Extract

A free, ad-free recipe app for your phone. Paste or share a link to any recipe page and get just the recipe: ingredients and steps, no life story. Save recipes, sort them into categories and recipe books, scale servings while you cook, and share them with anyone.

• Works on iPhone and Android as a home-screen app, and on a computer in any browser.
• Recipes are stored on your phone and work offline in the kitchen.
• Most recipe sites work instantly and for free. Extract reads their standard recipe data, and for sites that block readers (like Allrecipes or Serious Eats) it reads the public copy saved by the Internet Archive.
• Cook mode: one big step at a time, with that step's ingredients shown and tappable times that start kitchen timers.
• Grocery list from any recipe, scaled to your servings, sorted by store aisle with repeats added up (or grouped by recipe), plus your own items.
• Pantry of what you have at home: those items start unticked when you shop, and What can I make? ranks your recipes by what you already have.
• Instagram, TikTok and YouTube links: the recipe is read from the caption or description, or from the page the caption links to.
• Ratings and a cooking log with a dated note each time you make something.
• Linked recipes (a sauce or dough inside a dish), Surprise me, Fill empty days for the meal plan, and Add to calendar (a calendar file of the week).
• From blogs: follow recipe blogs by their address and see new posts in one place.
• Your aisles: move an item to another aisle (remembered) and arrange aisles in your store's order.
• Help (the ? button): how-tos, what Extract can't do yet, what's new, and the tour (50 stops including Limitation steps; take it whole or one part at a time).
• Weekly meal plan that turns into a grocery list in one tap.
• Sync between devices with your own free Supabase project (optional), plus short share links.
• Photos, favorites, a cooked count, US/metric conversion, nutrition facts, printing, read-aloud steps, importing many links at once, categories, and recipe books.
• A short tour on first open, and a What's new note after each update.
• Optional: add a Claude API key to also read recipe photos, pasted text, and sites without recipe data.

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1. Put it online (Vercel, free)

1. Go to vercel.com/new and import this GitHub repository.
2. Leave every setting at its default and click Deploy. The project settings in vercel.json handle the rest.
3. When it finishes, Vercel gives you an address like extract-yourname.vercel.app. That's your app.

To use your own domain, for example recipes.bnewt.com, open the project in Vercel, go to Settings → Domains, and add it.

2. Install it on your phone

iPhone: open your app's address in Safari, tap the Share button, then Add to Home Screen.

Android: open the address in Chrome, tap ⋮, then Install app (or Add to Home screen).

Open it from the home-screen icon from then on. On iPhone, the home-screen app keeps its own storage, separate from Safari.

3. Save recipes

• Android: on any recipe page, tap Share → Extract. The app opens and fetches the recipe.
• iPhone: on the recipe page, tap Share → Copy. Open Extract, tap Add, then Paste link.
• Any phone: you can also type or paste a link into the Link box, or use Type it in.
• Instagram, TikTok, YouTube: copy the post's link and paste it on Add. Only the caption or description is read, never the video. Instagram sometimes hides captions from readers; copy the caption and use Paste text (works without Claude when it has an ingredient list).

Every recipe opens on a review screen first, so you can fix anything before saving.

4. Optional: Claude reading for photos and other sites

Without this, links from sites that publish standard recipe data work fine. Most big recipe sites and food blogs do. With it, you can also read photos of recipe cards, cookbook pages, and pasted text, plus sites without that data.

1. Create an API key at platform.claude.com under API Keys, and add a little credit. This is billed separately from a Claude.ai subscription. Reading one recipe with Claude Haiku costs a fraction of a cent.
2. In Vercel, open your project, go to Settings → Environment Variables, and add:
   • ANTHROPIC_API_KEY: your key.
   • ACCESS_CODE: any password you choose. This stops strangers who find your app's address from using your key. Enter the same code once in the app under Settings → Access code.
3. Redeploy: open Deployments, then on the latest one tap ⋯ → Redeploy.

Optional: set RECIPE_MODEL to use a different Claude model. The default is claude-haiku-5-5.

5. Optional: sync between devices (free Supabase account, about 10 minutes)

Sync keeps your recipes, books, meal plan and grocery list the same on your phone, computer, and anyone else who signs in with your email. It also makes share links short. Without it, everything still works on one device.

1. Create the project. Sign up at supabase.com, click New project, give it a name (e.g. extract) and a database password (save it somewhere), and pick the region nearest you. Wait a minute for it to finish setting up.
2. Create the tables. Open SQL Editor → New query, paste the whole of supabase/schema.sql from this repo, and click Run. It should say "Success. No rows returned."
3. Turn on sign-in codes. Open Authentication → Emails → Templates → Magic Link (newer dashboards call it Magic link or One-time code). Replace the message body with:

   <h2>Your Extract sign-in code</h2>
   <p>Enter this code in Extract: <strong>{{ .Token }}</strong></p>
   

   Save. (The app signs in with this 6-digit code instead of a link, because on iPhone a link would open Safari instead of the installed app.)
4. Copy two values. Open Project Settings → API (or Data API). Copy the Project URL and the anon public key.
5. Give them to Vercel. In your Vercel project, open Settings → Environment Variables and add SUPABASE_URL (the Project URL) and SUPABASE_ANON_KEY (the anon key). Then redeploy: Deployments → ⋯ on the latest → Redeploy.
6. Sign in. In the app, go to Settings → Sync between devices, enter your email, and type the code you receive. Do the same on each device. Everything already on a device is uploaded the first time it signs in.

About the free plan: Supabase pauses a free project after about a week with no use, and emails you first. Your data is kept; open the Supabase dashboard and click Resume project. Using the app every few days keeps it awake. The anon key is designed to be public: the database rules in schema.sql let each person read and change only their own data, and a share can be opened only by someone who has its link.

Supabase's built-in email sender allows only about 2 emails per hour for the whole project, and one code request per minute per person. Each device needs one sign-in, so set up one device, wait if needed, then the next. To lift the limit, add your own email sender (for example a free Brevo or Resend account) under Authentication → Emails → SMTP Settings.

Adding to the tour

Every new feature gets an entry in public/tour.js (TOUR). People who already took the tour see only the new entries, under "What's new", the next time they open the app.

Sharing

Share on a recipe or a book makes a link anyone can open, no account needed; they can save their own copy. With sync on, links are short. Without it, the link carries the recipe itself, so books with many recipes make long links; if a messaging app cuts one off, send it as text instead. A shared link is a copy: later edits don't change it.

Backups

Under Settings → Backup, Save a backup saves a file you can keep in Files or Google Drive, and Restore from backup loads it on a new phone. With sync on, your data is also in your Supabase project.

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For developers

No build step. public/ is the app (plain HTML/CSS/JS, installable PWA with an offline service worker and an Android share target). api/ holds Vercel serverless functions:

Route	What it does
GET /api/fetch?url=	Fetches the page server-side and reads its schema.org Recipe data. Falls back to Claude when the page has none and a key is set. Blocks private and internal addresses, with redirect, size and time limits.
POST /api/extract	Reads { text, url? } or { image: { data, media_type } } with Claude.
GET /api/status	Reports whether Claude reading is on, whether an access code is required, and the Supabase project to sync with.

Sync (public/sync.js): each recipe, book, planned day and the grocery list is one row in items. Devices pull rows by server time and push through push_items, which only accepts a change newer than the stored one, so an offline phone can't overwrite newer edits. Deletions are synced as tombstones.

npm test                              # reader, cook mode, units and sync-rule tests
node test/dev-server.js               # local preview at http://localhost:5173
FAKE_SB=1 node test/dev-server.js     # same, with an in-memory stand-in for Supabase