Show HN: PurePlates – A Recipe Scraping iOS App

[CZubrecki]

https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/pureplates/id6621180161

Hey Everyone!

This is my first post on Hacker News, and I wanted to share my project with you! From a young age, I dreamed of becoming a chef, but life took me down the path of software engineering instead. Nevertheless, my passion for creating delicious meals has always remained close to my heart. This journey led me to seek out recipes to enhance my cooking skills, but I often found myself frustrated by the websites I encountered—ads everywhere, walls of text, and recipes that were difficult to follow.

That’s where PurePlates comes in. PurePlates allows users to share a recipe through their mobile browser or simply copy and paste the URL directly into the app. In an instant, you receive a scraped recipe that includes instructions, ingredients, and any available nutrition information. You can easily start cooking and follow along step by step, making the process much more enjoyable. Plus, if you find a recipe you love, you can add it to your favorites for quick access later!

As this is just an MVP, there’s still plenty of room for improvement, and I’m actively working on enhancing the extraction rate for recipes.

Thanks for reading, and keep hacking! Connor

[kjellsbells]

I'm a long time veteran cook. This may sound a little rough, but the most important feature, bar none, for me, is not getting the recipe in to a recipe app/site, but getting the recipes out.

All recipe apps have a finite lifetime far lower than the useful lifespan of the recipe collection. So, imagine a chef puts in the effort, over a few years, and builds up a corpus of a few hundred or thousand recipes. They expect to be able to take those recipes with them when they inevitably migrate to the next system.

Example: I got lucky with Pepperplate, in that they used sqlite under the hood, and there was a repo on github that could extract the recipes. By contrast, Cozi is a black hole, and I'm going to have to do brain surgery on my phone to figure out how it works.

Never again. I'm seriously thinking of building my own infrastructure in YAML/XML (recipe markup language?) to store the recipes in a standard schema, a LaTeX layer to optionally print the recipes on index cards to give to family members, and some sort of plugin-based extraction method for various websites. Its quite a grind.

[CZubrecki → kjellsbells]

This is great feedback! I will definitely add to my backlog a way to "export" recipes if user desires, where the user can export their recipes with all the information needed to put on a index card of uploaded to an external DB.

[KetoManx64 → kjellsbells]

Look into Mealie, it's a self hosted web based recipe manager that you have full control over: https://github.com/mealie-recipes/mealie

[mrbigbob → kjellsbells]

An app to possibly look at is Tandoor Recipes. https://github.com/TandoorRecipes/recipes

[heisenzombie]

Is there a reason I have to sign up for an account?

The old-school reigning champ of this is the app “Paprika” which does a pretty great job of this sort of scraping, modifying, and saving recipes. I do think that Paprika is getting a little old and clunky around the edges so there could definitely be room for a fresh new upstart.

[CZubrecki → heisenzombie]

That is great to know, I will check "Paprika" out and hopefully be able to build on what they have a shed new light on the cooking/recipe game. The reason initially behind accounts was more so storing personal recipes per user. I am however looking into the anonymous sign in, which will not require any "sign up" and then can be converted if desired!

[taw1285]

Love it! It would be cool to be able to auto tag cuisine type. Did you use an LLM to scrape and parse receipt details?

[CZubrecki → taw1285]

Actually adding that as we speak! Categories, cuisine, dietary, etc. Yeah I am using OpenAI, I tested with Claude but it was actually less reliable. FWIW, I am extracting the HTML and doing some cleanup work for it before passing it to the LLM with instructions.