Comí

Inspiration

Everyone saves recipes from Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and food blogs, but almost nobody actually cooks them. The problem isn't a lack of inspiration. It's friction. You're missing one or two ingredients and don't know what to substitute. You can't remember which of your fifty saved recipes would work with what's actually in your fridge. Or the recipe you saved for the weekend is too involved for a Tuesday night. Existing recipe apps don't solve this — they're glorified bookmarks. They store your recipes, but they don't help you cook them. Me, my mom, and so many people I know face this exact problem, and Comí solves it.

What it does

Comí is an AI-powered recipe app that turns the recipes you save from social media and the web into meals you actually cook — by adapting them to what you have, what you want, and how much time you've got.

Import from anywhere. Share a link from Instagram or any recipe blog, snap a photo of a cookbook page, or type one in manually. Comí's AI extracts and structures everything: ingredients, steps, timing, all into a clean, usable recipe automatically.

Smart ingredient organization: Ingredients are grouped by importance (main, supporting, and pantry staples) so you can instantly see what you actually need versus what you probably already have.

Intelligent search and suggestions. The "What Can I Make?" feature lets you describe what you have or what you're in the mood for in plain language. Comí searches across your entire collection, but it's smart about it — if you have beef but only saved a chicken recipe, it recognizes that's an easy swap and suggests it anyway, with the full recipe rewritten around that substitution. Comí also generates new recipe ideas tailored to what you asked for, so you're never limited to just what you've saved.

Quick swaps and servings: Tap any key ingredient to get context-aware substitute suggestions, adjust servings with a tap, and hit apply. Comí regenerates the entire recipe with everything adjusted coherently.

Freeform modifications. Chat with any recipe in natural language: "make this dairy-free," "simplify for a weeknight," "double it for a dinner party." Every modification produces a full variation linked back to the original, so you can switch between versions anytime.

How we built it

Comí is built with React Native, with Supabase handling the entire backend: database, auth, edge functions, and storage. All AI processing routes through OpenRouter to Google Gemini models. The billing system is a hybrid between RevenueCat (subscription state) and Supabase (trial tracking, usage cycles, phase transitions).

Challenges we ran into

The modification pipeline was a challenge. Getting the AI to produce coherent, complete recipe rewrites (not just "swap X for Y" footnotes) while also correctly classifying whether a change is a variation of the original or an entirely new recipe took significant prompt engineering and iteration.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The smart suggestion system is the feature we're most proud of. When you say "I have ground beef and rice," Comí doesn't just keyword-match— it understands ingredient substitutability across your entire collection and suggests recipes you wouldn't have thought to search for, with modifications already figured out. That moment where it suggests your saved chicken stir-fry but adapted for beef is when the app clicks for people.

What we learned

Recipe apps have a cold-start problem that most competitors ignore. The app is only as powerful as the collection behind it, which means the onboarding and import experience has to be near-frictionless.

We also learned that ingredient substitution is far more nuanced than it looks. A swap that makes sense in one recipe is wrong in another. Context-aware suggestions (considering the dish, the cooking method, the other ingredients) make the difference between a useful tool and a gimmick.

What's next for Comí

Smart grocery lists: auto-generated from selected recipes, consolidated across a meal plan, organized by store section, and aware of any ingredient substitutions the user has made.

Meal planning: a weekly view where users slot recipes into days, with grocery lists that aggregate across the plan, turning Comí from a recipe-by-recipe tool into a weekly cooking companion.

Cooking mode: a step-by-step guided experience with timers, voice navigation, and screen-awake functionality for when you're actually in the kitchen with messy hands.

Creator integration: a partnership model where creators like Eitan can have a dedicated feed within Comí, giving their audience an enhanced experience with their content while driving app adoption through existing distribution.

Built With

• expo.io
• openrouter
• postgresql
• react-native
• typescript