distinct people independently saved and cooked, so it exposes nobody.
what it proved
one honest sentence
the extraction is what looks impressive; what is worth defending is that the cooking loop works without an account and keeps none of your behaviour.
from the build
5 screens
what it costs
free covers almost everything: saving, cooking, sync, widgets, siri, and any recipe page your phone can read by itself. the meter sits on one thing — the ai call for a page nothing can parse and nobody has extracted before — and it allows five a month. past that, culin plus is $2.99 a month, sold one month at a time. no annual plan, and no free trial: the free tier is the trial.
built with
built after hours by aksial · oslo