Recipe Box

Type this into a browser on your wifi and your recipes are there.

Your recipes live in your house, not on someone else’s computer.

Recipe Box is a small computer that keeps your household’s recipes, meal plans and grocery lists. Everyone at home opens it in a browser, on any phone or laptop. You buy the box once. There is no Recipe Box account and no monthly fee, because there is no service behind it.

See what it does See the latest update
Recipe Box on a phone: a searchable list of recipes, each with its serving size, times and tags.

A recipe book the whole house can open

It runs in the browser you already have. There is nothing to install, and nobody needs an account.

A recipe for miso salmon with rice: servings, times, ingredients, and buttons to share, print or edit.
Recipes, laid out to cook from Type one in, or paste a link to a recipe on the web and Recipe Box fills in the ingredients and steps for you to check.
A meal plan called This week, with a breakfast, lunch and dinner chosen for Monday and Tuesday.
The week, planned Breakfast, lunch and dinner for each day, picked from your own recipes.
A grocery list for ten meals, sorted by aisle, with each item showing which recipe it is for.
One grocery list Built from the week’s plan. Repeated ingredients are added up and sorted by aisle, ready to work through on your phone or print.
  • Add a photo to any recipe.
  • Search by name or by your own tags.
  • Print a recipe, share a link to it at home, or send a copy to anyone.
  • Put it on your phone’s home screen, like an app.
  • Four colour themes, one of them dark.
  • Take everything with you: one file holds every recipe, plan and list.

Inside the box

No screen, no fan, nothing that moves. Three things you can point at.

  1. A small computer A Raspberry Pi, about the size of a deck of cards. It runs Recipe Box and nothing else, and it starts by itself when it is plugged in.
  2. A USB drive with your recipes on it Everything you save is on this drive, and a copy is made every night. Pull it out and your recipes come with you. Plug it into another Recipe Box and they are there.
  3. One power cable It stays on, like your router, so the recipes are there whenever someone reaches for a phone.

For the curious: it is built for a Raspberry Pi 3B, uses about 120 MB of memory, and keeps everything in a single database file.

No subscription, because there is no service

Most recipe apps keep your recipes on their computers and charge you to reach them. Recipe Box keeps them on yours. There is no account to create and no monthly fee, and if this website disappeared tomorrow your box would carry on exactly as before.

What that costs you

Away from home takes a Tailscale account
The box is not on the internet. To reach it from the shop, Settings → Away from home links it to Tailscale, a free service that connects your own devices privately, and each phone needs the Tailscale app signed in to the same account. Without it, the box only works on your home wifi, which is why the grocery list has a print button.
The lock stops changes, not reading
Settings → Lock sets a password that is asked for before anything is added, changed or deleted. Without it, anyone on your home wifi can change what is in Recipe Box. With it, they can still read every recipe, meal plan and grocery list, and anyone standing at the box can remove the lock by holding its setup button for five seconds.
The backups are on the same drive
Every night the box saves a copy of everything and keeps the last 14. They sit on the same USB drive as the original, so for a copy that survives losing the drive, export everything to a file from Settings and keep it somewhere else.
Old devices may need the long way round
Phones and laptops from the last several years find recipebox.local by themselves. Android before version 12 and some smart TVs do not, and reach the box by its number on your network instead.

Updates are free, and up to you

When there is a new version, a dot appears on the menu. One button in Settings installs it, and your recipes are not touched. If a new version does not start properly, the box puts the old one back.

Your box looks for updates by downloading one small file from this site. It sends nothing about you or your recipes, because there is nothing here to receive it.

The current version is 1.7.0. See what changed, and how updating works.