Show HN: Recipe Shelf – A recipe manager I built after a year of solo dev
recipeshelf.ai
recipeshelf.ai
I tried existing apps but couldn't find one that handled all my use cases well - especially importing from different sources reliably.
What it does:
Scrape recipes from websites (currently supports 15 sites) and TikTok
Extract recipes from photos using OCR (GPT-4 Vision)
Manual entry for family recipes
Scaling and unit conversion
Search and organise everything in one place
Tech stack:
- Frontend: React Native Web + Expo
- Backend: Kotlin + Spring Boot
- Database: PostgreSQL
- Infrastructure: AWS (EC2, RDS, S3, CloudFront)
- OCR: GPT-4 Vision API
Built this while working full-time as a software engineer, so it's been a slow burn over the past year. Web is live now, mobile apps coming soon.
Happy to answer any questions about the tech or the journey. Would love feedback!
(Posting this while literally cooking dinner for my family - seemed fitting )
As someone who never opened tiktok, how does the app handles that? Do people even upload recipes on tiktok? I thought tiktok posts are mostly videos. So does it mean that it uses some AI model?
When you paste a TikTok link, we pull the video caption and try to extract ingredients/instructions from the text. If the creator wrote out the recipe in the description (or linked to their blog), it works really well.
But you're right - a lot of TikTok recipes are just "watch me cook" with no written recipe. In those cases, we save the video embed so you can still watch it directly in the app, add your own tags, favourite it, and keep it organised with your other recipes. Not as ideal as having the full recipe extracted, but at least it's not lost in your TikTok likes anymore.
For recipe cards shown visually in videos, you can screenshot and use our photo import feature - that one does use GPT-4 Vision to OCR the text.
Lmk if you have any other feedback!