Demo (runs fully in your browser, no sign-up): https://check-forkcast.tizzy.dev/demo/ Repo: https://github.com/tizzyapunkt/forkcast
After signing up for a 90-day challenge to lose weight and get fitter, meal planning and meal prepping have been the most important things, next to exercising oc. The apps that have been suggested for planning and tracking (yazio, fddb, MyFitnessPal), were nice for logging what I just ate but annoying to use as a planning tool so this is where forkcast comes from and how it works differently:
- You plan the week against your calorie and macro goals and see which days goals are met. Recipes are logged as their ingredients, not as one entity, which makes swapping ingredients or changing amounts a lot easier eg changing 100g of pasta for 75g of rice.
- Recipes serve two purposes. Logging them (leaving out ingredients that do not make sense to log, like herbs) and cooking them (seeing steps and all ingredients).
- The grocery list comes straight out of the weekly plan (and can go to Bring! if supported where you live). Packaged food comes from Open Food Facts, generic food from a local, editable catalog which is seeded with common foods.
- AI only where it saved me time which was importing recipes from photos and reading nutrition labels. It’s optional and uses your own Anthropic key.
Full disclosure at this point: I decided to build something that works for me, a dad of two (when I started they were two under two), full-time job, but still ready to get in shape! I would have loved to code this myself, since I am a software engineer and techie by heart, but my time was limited to reading specs, reviewing code and steering Claude Code. Without that, I would not have anything usable.
The stack is Hono + React PWA and deliberately kept without a real DB, multi-user or the like. Self-hosting is possible with docker and under AGPL.
I am posting to find out if anyone besides me finds this useful, and if so, whether a hosted version would be worth building besides the self-hosting option. There is a one click vote on https://check-forkcast.tizzy.dev Any feedback is welcome, even if it's just 'wow, yet another calorie tracker'.
Oh, and in the meantime, I found out that the clever and creative name I thought I came up with was chosen several times already. Meh. Ideas welcome. :)