I love to cook, and so does my family. Between us we have built up something that took years: more than six thousand recipes, sorted into hundreds of folders, each one tweaked after a cook and rewritten to our taste. It is, quietly, one of the most personal things I own.
For a long time all of it lived in Paprika, which is a genuinely good app with a simple, one-time price. Then, for the better part of two years, the updates stopped. Nothing broke, and my recipes still opened every night, but the quiet got me thinking. How much was I trusting to a single company, and how little could I do if that trust ever stopped paying off?
It made me look at where my recipes actually lived. They were on my devices, yes, but in a format only Paprika could read, syncing through a cloud only Paprika could run. Six thousand recipes, and I did not really own a single one of them. I was renting access to my own cooking.
This is not a dig at Paprika, which is being actively worked on again, with a new version on the way. It was never really about one app. It is the shape of almost every app like it. A one-time purchase is revenue paid up front; running a sync service is a cost that never stops. That math has to give eventually, and when it does, whether a company raises its prices, gets bought, changes its terms, or simply goes quiet for a while, the recipes you have spent years building are the thing you can least afford to lose. A recipe you have saved should be as much yours as a cookbook on your shelf. Nobody can reach into your kitchen and take a cookbook back.
The more I looked, the less a recipe box seemed to need. Underneath, these apps mostly store text and copy it between your devices. That is not a product you should have to rent from anyone. It is a protocol. Once you see it that way, the whole arrangement starts to look backwards.
So I built Gratin the way I think it should work. Your recipes live on your device. There is no account, because there is nothing to log into. There are no ads, because you are not the product. When you want your recipes on another device, they sync through a small relay that you can run yourself, or pay us to run for you.
I built Gratin for my own kitchen, and I made sure it does not need me to keep running.
That last part is the whole point. Gratin is built on an open sync protocol. You can run the sync yourself, or pay us to run it for you. Either way, if I stop working on Gratin tomorrow, nothing breaks. If I get hit by a bus, nothing breaks. If the business folds, you lose nothing. Your recipes stay exactly where they are, and all your features continue to work. You might have to point the app at a different relay, but you can do that. Thats the magic.
I am not trying to build the biggest recipe app. I am trying to build one that still feels safe to use in ten years. One that treats the person doing the cooking, and the years of work stored in their recipe box, as theirs and never ours. One that does all of the things someone who enjoys cooking would want.
If that is the kind of thing you want in your kitchen, I would love for you to try it.
Thanks,
Russell