Recipe Jar
Just the recipe, yours to keep. Free, offline, unlimited
I shipped Recipe Jar this week: paste a recipe link, get a clean card, save unlimited recipes. No account, no ads, works offline, free forever.
On a site full of people trying to make money, "free forever" deserves the skeptical look it gets. So here is the honest version.
There is no server storing your recipes. They live in your own browser. The site is static files on a CDN, and the only backend is a tiny stateless proxy. That means the cost of running it is basically flat whether ten people use it or ten million. Free forever is not a pricing promise I might break when the bills arrive. It is just what the architecture does: there is nothing to bill for.
The flip side, and the part relevant to this community: it also means there is no obvious business model, and I am fine with that. It genuinely costs me almost nothing to run (a domain and a free Cloudflare tier), so it does not need to earn to survive. I built it for myself and my family and decided to give it away. It is open source (MIT).
Launch week so far has been small but real: a decent Product Hunt day, a Reddit thread where a professional cook described using cook mode with floury hands, and a sharp commenter who pushed me on the "no server" claim until I tightened my own wording. That last one taught me more than any upvote.
The question I keep sitting with, and would love this community's take on: is there an honest way to make something like this sustainable without betraying the thing that makes it good? No accounts, no ads, no selling data are all off the table by design. Donations? A "pro" layer that does not touch privacy? Or is "it costs nothing, so let it just exist" a perfectly fine answer?
Recipe Jar: https://recipejar.app
6 Comments
You've made an interesting tradeoff by letting the architecture define the business model instead of the other way around.
I'd be careful to protect that. Once people trust that Recipe Jar exists purely to solve the problem—not to eventually monetize their data—that trust becomes part of the product itself.
Thanks, that's a lovely way to frame it.
The bit I lean on is that it's structural, not a promise: recipes never leave your device, so there's nothing for me to monetize even if I wanted to. Safer to make the betrayal impossible than to swear I won't. But yeah, I'll guard that carefully.
I'm glad it resonated.
Your reply made me think there's one strategic decision sitting underneath that principle which becomes much more important as Recipe Jar grows, but I don't think I can explain the reasoning properly in a thread without oversimplifying it.
If you're interested, what's the best email to reach you on?
Thanks for chewing on it this much. Reach me at "sagar at sagarbudhathoki dot com". Curious what you've got. Happy to hear it here too if you'd rather, no worries about oversimplifying.
I'm writing my email like this because I'm getting this:
You're not allowed to post links yet.
Thanks! I’ve just sent it over.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts whenever you have a chance.
Yep sure, will get back to you shortly then!