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Show HN: Tinder, but to decide what to eat (whatdinner.com)
266 points by kiru_io 37 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 222 comments
Hello HN,

My girlfriend and I waste too much energy to decide what to eat. Every day, we would text each other, "what do we eat tonight" messages, and go over options and many times spend too much time on deciding. I am an indie dev and created this app to solve my own problem: decide with my girlfriend what to eat for dinner.

Initially, I created a simple app, in which we listed all the recipes we ever prepared, and it would propose randomly three of them. We would then choose together one of them. This app[0] turned into a tinder-like app, which would propose every day a set of recipes to my girlfriend and me - we would swipe and go for the first match.

If have some time, give it a try and feedback is very appreciated!

Cheers, Kiru

[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/meal-planner-dinner-ideas/id64...




I work for a startup that provides meal plans. This and competing apps let you set requirements (kcal, intolerances, etc), also includes breakfast, etc. These apps are aimed at people that want to eat healthy and are looking for some inspiration.

You seem to go with user generated content, so the inspiration part is out, the health part is out, but you focus very much on the problem of forming a choice just for diner.

I do think this way your audience is huge, but the added value is a bit limited.

So you can decide to slowly move towards those other apps. Or, perhaps move away from it somehow. Maybe it's a generic tool to help you grow and maitain your relationship with your partner by providing tools that deal with each other preferences and choices within that relationship. Both practical and more emotional. But I guess I'm now more brainstorming :).

You can also just keep it small and have fun tinkering in a way that works for you. I read a comment:

> There are servers needed for the app to work, right? So I guess subscription makes sense?

Perhaps you don't really need servers. Keep the data just local on the app. Let people use regular chat for getting to a compromise. That way you could ask a one time fee of $5. It could be a (very) small passive income that doesn't require you much work, no moderation, no security risks.

Either way, good luck!


If you add machine learning to the mix like Tiktok, those that want healthy food will quickly end up with almost exclusively healthy recipes, and those that strongly prefer junk food will get their junk food. No need to programmatically take any of that into account besides time to swipe.


Great points. The health part can be incorporated back into the mix later as their app gets traction, as a subtle bias in the proposed choices and based on what they ate the previous days.


I like the idea and face the same challenge. I’ve just installed it and, from my first impressions, it seemed a bit basic. Here’s what I expected:

Hundreds of recipes that I could swipe left and right through, allowing me to build up a typical selection of what I would usually eat. Instead, I was presented with only three choices, none of which I would generally consider.

A simple way to send the code to my wife — via imessage, Telegram, etc. Instead, I had to tell her in person! :)

This presents the perfect opportunity to delve into shopping lists where the wife wants something healthy, and the I crave a burger. I can think of quite a few features you could add if the app develops further.

Also, like the comment below about having a stranger over for dinner (not for dating purposes), it could involve a couple or someone visiting a new country who would appreciate a local showing them around and perhaps covering the dinner cost. Once the app learns your food preferences and interests, that could be quite exciting! There might already be an app that does this; I’m not sure. Swiping left and right on both food likes / dislikes and also general interests.


If it's a recipe focused app, then maybe it should not be a "swipe daily" thing, as what's in the fridge right not maybe not matching what's on the phone, and it takes time and effort to buy and store food.

You probably need a food purchasing to-do list feature, and allow user to plan ahead of purchase.

But overall, it's a very nice idea with many potentials.

When I was little, the feeling of anticipating a good dinner always keeps me excited the entire day. Maybe this app can bring that feeling back.


I had a stab at fixing the mismatch between fridge and database by allowing you to exclude recipes with a particular ingredient. Surely this type of filter can be incorporated into other recipe apps.

Check out the demo video in the README: https://github.com/kassner/whattocook


It would be useful to have some nuance. Some dishes don't work without an ingredient, whereas you can skip or substitute that same ingredient in other dishes.


I understand that and I’m all ears for suggestions!

AFAIK I’m the only user, and our household doesn’t have issues with that. We also don’t have complete recipes, because we are pretty decent with cooking and coming up with stuff, so the main use is for idea generation and making some decision.

Recipes like “meatballs with mashed potatoes”, if we don’t have cream to make the mash, you either exclude the cream, or you can just decide “meatballs” is good enough of a suggestion and make some spaghetti to go with it. The idea was to aid us getting over the indecision hill, and for that it has been pretty great.


Why not both? See what others around you want to eat, swipe together, meet up with a stranger in a restaurant and eat together. Maybe get to know them, maybe not.


I saw a startup recently doing this: https://timeleft.com

Matches you with 5 people to have dinner on wednesdays.


Did that last week after a friend told me about it and I like these kind of random things

I’m new in town and was hoping to meet some fun people

Turns it there is an underlying intention of meeting potential dating material, as I matched up with 3 single women.

Being a married man I had an amazing evening and lots of fun discussing dating apps and dating life, though I’m not sure if the ladies would rate the evening equally successful given the absence of potential dating material …


Noted, thank you.

Singing up now...


They charge a lot of money for that. DOA for me.


Do they? How much? I filled the quiz, then I got requested to create an account. I guess they show the price after they have the users fully signed up.


Somewhere around 12 usd for one diner I believe. You can also get a monthly subscription.


I see how that isn't a pocket money amount of cash. However, that's still a price I would be willing to pay to have a single shot try at the event. I might actually try it this month.


Huh?

Maybe it's different on other cities. On mine each seat was $50 (plus tax and stuff). And then you also have to pay for your food, obv. And you don't even get to pick the place.

I would definitely pay that (and much more) if I knew I was going to get an honest lifelong friend out of it. But it's a very shallow experience, you come in as strangers and you leave as such, not really worth spending any money.

What I wish would become widespread is this concept of a "shared table" at restaurants where people are expected to sit down to dine together and talk to each other.


This was Amsterdam. I just double checked: 11.69 euro

Interesting they charge significantly different rates for different cities, maybe surge pricing strategy like Uber?


That actually sounds great


Man, if it has the same success rate as Tinder did for me, I'm gonna starve.


Living proof that not even a top tier sense of humor helps, haha.


I must say, coming from a bad "tinder date" in the weekend i just lol´d, thanks stranger.


That's on you and/or the other person, not on tinder...


Tinder isn't exactly innocent in this.

Tinder isn't making money on people who match with people successfully and never come back to the app. The managers tweaking the algorithm know this.


Dating apps are hard to make profitable.

Your most successful customer is the one that no longer needs your platform, so a monthly fee or relying on ads does not work. You end up with a perverse incentive to make sure users only ever get "okay" matches, and never GOOD or even GREAT matches.

But if you charge a one-time fee, then the barrier of entry is too high and you won't get many people buying, especially once the people who are frankly undateable start bad-mouthing your app.

You could try a method where you only pay once you decide you landed a good match, but that's going to be impossible to enforce without greatly giving up privacy.


Still could be way less hostile than what Tinder is right now.


The app is unusable to me because you have to pick three out of only four initial options, none of which appeal to me actually. Another problem is that the initial options don’t list ingredients, so it’s unclear whether they contain anything that the user may not want to eat.


You may prefer favorite picker: https://github.com/antialiasis/favorite-picker

Your comment made me remember of and realize this is basically the same thing, just presented differently and with the need to populate the entries yourself.


I solved this problem with a different approach: computer tells you what to cook, period. It allows some variation given you might not have all the ingredients at home, but that’s about it. I made a AGPL project out of it, been using it for a year now, and it has been surprisingly helpful.

https://www.kassner.com.br/en/2023/09/21/what-to-cook-launch... https://github.com/kassner/whattocook


> computer tells you what to cook, period.

I like to do sports, I prefer my body and physical activities help me decide.


This is a cool idea.

Unfortunately I’m not going to pay $20/year to make deciding on dinner slightly easier. Sorry. I understand why people want subscriptions for recurring revenue. But I hate having dozens and dozens of subscriptions for niche services.

If this was like a $10 one time purchase I might go for it.


> $10 one time purchase

Author of a $10 one time purchase app here. People have been acclimatized to paying rent on apps for so long that I routinely get emails asking for a cheaper monthly option, because $10 is too steep. :)


There's a business idea: let users buy apps that cost $10 for say $2/month, 3 months minimum. Eat the risk of users cancelling, make bank on the large minority who end up paying 50 times. Add some dark patterns and confusing language to keep your margins up. Liberally claim fraud for apps where users consistently pay $6 but you're out $10.

If you could execute this technically it's clearly a billion-dollar idea, but maybe the only people with the right connections to do it are Apple and Google.


A reverse might also work: a platform that provides a prepaid plan in a transparent way. Let the user pay for three months in advance. Cut off the service afterwards if they don't pay for the fourth month. Bonus: provide a one-time purchase option too.


Add a $3.99/mo recurring subscription option.


I think there is a market. I pay for mealime monthly, I don't even know how much it costs. The cost of an app to help the family choose a dinner menu instead of eating out is worth it. Not only for money savings, but for health as well.

One of the best features is to streamline the online ordering from the app.

It works very well.


well said, this makes zero sense to be a subscription service


All web-based software makes sense as a subscription because of ongoing maintenance costs. Servers, security updates, bug fixes, dealing with app stores, testing on new devices... it adds up in an unpredictable way.

That's not even considering the many subscriptions a developer has to pay, including to Apple.


That's... not the user's problem. This is a fine and cool project don't get me wrong. But the overall 'subscription everything' model is not really justified by costs. The subscriptions are usually orders of magnitude more than the true operating cost.

It's not the customer's job to pay you forever bc Apple wants a developer license. It's the business's job to make sure it's sustainable with the costs that it has / has chosen to bear.

That's the backpressure on business models - they're not all viable. Just because you _could_ add in a bunch of servers and cloud costs and whatever, doesn't mean it's inherently justified.

The problem is more that it's gotten _so_ cheap to run, that charging each user a seemingly-nominal 5c/day fee doesn't feel bad to an average person for a chance at value. And at scale you get enough people who figure "ah it's not that much", and end up with massive profit margins. Profiting off the disparity between the individual choice and the aggregate.


There doesn't need to be any justification. If that's what OP wants to charge then that's reason enough.

That being said, OP should probably realize a lot of people don't pay for software--even in HN.

That's why OP needs to make sure the users are the product and find some way to sell the user data to advertisers.

OP should contact restaurants and allow them to place ads in the recommendations. He should also sell access to user data and allow restaurants and advertisers to target free users.

He can have a subscription tier that gives you privacy.


Your comment was quite the ride.

> There doesn't need to be any justification. If that's what OP wants to charge then that's reason enough.

Yep, makes sense.

> That being said, OP should probably realize a lot of people don't pay for software--even in HN.

Indeed. Maybe people pay even less on HN, seeing as many of us can hack together something for personal use.

> That's why OP needs to make sure the users are the product and find some way to sell the user data to advertisers.

Er…

> OP should contact restaurants and allow them to place ads in the recommendations. He should also sell access to user data and allow restaurants and advertisers to target free users.

Wait, what? This is app for eating at home, restaurants have nothing to do with it.

> He can have a subscription tier that gives you privacy.

Full-on dystopia.


if and when someone invents microtransactions for real ... i still think being able to pay a penny or a nickel for a resource, instead of a subscription, would be an interesting experiment.

probably everyone would end up going broke but i would love to see a simulation of it, if not a real experiment.

i know nickel transactions costs a dime to process, but if it was cheap we could have new ways of having new things.


That would be kind of neat. Bc realistically the marginal costs on most digital things is negligible. But if it were practical to charge people the 1e-11 dollars per page view or whatever maybe could do some interesting things


As soon as we get microtransactions, we will also see the implementation of micro-fines.


> But the overall 'subscription everything' model is not really justified by costs

Probably shouldn't subscribe then ...


I think the argument is that you shouldn't choose to price a product as a subscription simply because you have recurring costs.

If I subscribe to a magazine or a streaming service, I continually get new content. Apps that aren't doing that are basically price gouging customers.


It’s nice of you to consider the wellbeing of other users, but I think every adult has the right to make their own decisions about how to spend their money.

If it’s not a price you’re willing to pay, that’s fine. But if someone else gets value out of it and thinks it’s a fair trade, that’s between them and the app creator.


> But if someone else gets value out of it and thinks it’s a fair trade, that’s between them and the app creator.

Since we're apparently now doing Freshman Civics:

There are many sorts of transactions that someone would get value from and think are a fair trade, but are prohibited for one reason or another.

Even for those somewhat-antisocial transactions that aren't prohibited, there's no rule that says that you can't complain about how those transactions could be more pro-social.


> Even for those somewhat-antisocial transactions that aren't prohibited, there's no rule that says that you can't complain about how those transactions could be more pro-social.

Yeah, and there's also no rule that says that other people can't tell you to shut up.


Why do you feel the need to tell them to shut up?


How about the argument that having recurring income incentivizes further development, whereas single-pay fees incentivize customer acquisition?


That's called gambling. Pay me now and maybe you'll like what comes next!


And the customers don't like it, they can stop paying.

Seems like a risk to the author. Keeping existing customers is typically easier than getting new ones.


Makes sense as a subscription for the developer, not the user. I’d not pay for this, subscription or not. It’s up to the person trying to sell me something to either convince me to pay (not happening in this case) or figure out other ways of making money (deals with restaurants, premium features, idk).

I get that there is work behind it, there is work behind everything, and I get they are reoccurring. What you mention is still valid, but in the real world, sob story about costs to run something are not something the customer cares about.


From a consumer’s perspective, paying for a product or service is an exchange of money for value. Even with a service, there’s a tangible result—like a fresh haircut or the convenience of not dealing with tax filing. Paying only makes sense when there’s value in return, which isn’t true for many subscription services. Arguments about “maintenance costs” hold little weight for customers who don’t perceive any added value.

In some cases, subscriptions are reasonable, such as when software would be a heavy burden on personal devices, like power-intensive language models, or when it needs to stay compliant with evolving legal requirements, like an accounting software or something.

A larger issue is Apple’s push for subscription-based software in almost everything, often to bolster its bottom line, while damaging the industry as a whole for the reasons mentioned.

Also subscription to a developer is a product for them, it has nothing to do with the product they create for others


Even if the service can't be delivered indefinitely for a one-time payment, subscriptions as the only option are a hard sell at this point, because most people are feeling the effects of subscription fatigue

A 1-year pricing option or 30-day trial with the option to pay up front for a year or a month, without it becoming a subscription is way more compelling to the user than signing up for a subscription that one then has to remember to cancel.

I personally subscribe to Amazon Prime and that's it. A service has to meet an incredibly high bar for me to consider a subscription, and I wouldn't have considered it with Amazon until after they had set up their global prime delivery infrastructure/network and video streaming service. I'm not going to give my credit card to a company that makes picking out a recipe slightly easier to keep on file, that's a ludicrous proposition.


The point of commercial software shouldn't to satisfy the need of their developpers to get paid for it but to reach that intersection where it is useful enough for many users to accept paying a decent price for it and allow dev to make a profit.

If that intersection is unreachable in the first place, there is just no sense to mention maintenance costs.


So don’t be inept and make a web service out of what can and should be local-first.


Really one of the most ridiculous things I can remember seeing.


I'd like to see a new subscription model emerge:

some base price quote.

then, the more I use it, the cheaper it gets, or at least never "the more expensive it gets" (in this way we can get tiers, but it's not quoted as screw-you plan)

and, I stop using it, I stop paying

If the base price is attractive to try, put in my credit card and try. If I keep liking it, I keep using it, if I don't, I don't. It's what we all want, just give it to us.


usually called "pay by use".... tinder does that: you get free swipes. and fill in the top and bottom with relevant ads. You go premium...well then depends.

But I have to admit, a food matching app with this approach would be strange since the person I am truing to match is know to me and possibly living in the same place.

I would personally open a chatGPT session and tell what I have eaten today or this week and should suggest from the history when I need it.


> I would personally open a chatGPT session and tell what I have eaten today or this week and should suggest from the history when I need it.

Honestly, an interesting idea. Finetune Llama on a bunch of nutrition info and it can help you find out what micros you’re missing and maybe even find recipes to help your macros


Unfortunately, the Apple Developer account is not a one-time purchase and neither is the recurring payment to keep the server used by the app. People need to stop expecting one-time payments for online services


Skip the Apple tax and build a web app. A simple web app like this should not cost a significant amount of money to host.


https://whatthefuckshouldimakefordinner.com


This was just great. I laughed.

Then I got hit with 753 ads and stopped laughing. But still pretty fun.


My favorite restaurant’s rent isn’t a one-time purchase either but they still manage to sell me a meal without an annual subscription.


Bad analogy. You keep paying the restaurant for every meal, whereas you would pay only once for the app.


The argument I was responding to was “The developer has ongoing costs therefore the user can’t expect not to have ongoing costs.”

I might eat at a restaurant only once.


You'd rather pay every time you use it?


If the price was reasonable (less than ten cents in this case), absolutely.


I don't think you can charge so little. You'd probably have to buy some amount of runs in bulk.

Another alternative would be you buy access for a block of time, but not an auto renewing subscription. Mullvad VPN works like this, I have to go into the app and re-up if I want to keep using it every month.

However I think this type of app should be a one time purchase anyway. Looks to me like it could work without any server / hosted infrastructure.


This is actually a great idea. Lots of subscriptions just pay for a thing to be available. Netflix will tell you "sleeping giants" who never watch are ok, because the content was made available, but I think that's BS. I'd love to see a system where you're only billed on the months that you use it. Or even just charge me a dollar per use with a monthly cap of ten after which the rest of the month is free.


A better analogy is the usual "car" analogy: I bought my car in cash as a one time purchase. Even though Toyota needs to maintain their network of dealerships and service centers, finance their factories' operations, and pay their employees, I still don't have to pay a monthly subscription for the car (yet). If I drive it, I pay to put gasoline in it and maintain it every so often, and that's it. If I don't drive it, it sits in my garage and I don't have to pay monthly for it.

This idea that customers should need to pay for all of a business's business costs and overhead as the overhead happens is a new one, and an annoying one.


But you maintain your car don't you ? If you need to fix the car, you're generally on the hook for that (besides manufacturing defects etc). Then there are normal maintenance costs you're always on the hook for.

Generally anything physical you own, you're on the hook for maintaining. But software is different isn't it ? If you pay a lifetime fee for an app, are you expected to maintain it ?

I bet that if manufacturers were also on the hook for maintaining cars they'd sold indefinitely, we'd be on subscription fees there too.

Obviously, some apps have negligible maintenance so i'm not saying a subscription model is the best model for all cases, just that i don't think the analogy with cars fits exactly.


Having to eat food is a lifetime subscription. I guess the point is you would pay for the app once, but visit the restaurant multiple times. I think something like a small initial fee plus donations to keep it running would be good for such an app as this.


You should have started the app on an Android first. An Android developer license is only a one time $25 fee. Once you build it on Android, you can gauge the response and determine how much to charge on other platforms. And build it using a build once, deploy many framework, such as React Native or Flutter, that way porting it to any device would be a sinch! My piece of advice.


I remember reading years ago that people were much more likely to pay for apps (outside of games) on Apple vs Android. I wonder what the current distribution looks like.


why even have a android app? just build it on the web.

on the plus side everyone can use it on any device they would like.


It's almost like so many things are broken at every level...


online services do have inherent costs that need to be paid especially for products that provide value.

i do wonder if for new products they should opt for a webapp instead which would negate the apple/google tax and it would allow android users to also try


Apple dev account costs $99/year. Do you really need to recoup that from the first 6 customers? (5 + 1, since one has to pay for the 15% Apple cut.)


> $10 one time purchase

I miss when good apps were selling for $2 on the app stores.


The HN crowd isn't going to like it, but this is the perfect one for ads.

Perfect.


I hate ads, but you're actually right in this case. If done with moderation and purpose—like the YouTube videos that promote a high-quality cooking ingredient while meaningfully explaining why it’s better—it could work well.


Or, commission from ordering items from the recipes via local stores.


There are servers needed for the app to work, right? So I guess subscription makes sense?

Of course then there is the price of the subscription... But I'm talking about the model, not the cost.


The trouble is the justification of a subscription is evaluated differently by businesses and customers, and both perspectives are rational. If you’ve got servers to pay for, subscriptions are a very appealing model since it makes the “is this business sustainable” math very easy (and less charitably lots of businesses are after that sweet sweet subscription revenue because it tends to be sticky). As a customer, I think it’s also very reasonable to get annoyed that “everything is becoming a subscription” and say “why would I pay this much for something I might need once in a blue moon.”


GP did say they understand why. Doesn't mean it's compelling from the other side.

'Pay for what you use' (micropayments?) seems under-explored outside of cloudhosting to me. Some small cost per meal solves the same problem while seeming more reasonable (or more obviously reasonable) to the consumer, doesn't it?


Honestly, the servers an app like this would need would be a $3/mo VPS. I'm not arguing about the price, the author can charge whatever he wants, but I don't think he'll get many customers that way. It's a good thing that the server requirements are minimal.


OP mentioned this is a “simple app”. They should follow the example of the author of parcelapp.net, which charges less than 5 EUR a year. That’s 50 k€ per year (judging by the ten thousand of reviews (4.8/5 star average) on the Apple App Store. Without taxes, of course.

More than enough to pay for server costs.


Worth noting that Parcel used to be a one-time purchase, and those who bought during that time are grandfathered in with a lifetime account.


> There are servers needed for the app to work, right?

But why?

This is described as "a simple app, in which we listed all the recipes we ever prepared, and it would propose randomly three of them. We would then choose together one of them."

You could, if you chose to, built/architect that in a way that doesn't require a backend at all.

You can use deep link URIs to send a _lot_ of data in a link in an email (like literally gigabytes on iOS). Easily enough data to send each other newly added meals/recipes.

You could also encode recipes in QR Codes, so one person enters a new recipe and the other can scan a QR Code the app generates to grab it - you can get about 4kb into a high density QR Code that'll read reliably off a phone screen.

Use one of those to maintain the whole meal/recipe database on each device, no backend required.

Maybe use a date based PRNG so both ends will pick the same "three random recipes" every day.

Send messages between apps as emails with deep links in them, so one user can use the native iOS "share by email" widget to send a "hey, what do you want for dinner" email, with an app generated message with three deeplinks, one for each random choice. Recipient responds by tapping the deep link for their recipe choice, which opens their version of the app - and the app digs the data out off the deeplink URI to pres3ent a "share your choice" button that also uses the native iOS "share by email" widget to send the response back to the first user.

Tapping links in emails and sharing via email isn't as "nice" as an app with a centralised database and push notifications, but it also has zero ongoing cost to run and you know for sure the developer has no lever to enshittify the service, and has no user PII or usage data to sell to surveillance capitalists.

Hmmm, I wonder if you could do this entirely as a web app?


For stuff that I'm not sure that I'm going to continue using, I subscribe, then immediately cancel.


For a marketing app like this, really the people paying should be the restaurants. They pay a bit of money, they appear a bit more often, and a bit more at the beginning of the list of dishes displayed. Cool idea and makes a lot of sense!

Also should consider what was selected last time - a bit of a predictive algorithm would be useful to start providing towards my likes a bit quicker.


"which we listed all the recipes we ever prepared,"

Where are the restaurants in this?


This sounded fun and I wanted to try it, so I built a web version. It's open-source built with React Native. The code is here https://github.com/HatmanStack/savorswipe or it's hosted here https://www.savorswipe.fun You can easily add recipes to the swipe list by snapping a photo of ingredients and directions then adding the photo to the app.


Why is it not called Dinnr?


Dinder


Not bad, esp. given that "dinde" is "turkey" in French.

Turkinator, basically.


Neat idea, but I have to echo the negative sentiment on the subscription. I get there are costs associated to running an app, but this is not a problem-solution I would pay for. Hopefully you do find a demographic who will.

Good luck!


Isn't this taking something that should be relationship building and outsourcing to an app? How long can a relationship last when people refuse to settle the littlest of disagreements like rasonable adults?


Deciding on dinner needn't be a disagreement, it's just another task that needs to be done in a relationship.


I don't see it that way. It's a potential tool that adults can use together, like a bulletin board or index cards or pen and paper.


I am really disagreeable person and hard to deal with but I have never had this problem.

The whole idea is just fucking dumb.


Yeah, totally, working out what is for dinner is great way to learn about people you have dinner with. What foods do they like? Why do they like, dislike, or simply cannot partake in some foods? And less direct but deeper notions like: What makes arguments happen with this person? What happens when this person lashes out on a small scale? Can I react sensibly to this person disagreeing with me?

This and a million other little nuances are super important for successful relationships.


This is not limited to the app under discussion, but how well do iOS emulators and compatibility layers for Android phones work? Are they anywhere close to as good as, say, Proton and Wine?


As someone who loves to cook I really like this idea, I think it would be really helpful if there was some kind of social element -- like seeing how many people cooked a meal, or reviews from others not just from your immediate family circle. I always wanna know what other people think about dishes prior to cooking, NYT cookbook does this really well with their comment section (which I always check before cooking)


I felt generate recipe repositories is quite a friction, not sure how many user would like to go through this process. But if you have nearby restaurant pictures, swipe right for matches seems a better use case. People don't need to populate the content, and you can let them define a zipcode to narrow down the options.


Is there a way with which you could expand the number of recipes available?

You have a set of ingredients at home (or easily purchaseable)—an evolution of this app could have you tell the app "look, I want recipes that use any of these 45 different ingredients, what recipes have we never tried?" And it has access to some big database of possibilities.


Just brainstorming here, but as a parent and someone who subscribed to a weekly CSA, it’d be a big boost to be able to take a picture of what I’ve got and get some ideas about recipes, especially if I could say, I’ve only got about 15 minutes to make dinner for kids. I guess that doesn’t really fit the Tinder model..


Does this only work for two people? Some of us have significantly larger households. Not that we're on iOS anyway.


In principle, it should work with more than two people, but I haven't tested it thoroughly.

Btw, I have added an Android wait list [0]

[0] https://whatdinner.com/ (second button)


Nice idea. It would be great to plan a week's menu using something like this. Currently, we alternate weeks and it ends up being one week of the same 6 recipes and one week with slightly more variety. Then there is the kids who won't eat 80% the foods we'd like to. :-( Tough to please everyone.


as a foodie,with hypoglcymia, who also trained under the best chef in Canada,amongst other excellent food teachers, what would take sn application to the next level would a further evaluation of the users physiological state so; when my blood sugar bottoms out, I can EAT and need a fully balanced meal,and I have learned to look at my hand ,vibrating or trembling as a proxy for hunger and this is something a phones accelerometer could detect and use as data for recipie suggestions, and in my case I have to eat something before I can cook a meal ,so go into a whole menue sugestion I dont need or would use such an app, as I invented food,but I can see how it could be very helpfull,especialy in a busy family situation with diverse diatary requirements


I've seen people pay a yearly subscription for much less, so I'm not going to comment


Nice app, I really like the idea! Let me know if you need help getting the Android app through the closed testing, happy to install and test!


Funny, there was something called "Why Don't We..." back in 2010 where people would post dates they wanted to go on. It was a lot of fun because dates were inventive and noval and it's how I found my current life partner.


That’s fun, what did you do on your first date? Ironically, there was also one called how about we.


Hey, just wanted to say nice app :)

Lotta people talking about broader app/subscription ecosystem issues, which hopefully you can take as off-topic to your specific project. Making a cool useful thing and putting it on the internet is great, cheers.


Do you have to input your own recipes? It doesn't just provide recipes and you can select your favorites?

How long does it take for someone to input 40 recipes?

I feel like this should essentially just be a cookbook app with a random function call.


Are you saying that there's a $20/year subscription fee to put your manually-entered data into this dev's cloud storage and do some simple access control?

Is this a difficult thing to programatically do for one's own Apple/Google-provided gratis cloud storage? Even a couple-thousand recipes wouldn't take much space at all, so "I don't want to hit users' quota" doesn't seem a good excuse to not do it this way.


It would be cool to be able to see what the other person has already swiped on or "favorited" so I can just look at that first to see if there is anything there I can immediately swipe on.


That costs extra on tinder.


The killer feature for me is if you could tell it when you throw something in the bottom of the freezer or back of the pantry and it reminds you do do something with it in two months


Think of a pun and pay for a Shark Tank ad, they'll love the idea


I never think about this idea, probably next one "Tinder, but to decide what should i buy" kind of things


Any plans to extend it to the other 60% of smartphone users?


Dev here: that is on my to-do list, once I fixed the most common bugs in the ios version, I will start with the android version.


Great! Best of luck


It's no secret that Android users are money tight compared to Apple users. It makes sense to start on iOs and gauge subscribers before spending additional resources on making another app


This is an awesome app that my partner half-joking had been asking me to build for years. Glad to see someone actually made it!


There is an idea like this coming out every year and they mostly failed. I think it is described in one of pg essays.


It crashes on my first three attempts after setting up the family code so I will probably not give another try :(


Dev here: Crap. Can you drop me a mail with the family code? (whatdinner@kiru.io)


For me I like to use a tournament tracker.


It crashes on my first 3 attempts after setting up the family code, so I’ll probably not try it again.


If it would recommend/show meals from restaurants around that would be great.


This would make sense as a Mealie extension. You have a content (recipe) bootstrapping issue.


really fun idea. one marketing approach would be to use suggestive foods like squash or eggplant.

About your girlfriend, she wants you to make a decision. That's why you're ending up in a recursive loop.


I was really hoping this would be a thing that gave you home cooked meal recipes, for normies. Not the bullshit "I fancy myself as a chef and want to brag about how much effort i put into my family dinners" kind of recipes, but the "oh my god, I'm so brain dead after a day at work, what can I throw together that is healthy, tasty and relatively simple".

Where are those recipes? Like ones that Kenji does, but without having to do everything from scratch because I'm lazy and would forgo some amount of taste for pouring a packet or jar of something over some other, more fresh, stuff and cook it for 30 minutes. Thats real person minutes, not "Jamie Oliver, this has been timed to perfection by a team of 10 pro chefs who spent 5 days tweaking everything so I could rock up infront of a camera and make it look effortless" minutes.

Oh, and while I'm at it, if you could also make these recipes palatable to my 8 yo child so I don't have to cook A WHOLE OTHER MEAL while brain dead and lazy, I would happily like and subscribe and even pay the equivalent of my Netflix subscription.

Thank you.


UrbanSpoon (again)?


No. Dinnr (again).


Lol. I read the title as Tinder, but they(the girl) decides what to eat. Could work.


DINDER


When my wife and I were dating, we came up with a simple rule:

Whoever was driving would mentally pick a place and start driving there. The other - before getting to the parking lot - could pick anywhere else and that’s where we would go instead.

We’ve been happily married 26 years now and still follow that same rule for choosing where to eat. ;-)


As a companion to this, my partner and I developed a rule that you can't say No to a suggestion without counter-suggesting. It prevents one person continually making suggestions and the other person rejecting everything and giving zero feedback.

e.g. (bad): "How about pizza tonight?" "I don't feel like pizza." "Ok then, burritos?" "No." "Soup?" > Frustration

vs (good): A: "How about pizza tonight?" B: "I'm not into pizza, but I could go for a burger." A: "I'm not feeling burgers, how about sushi?" > Continues until agreement


That's really a good rule. It could apply to almost any aspect of life, not only just about what to eat.


A good strategy that works for us is the first person picks 5 places to eat, the second person narrows it down to 3 of the 5 and the first person then decides out of the 3 the place to eat.


It seems like the dominant strategy is to always be in the passenger seat and always pick your favorite place.


Only if you're solving to "win" every time, but in relationships you're often solving to also please the other person. Plus people get decision fatigue, so deferring to the other person can be doubly good... but not to the point where you don't care at all where to go, because you still have your standards and soft preferences and some places you'd like to veto entirely... which is why couples often get into this endless dance when deciding something for both.

It's true also of deciding what to watch. I've spent 30+ minutes debating what to watch, only to realize we should be going to sleep in just another 15 mins so no we can't really watch anything anymore

So over the years my strategy has morphed to making the decision and taking responsibility for making it an enjoyable experience for both


> I've spent 30+ minutes debating what to watch...

This is something I've personally wanted to dive into the psychology of more.

Maybe it's just me, but I've noticed that - in the days of streaming and everything being on-demand - picking what to watch is actually very frustrating to me. Quite often, I'd much rather just browse "live" TV and stop on something I like.

I'd never think to myself "I feel like watching The Goonies". But if I'm flipping channels and The Goonies happens to be on - 20 minutes into it - I'll stop there and absolutely enjoy watching the rest of it.

I wonder why that is.


Decision fatigue is part of it.

There is probably some research that directly taps into it, I did come across and adjacent research paper -

“ New contexts, old heuristics: How young people in India and the US trust online content in the age of generative AI”

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.02522

The indication is that people consume content online in different modes based on their objectives. Perhaps the mode of consumption for food decisions / streaming decisions is part of the category where we dont want to work very hard to get to an answer.


If you can't beat your spouse whats the point?!


So person B always chooses what person A dislikes the most, until person A recognizes its mistake.


Easy enough to solve by making sure partners alternate seats every time.


I'm curious how many ways both of you have gamed this system over the years. :)


Honestly, most of the "gaming" comes from (quoting from another response in the thread) decision fatigue. For example...

My wife absolutely hates seafood. So, if I don't want to pick I just start heading in the direction of somewhere like Red Lobster and she'll always think of something else rapidly.

She'll do the same to me with something like a vegetarian place.

What's hilarious is when one of us starts heading somewhere we think the other won't like and they don't change it. We end up eating there and usually have a great time anyway. I've learned to like eggplant that way, and she's started growing more fond of Thai food.


I guess that stuff can probably only work in US of A. Wherever I am going, regardless of the transport method, there are multiple places where we could go in the same direction. You wouldn't be able to find out wherever one is going until the last minute or so.


Not applicable to everywhere in the US, I live in a rural area with 3 population centers that are all roughly equal in distance and each has a variety of restaurants bundled closely, so any counter-ideas would have to come in early or risk wasting time and gas. Although, one could compromise by the driver picking the area and the passenger picking the restaurant once you’re there.


Could be a rural place anywhere in the world actually


Maybe I am misinterpreting but this is a beautifully crafted bit of wry humour. :D


I don't mean to belittle your app, I can't try it 'cause I don't have iOS.

We did solve the problem in a much easier way though. We do have 40 recipes we usually cycle through. I wrote them in a spreadsheet and marked them based on who can cook them, if it's brunch, lunch or dinner, quick or elaborate, summery or wintery.

Then in another sheet I just create a list of those recipes/dishes picked randomly based on the day of the month.

If we start the discussion "what do we eat tonight", I can just open the spreadsheet. 99% of the time proposing the option for that day on the sheet gives us closure and we're done.


My wife does the same kind of thing, except she wrote a whole web app that I host on my homelab server (we're both rails devs). The app keeps track of upcoming meals on a calendar, number of leftover servings in the freezer, ingredients needed for upcoming meals, etc.


What an organized person. I just pull stuff out of the fridge and randomly cook whatever I can with it and if there's no good option I go to the store to buy some random things to resupply the fridge.


An extension or integration with https://mealie.io/ would be a neat thing have (we selfhost mealie but are still building out recipes).


Your spreadsheet has obviously one missing feature - you cannot charge strangers $20 a year for using it.


It is nice to have ideas that you can pick up but being so organized sounds so exhaustingly boring...I would have suggested a deck of cards with recipes that you can pick up randomly.

Also, what about that "who can cook them" column in that spreadsheet? Obviously there are personal prefs but you guys have the recipe stored, surely anyone can cook it.


> Also, what about that "who can cook them" column in that spreadsheet? Obviously there are personal prefs but you guys have the recipe stored, surely anyone can cook it.

In a very general sense, yes, but people have varying competencies/preferences in the kitchen.

Some people have more patience/precision for baking, some people don't think twice about handling raw meat, some people put in the time to learn fancy knife skills and can dice an onion in half the time...

I have found it works very well to divvy up the complicated cooking by skill/preference (though obviously everyone in the house can churn out a pasta dish if the need arises).


Funnily enough me and my partner are coming from very different countries and culture so for the same name of recipe we do it completely differently and we love discovering how our each one of us would do one thing. Also we like to do things together as well so some days cooking becomes a teaching workshop on how to prepare a dish specific to one of our countries of origin and I can now prepare stuff pretty much as well as any local of her own country. She often joke I should obtain the passport because of that ( and for adopting their way of swearing ).

Having said that you have a point about handling raw meat.


I'm not organized at all! The deck of cards idea sounds much better than the spreadsheet, I might print them!

For the "who can cook them" in the spreadsheet, I guess it's just a matter of what we're used to cook. I'm from Italy, she's from Malawi, I'm sure I could cook 'nsima and she could cook polenta.


There is absolutely ZERO case for a dedicated app for this thing - a web app is 'more than' more than enough. Glad to see a subscription fee. Totally makes sense. Without that I could not have stomached it.

So very venture capital - solving real world problems, one subscription at a time. Nice.


Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


I have no idea what you’re on about. The early iPhone App Store was full of apps like this. Someone who liked writing apps would scratch an itch and make it available to the world. Then venture money hit the app stores and it became a race to snarf up address books and precise locations with free apps that extinguished not just the craftsman iPhone developer, but also sucked all the oxygen out of the indie Mac ecosystem too.


There's nothing wrong with writing an app to scratch your itch. But this app could be a web app, and I don't see any value in it being a subscription. The cost of hosting something like this is so minuscule that I'd make it free and just eat the cost if I were running it.


I would have made it a locally hostable PWA so I don’t have to worry about hosting to begin with.


I'm not gonna use a web app with any frequency, especially when I'm already in the car deciding where to go and thus have to use my phone. Web apps are notoriously terrible on phones compared to computers.


They could also use something like wifi-direct and transfer data between devices


Do you regularly give away money just because it is a minuscule amount?


I would benefit from the app myself, primarily. And I would need to pay to host it anyway. Others may also make use of it, with no warranty, and no guarantee of me keeping the service running for any length of time.


So you are selling an app whose server could be plugged at any time and render the app unusable. How is that any better than a subscription. Imagine paying money for a phone that stops working after one day. By design. You would be furious. And rightfully so


Agreed wholeheartedly- must be a SV trained individual.


Putting this behind a subscription is crazy.


The outcome of venture funded business models. Before this, we solved a problem for customers and collected a markup or fee. And now the problem we solve is 'when can VC get their money?'. There's no incentive to solve problems for anyone except VC, and you have to convince the customer to give up money, or attention (for growth!). Until this changes, we end up with 'what's for dinner' apps that do almost nothing while wanting an annual subscription fee. Funny to see people posting 'but servers cost money'. That problem is created by the app.


This is the unfortunate reality of the app business today. Without constant ad spend it's very very difficult to acquire new users. And constant ad spend is of course not possible with a low one-time payment for the app.


> Without constant ad spend it's very very difficult to acquire new users.

If you're not VC funded, who gives a fuck how many users you have or how quickly you get more?

Unless the cost of whatever backing online resources you need doesn't scale fairly closely with the number of users you have, the only thing number of users matters for is the size of the check you get at the end of the year, rather than the profit percentage from that check.


If you want to make a living with apps, you kind of have to advertise.


If you're creating an app to help, then you don't get about acquiring new users. Who would care?

If you're creating an app to make money, then don't put all your eggs in a Tinder-for-dinner basket.


The subject of this particular app isn't the point. It's the economics of the app business in general.


Local grocers could just pay for advertising or placement space in such an app.


They'd just end up doing both


I'm the person most positive about technology of all my friends, and this gets a no from me. A relationship is an endless sequence of coordination problems, and you need to work out a way to do these effortlessly. Defer to the person with stronger opinions, everybody decides half of the time, some quid pro quo, I mean there's just endless ways to solve this in an easier and more fun way than using an app.


Yeah the last thing I'd want when we talk dinner with my partner is to both of us grabbing a smartphone and start swiping.


Weird, unlike everyone else on this thread I just don't see this as a problem to be solved. My wife and I talk to each other (I know, crazy, right?) and one of us suggests something to eat and then we decide. No subscription required.


> Tinder, but for couples

:(


It's not even called Dinder.


While that may be a cute pun (but probably also only if you know the “like tinder but for meal planning” backstory), I think their current name is a much better choice overall, as it’s clear and concise on it’s own.


I'm sorry, I'm out.


What a loss!


Neat idea and good execution.

However, I would not personally use this, because I plan meals for a full week in advance, trying to arrange for both a style of cuisine and for repeated ingredients.

So, I'm not your target audience.


Missed name opportunity: Dinnder


I clicked because I wanted to try this, but it looks like you built your thing inside a particular device manufacturer's closed ecosystem which I do not use, so I cannot try it.

Would love to see more web forward tech, or otherwise platform agnostic tech.


What you say definitely makes sense, but honestly the overwhelming majority of their customers would come from that ecosystem even if it was cross-platform or web-based, so why should they bother? It is hard to imagine many people out of that ecosystem would pay for something like that, which is also why a lot of similarly oriented stuff are restricted there. The whole concept sounds like a kind of "luxury good" equivalent for an app.


[flagged]


> Oh God it’s even got a subscription for it. This app is literally garbage.

Can you elaborate on why you think it’s “garbage” when an indie dev is trying to make money off something they created? May I ask what you do for a living? (Just curious.)


First off, great job misrepresenting my point! Secondly, let me ask you this: did you spend the money on the app? I’m going to assume no, just for the sake of argument, since obviously you’ve bought it and will pay for many years to come since you want to support an indie dev.

But again, for sake of argument let’s say you didn’t, why not? Because at its core you didn’t find it valuable. But they deserve to make money off their creations right? So by your logic everyone should buy this, regardless of value, because they deserve the money. Except they don’t. They have a right to charge $20/yr for an app they made in a weekend, and I have every right as a consumer to refuse that and even mock it. Especially when they make poor business decisions such as taking on unnecessary fixed costs and limiting themselves to ~50% of the market. This is what they call the free market, and I suggest you go back to Econ 101 if you don’t understand.

As for what I do for a living: I provide value to others and receive monetary compensation in return, something this app fails to do.


Personally, I think the pricing issue is related to the web app issue from the parent comment.

Even as a free iOS app, there is the $99/year Apple Developer fee, on top of any server costs.

Meanwhile, a web app can be used by anyone on any device, and if designed properly, can be hosted for free on a number of platforms.

If the goal is to make money from casual users, an indie iOS app is the move.

... But that would not fly for what I presume to be a very large fraction of the HN audience that lives and breathes code. What could have been an interesting and tweakable open source project built in a weekend, sold as a closed untweakable app at a $20/year subscription, only for iPhones? That would certainly be quite a bold sell.


It's very noble of you to work for free. Oh what's that, you don't? Interesting.


And it’s very kind of you to spend the $20/yr on the indie food app. Oh, you didn’t? Interesting.


I'm not sure if I'm getting this: people need an app to decide something that can easily be decided by... talking to each other?!


[flagged]


This is barely relevant to the discussion. All your recent comments are a link to this website.


[flagged]


Please tell me this is satire.


it isnt, my girlfriend will love it but i donf love her that much to build it


[flagged]


>choosy beggars

Nobody here wants a discount. No one is begging for anything. People are providing the feedback they were asked for.


Actually a great idea


Have you considered just eating two separate dinners?


Ah. An app to find people who want to eat the same thing.


Nice! Solving this problem with technology. Looks amazing. Well done!


Ah damn! After joining a Family - it crashes


Dev here: Can you send me your family code? (whatdinner@kiru.io) - I will debug the issues!


After all, it's an NP-hard problem.


What about an app to tell you what kind of sub sandwich to eat? Could call it Grinder!


I don't mean to belittle your app that unfortunately I can't try it since I don't have iOS.

We did solve the problem in a much easier way though. We do have 40 recipes we usually cycle through. I wrote them in a spreadsheet and marked them based on who can cook them, if it's brunch, lunch or dinner, quick or elaborate, summery or wintery.

Then in another sheet I just create a list of those recipes/dishes picked randomly based on the day of the month.

If we start the discussion "what do we eat tonight", I can just open the spreadsheet. 99% of the time proposing the option for that day on the sheet gives us closure and we're done.




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