Health, home and travel decision
Stashed: Save Any Recipe
A capable technical user can build a useful subset (import, parse, store, shopping list) using open-source tools and the referenced Gourmand project, but reproducing a polished native iOS app with reliable cross‑social imports and App Store distribution is multi‑week and not trivial, so keeping the paid product is reasonable for convenience.
View on the App Store↗$4.17/mo
$50/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$100one-off70 h to build
$10/mo3 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 5 seats.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Stashed: Save Any Recipe alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Save or share a recipe (link or image) -> parse/extract ingredients & steps -> store recipe in a database -> view/organize/search recipes -> add ingredients to a shopping list.
What it still won’t have
- Polished native iOS UX, App Store distribution and payments handling
- Robust cross‑social import reliability and edge-case parsers maintained by vendor
- Polished subscription/product support and iteration
- Any proprietary backend or cloud sync implemented by the vendor
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 5 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 lightweight self-hosted recipe keeper: use React (web) + React Native (optional PWA) for UI, Node.js + Express for API, Postgres for storage. Implement endpoints and UI for: (1) accept recipe input via pasted URL and image upload (support common social share formats), (2) recipe extractor using server-side HTML scraper (cheerio) and image OCR (tesseract), (3) store recipes with ingredients, steps, tags, and source URL in Postgres, (4) recipe view/edit screens, search and filter by tag, and (5) shopping list generator that aggregates ingredients across recipes. Out of scope: App Store submission, paid subscription billing, advanced ML parsers. Include error handling, input validation, migration scripts, unit tests for extraction logic, and basic integration tests for API routes.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 2 cited sources+1
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Evidence score65
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 →Cited sources · 2
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productStashed: Save Any Recipe - App Store
- open sourceGourmandRecipeManager/gourmand
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
