Hey HN! I'm Rachelle - I built Recipe Shelf to solve my own problem: recipes scattered across bookmarks, screenshots, random apps, and photos of my mum's handwritten recipe cards.
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 )
sbinnee•1d ago
Description alone sounds like something I would love to give a try.
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?
rachelle-r•18h ago
Great question! TikTok recipes are a mixed bag honestly.
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.
pervysage•1d ago
There should be few demo recipes to look at before logging in. Don't you think?
rachelle-r•18h ago
That's solid feedback, thanks. You're right - being able to see what the app does before signing up would lower the barrier. I'll work on that today - plan is to let anyone scrape and preview a recipe without logging in, then only prompt for signup when they try to save it. Should be live before I head to bed tonight :)
rachelle-r•1d ago
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 )
sbinnee•1d ago
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?
rachelle-r•18h ago
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.