Hello, I just launched Recipe Scaler - recipescaler.com/ - and it's exactly what it sounds like.

1Q. What do you think about the website? Any feedback on the design or glaring issues?
1A. The idea is good, but I believe you should be the google for recipes, you need to crawl list of recipes and list all different recipes to your users. It is really not that good to copy and paste a link to your web site, it is time consuming, there should be a faster way for this. You should write which websites do you support for parsing before a user tries to scale the recipe, users should save their lists and share, it should be a community of recipes. If you want to stick with this idea, than an extension would be great.

2Q. How should I monetize the website? (donation, paid users, ads?) Or should I keep the website free to show off the power of the api and sell the api to devs? Or both?
2A. I think you should go with the ads

3Q. I don't like the idea of using Google analytics to track users? Is it analytics mandatory step to successfully monetize my website?
3A. You are not actually tracking them, it is an aggregated data of your users' actions, I do not believe analytics should be installed for ads, I believe it is for user actions, which of your feature is most used ?, which recipe is the best ?, it is analytics, I think it is a must

Well, you made me think about your service more than I expected. I now believe that before you think about any ways to monetize you would add more value to your service. Because now, you should admit it, it doesn't have much. What can be done:

1. Don't make a user look for sites with recipes. It's so tedious to find some recipe, then copy the link, paste into your website...
2. Create your own database of recipes - just scramble all the sites you know and store the result in your database.
3. Index all found recipes - to be filtered, categorized and searched.
4. Provide some filtering and sorting right on your site. Let users select a category, search by ingredients, time to cook, cost, calories etc...
5. Scramble photos and cooking stages.
6. Add calories calculator.
7. Think about how to monetize it.

1. The design is simple and usable. I don't see any issue with that.
2. I'm not an marketing expert but it looks like ads is a better way. Selling this API is bad because it is difficult to scale your product to parse all the recipe website.
3. Yes, analytics would be really helpful to grow your website. You can find which part of the world your app is being used and you can target the popular recipe website there. If not google analytics you can proceed with other services (like https://clicky.com)

Well, that is probably interesting.
But the question is - if it's about recipes and cooking, why you show ads absolutely not related to it?

I really like the idea!

A couple of suggestions:

• The action shouldn't be "Parse", it should be "Scale". Sure, at a technical level, you are parsing and scaling, but half your users may not even know what you mean by that. It is the Recipe Scaler, just stick to the verb Scale.
• I don't mind having to paste a link, but then I would want to be able to store my list of scalable recipes on an account. Most people have their "go to" recipes that they use over and over. I wouldn't want to have to post a link everytime I want to scale one of my favorites.

But it is a great MVP, I really like it. Well done.