Health, home and travel decision
Easychef
A single competent developer can build and maintain a useful web replacement (LLM-backed recipe generator, storage, shopping lists) in about a week; the main losses are the native iOS app and app-store distribution.
Visit website↗$2.99/mo
$36/yr
Per seat. Read off the official pricing page.
$100one-off40 h to build
$25/mo4 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 12 seats.
No open-source build does this yet
Nothing published replaces this one, so a replacement starts from an empty file. Here is what it would have to cover.
What a replacement has to do
- User lists ingredients → server calls an LLM/recipe generator to produce matching recipes → present step-by-step recipe and allow saving to collections or converting to a shopping list
What it still won’t have
- Polished native iOS app and App Store distribution (homepage: "Download EasyChef Available on the App Store")
- Vendor-provided free 3-day iOS trial and billing flow
- Any proprietary recipe corpus or curated content not present on the public site
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 12 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a simple web replacement for EasyChef using React for the frontend, Node.js + Express for the backend, Postgres for storage, and OpenAI (or compatible) for recipe generation. In scope: ingredient input and normalization UI; prompt-driven LLM recipe generation returning ingredients, steps, and basic nutrition; user accounts with saved collections; convert a recipe or collection into a consolidated shopping list; basic responsive UI. Out of scope: native iOS/Android app, push notifications, payment/subscription billing. Include error handling for API failures, rate limits, and malformed ingredient input, and provide unit tests for backend recipe-generation logic and integration tests for the shopping-list consolidation.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Build verdict base78
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- Evidence score81
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
