Welcome to iwant2eat

iwant2eat is your private recipe vault, meal planner, and household shopping list — all in one, in any browser. Save the recipes you already cook, ask questions across them in plain language, plan the week, shop from one live list the whole family shares, and photograph anything in the store to check whether it's a good buy. Your recipes are visible only to you: nothing is public, nothing is indexed, nothing is shared unless you share it.

Getting started

Try before signing up — open the demo to click around a pre-filled account. No registration needed.
Sign up free — every new account starts a 14-day free trial with everything included. No credit card. Sign in with email and password, or with Google or Facebook (Apple on request).
After the trial — your recipes stay viewable forever, free. AI parsing, search, and translation pause until you subscribe.
Put it on your phone — iwant2eat works in any browser and installs to your home screen like an app. See Install & offline.

Adding recipes

There are more ways in than any other recipe app — pick whichever fits the moment:

Email — forward any recipe to recipe@iwant2eat.com from your account email. Plain text, HTML newsletters, photos attached to the mail, and bare URLs (we fetch the page) all work. You'll get a reply telling you what was saved, or why it couldn't be. You can verify several of your addresses on the Account page, and forwarding works from any of them.
Paste — open + Add Recipe and paste text, a URL, or an image straight into the editor. Images dragged from Evernote, Notion, Gmail, or any web page are imported automatically.
Photograph — drop in a photo of a recipe card, a cookbook page, or handwritten notes. The text is read off the image (yes, including most handwriting), then parsed into structured ingredients and steps. The original photo stays attached to the recipe.
Cooking video or reel — paste (or email) a YouTube video, a Facebook reel, or a TikTok and we pull the recipe from its caption or, when the recipe is only spoken aloud, from the narration itself. The clip stays attached to the recipe so you can play it while you cook. Instagram is the exception: it blocks everything automated, so reels there have to be saved with the browser extension while you're logged in (see Browser extension).
Browser extension — one click from any recipe page on the web sends it to your vault. See Browser extension below.
From your phone's share menu — on Android, share a page to the installed iwant2eat app. On iPhone, our Shortcut adds iwant2eat to the Safari share sheet.
Import from Paprika — moving over? Upload your .paprikarecipes export on the import page and the whole library comes across in one batch.
Drop on an existing card — drag extra photos onto a recipe you've already saved to add them to its gallery.

Every recipe is parsed in its original language, and the verbatim source text stays with the recipe — nothing is lost to AI interpretation. You can always see exactly what was captured, edit it, and re-run the parser. Whichever way a recipe comes in — email, extension, or the Add page — we spot when it's one you already have and skip the duplicate instead of cluttering your vault.

Browsing & search

On My Recipes:

Search — type to filter; results update as you type. Several words narrow the search: pickled onion finds recipes with both words, not everything containing "onion". If nothing matches exactly, we relax the ending of longer words so a typo or a different word ending still finds it.
Tags — click a tag chip to filter (combine several). Create tags from the + add tag input; drag a tag onto a recipe card to attach it.
Favorites — click the heart on any card; the heart toggle on the search row shows favorites only.
Collections — group recipes into named collections; a recipe can belong to several.
Sort — by name, date added, most recently viewed, or ✨ For you. Your choice is remembered.
✨ For you — puts the recipes closest to your tastes first. It learns quietly from what you already do: recipes you put on a shopping list count most, then favourites and meal-planned dishes, then the ones you keep opening. Nothing to set up, no ratings to give — and it sharpens the more you use the app.
Trash — deleted recipes go to the trash first and can be restored from there.

Ask AI — plain-language answers from your recipes

Below the grid on My Recipes there's a single box: ask anything the way you'd ask a person. The AI answers from your own collection — not from the internet — and you get both a written answer and the matching recipe cards underneath it:

"What recipes do I have with duck?" — filter by ingredient, diet, time budget, or any criterion.
"What can I cook in 30 minutes?" — constraint-based browsing.
"How do I make borscht?" — finds your matching recipes and variants.
"Which of my desserts are gluten-free?" — questions that need judgement, not just word matching.

It remembers your questions — tap the box to pick from the ones you've asked before; the ✕ removes one for good.
Ask inside a collection — open a collection first and the question only considers those recipes.
Answers know your tastes — your favourites, your most-used tags, and anything in your attention words are taken into account, so suggestions lean towards what you actually cook and flag ingredients you watch for.
Big vaults — asking across more than 100 recipes costs noticeably more AI budget, so we ask you to confirm first.

Every account has a small daily AI budget — plenty for normal use, but capped so one person's heavy day can't affect anyone else. Usage and spend are visible under Account → More → AI budget.

Reading & cooking

On a recipe page:

Layouts — switch between Standard (ingredients first), Stacked (each step shows the ingredients it uses), and Side-by-side (for big screens). Your choice persists per device.
Make it readable your way — under Account → UI preferences, set the font, size, and colour of the recipe text, ingredient names, quantities, times, notes, and the original text — even bold, italic, or underline per element. Saved per device.
Adjust any quantity — tap an amount to edit it in place (ranges too), or change the serving count and everything recalculates on the fly.
Nutrition — an ≈ kcal · protein · carbs · fat per serving strip, estimated by the AI from the ingredients. Treat it as a ballpark, not a lab reading.
Start cooking — a full-screen, kitchen-friendly mode: one step at a time with that step's ingredients highlighted, big type, and strike-through as you go. It can read steps aloud and you can advance hands-free by voice — flour-covered fingers never touch the screen. Serving count scales the quantities on the fly.
Screen stays awake — on a phone, the screen won't dim or lock while a recipe is open, so it's ready the moment you glance over mid-cook. On by default; turn it off under Account → UI preferences.
Multi-part recipes — when one source has several variations ("pelmeni with three fillings"), they're grouped as one umbrella recipe, and any part can be split into a standalone recipe.
Video — recipes saved from a YouTube video or a Facebook reel keep the clip in a collapsible Video section; tap the thumbnail to play it right on the page (reels open in a new tab). Remove it any time if you'd rather not keep it.
Photo gallery — drag photos onto the page to add them; drag to reorder; the first photo becomes the card thumbnail.
Original text — the verbatim source is always there at the bottom; edit it and choose Save and reprocess to re-run the parser.
🖨 Print / 📄 PDF — print a clean copy, or export the recipe as a PDF to share or keep.
🛒 To shopping list — one tap sends the recipe's ingredients to the household shopping list (see below).

Translation & unit conversion

Translate any recipe on demand — the globe pill (e.g. 🌐 EN) translates the title, ingredients, steps, and notes into your language. The original is never overwritten — it stays one tap away. Your target language is your profile language, and you can change it on the Account page at any time; the interface itself ships in 31 languages.
Units your kitchen speaks — set your preference (metric, imperial, or keep-as-written) and quantities convert accordingly: cups to millilitres, ounces to grams, °F to °C. Scaling the servings recalculates everything.
Cook's conversions inline — cooking temperatures show in your scale with the original kept alongside, and vague measures get a practical weight right where you read them: grams for a pinch of salt, a packet of yeast, or a clove of garlic, plus a grams↔ounces equivalent on ingredient rows.

This combination is what makes iwant2eat work for the whole family: Grandma's handwritten Polish recipe, photographed once, readable in English or Vietnamese, in cups or grams — while the Polish original is preserved forever.

Meal plan

On Meal Plan:

A Mon–Sun × Breakfast / Lunch / Dinner grid; today is highlighted. ← / → jump by week.
Drag recipes in from the drawer, which has its own search and favorites filter.
Or let the AI draft the week — describe what you want in plain language ("quick dinners, one fish day, kid-friendly, no repeats") and it fills the empty slots from your own recipes. Slots you've already planned by hand are kept.
Per-slot servings — each slot has its own serving count; bump it up for guests or batch cooking.
🛒 Make shopping list — collapses the whole week into the household shopping list, ingredient quantities summed across every slot.
🖨 Print / 📄 PDF — tape the week to the fridge.

Shopping list — one live list for the whole household

There's one shopping list, shared by everyone in your household, and it updates on every device in real time: add cornstarch from the couch and it's already on the phone of whoever is standing in the store.

Add items your way — type a name (suggestions from your shopping history fill in your usual quantity, unit, and store), or send ingredients over from any recipe or from the whole week's meal plan. Quantities of the same item merge — two recipes wanting onions become one line.
Quantities, units, stores — every item can carry an amount, a unit (including your own custom units), and the store you buy it at. Add, rename, or remove stores to match where you actually shop.
Two views — a plain list, or grouped by department so you walk each aisle once.
Store filter with "near me" — filter to one store, and when you're out, the app can spot the store you're closest to and show its items first.
Shop with one thumb — tap an item to mark it bought; it drops into a Recently bought section with one-tap undo. Clear the bought items when you're done.
🖨 Print / 📄 PDF — for paper people and fridge doors.

📷 Scan a product — is this a good buy?

At the bottom of the list there's a camera button. Point it at anything in the store — the product itself or just its shelf price tag — and tap once. No confirm step, no typing: the label is read and you get a verdict back.

Price per unit, worked out for you — the number that actually matters when one jar is 340 g and the next is 500 g. Multipacks are multiplied out.
Compared against your own history — "cheapest you've seen", or "you saw it 18% cheaper at Costco on Jul 3". Every photo you take is remembered, so the answers get better the more you shop. We don't guess at "typical" market prices — the comparison is your own shopping, which is the only price history that's actually true for you.
What's really in it — ultra-processed rating, Nutri-Score, and awkward ingredients read off the label or looked up from the barcode.
Expiry dates — a use-by or best-before date on the pack is read too, so a "bargain" that expires on Thursday gets called out rather than celebrated.
The store fills itself in — if you've allowed location, we already know which shop you're standing in; otherwise the store name is read off the tag.
Every scan is saved — whether or not you buy it, and whether or not it's on your list. Photograph the same thing twice in one day and it updates that day's entry instead of recording it twice.
Clearing it — Clear saved prices under the camera button wipes the household's price history. It can't be undone, and every "cheapest you've seen" comparison starts over.

Scanning uses a small amount of your AI budget per photo — a fraction of a cent. The price history is shared with your household, like the list itself.

Share a recipe or a collection by link — flip the share toggle and you get a private link anyone can open, cook from, print, or save into their own vault — no account needed to view. Revoke the link at any time and it stops working instantly. (For recipes captured from the web, we ask you to confirm you have the right to share.)
Friends — on the Friends page, invite people by email (the invitation can be translated into their language before sending). Once connected, you can browse what your friends have shared and copy any of their recipes into your own vault — recipes you already have are marked.
Household members — from the Account page, invite your family into your subscription. Each person gets their own sign-in and their own private vault, and you choose per area — recipes, shopping, meals — whether they can manage everything, add things, or just look. One subscription covers the household; the shopping list is the one thing everyone shares by design.

Browser extension

The iwant2eat extension adds a toolbar button that grabs the recipe page you're reading and sends it straight to your vault — one click, no copy-paste. It works on Chrome, Edge, and other Chromium browsers, and on Firefox (including Firefox on Android). Get it on the extension page.

Sign in once — the extension uses your existing iwant2eat.com session.
Save a recipe — open the popup on any recipe page and click Save this recipe. It captures the URL, title, article text, and images, and shows the parsing status right in the popup.
Instagram and Facebook posts — the extension reads the post you're actually looking at while you're signed in, which is the only way to get an Instagram reel's recipe: Instagram serves nothing to an app that isn't logged in as you. Open the reel or post and use the extension (or its keyboard shortcut) rather than emailing the link.
Keyboard shortcut — save without opening the popup at all; set or change the key combination on your browser's extension-shortcuts page.
No junk on failure — if a page can't be parsed (a login wall, a social post with no recipe), the placeholder is cleaned up automatically so your vault doesn't fill with failed imports.

The extension sends exactly what the page contains, plus your session cookie — it does not read other tabs, run in the background, show ads, or track you. Details on the extension privacy page.

Install to your phone or desktop — and cook offline

iwant2eat is a web app that installs like a native one — no app store, no updates to babysit. On Android and desktop Chrome or Edge, use the Install prompt; on iPhone or iPad, open the site in Safari and tap Share → Add to Home Screen. It opens full-screen, and your recently viewed recipes stay readable offline — a dead spot in the supermarket basement won't take your shopping list or tonight's recipe with it. Adding and editing need a connection.

Your data — private, portable, yours

Private by default — your recipes are visible to you and nobody else. No public pages, nothing crawled by search engines, and your recipe text is never used to train AI models. Full details in the privacy policy.
Export everything, any time — Account → More → Export recipes packages your whole vault (ingredients, steps, photos, tags, notes, nutrition) into one .i2e file. It's a plain, documented format — a ZIP with a JSON inside — so your backup is readable even outside the app. Individual recipes export to PDF or print.
Restore or merge — Account → More → Import recipes takes an .i2e file and imports additively: nothing already in your vault is touched.
Leave cleanly — you can delete your account and data whenever you want.

Pricing

14-day free trial, no card required. After that: $2.99/month or $20/year (≈ $1.67/month). One subscription, everything included — unlimited recipes, AI, translation, meal planning, the household shopping list, and the whole family via household members. Cancel anytime; if you stop paying, your recipes remain viewable free, forever. See pricing to sign up.

Frequently asked questions

Does it work on iPhone?

Yes. Open the site in Safari and tap Share → Add to Home Screen — it installs and runs full-screen like an app, with no App Store involved. Android and desktop install the same way from Chrome or Edge.

What happens when my trial ends?

Your recipes stay viewable forever, free. AI parsing, search, and translation pause until you subscribe — nothing is deleted, and you can still export everything.

Can I get my recipes out?

Always. Export the whole vault as a .i2e file (a documented ZIP + JSON format) or individual recipes as PDF. You are never locked in.

Is my data private?

Yes. Your recipes are visible only to you (and to people you explicitly share with). Nothing is public, nothing is indexed by search engines, and your recipes are never used to train AI models.

How do I cancel?

On the pricing page, open Manage subscription — it takes you to the billing portal where you can cancel in two clicks. No emails, no phone calls.

What languages does it speak?

The interface ships in 31 languages, and any stored recipe can be translated into your language on demand while keeping the original. Recipes are parsed in whatever language they arrive in.

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