Home Cooks
Recipe apps built for browsing instead of for cooking. Or recipe apps that lock your collection behind hostile export options. I keep ending up building tools to help with these problems.
What this is
The home cooks I build for don't all know each other. They aren't a forum or a meetup. But they share a problem — recipe apps built for browsing instead of for cooking, or recipe apps that lock your collection behind hostile export options — and I keep ending up building tools to help with it. The audience is quiet but real, and supporting it has been a real thread of work for me.
What I've built within this
Flour Power
ActiveA family recipe app built for cooking. Cook mode that keeps the screen awake on the counter, timers built into the steps, multi-cook coordination so two people can work the same recipe without stepping on each other.
MoveMyRecipes
ActiveRecipe migration. Spent years in Paprika and want to try something else? Plug it in, pick the target, let it move them. Built because I ran into the problem myself and the export options ranged from "annoying" to "actually impossible."
Both came from the same frustration: recipe apps treat your collection as marketing surface area instead of as something you'll be using with floury hands. I wanted tools that respect both the cook and the recipes they've spent years collecting.
Who actually uses these
Home cooks who've outgrown one app and want better, mostly. They're not loud — they don't gather in a forum — but they email when something breaks, they tell other cooks, and they keep finding the tools through search and word of mouth.
How this connects to the rest of my work
The patterns I lean on for freelance client work — listening hard to what the actual user needs (vs. what the spec says), shipping the unsexy mechanics first (export, sync, offline), iterating from real support emails — were sharpened on Flour Power and MoveMyRecipes more than anywhere else. Building for an audience that won't tolerate friction is one of the best ways I know to learn to ship clean software.