SuChef

Here you go:

Inspiration

Every day, millions of people discover incredible recipes on TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. They save the video, text it to a friend, screenshot it, and then never actually make the dish. The recipe disappears into a sea of bookmarks. We saw this problem firsthand in our own lives and in the audience of food creators like Eitan Bernath. People don't lack motivation to cook. They lack a tool that bridges the gap between saving a recipe and actually making it. That's why we built SuChef.

What it does

SuChef turns the recipes you save on social media into the meals you actually cook. Paste a link, snap a photo of a cookbook, or share a video, and SuChef uses AI to instantly extract a full, structured recipe with ingredients, steps, nutrition estimates, and more. From there, users can build shopping lists, organize recipes into collections, discover new dishes, and cook with confidence. The app is paywall-gated with a subscription managed entirely through RevenueCat, offering a yearly plan ($39.99/yr with a 7-day free trial) and a monthly plan ($9.99/mo with a 3-day free trial).

How we built it

SuChef is built with Flutter for the mobile frontend (iOS-first via TestFlight) and Supabase for the entire backend, including database, auth, storage, and edge functions. Supabase Edge Functions power the core intelligence of the app, handling recipe parsing, AI image generation, and import logic. We use OpenAI and Google Gemini models to parse and structure recipes from a variety of input formats. Our import pipeline supports speech-to-text for video audio, OCR for scanning cookbook pages or screenshots, and HTML parsing for web-based recipes. RevenueCat's Flutter SDK (purchases_flutter) manages the full subscription lifecycle, from paywall presentation to entitlement checks, trial management, renewals, and billing retries.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest challenge was building a reliable recipe import pipeline that works across wildly different input formats. A TikTok video, a screenshot of a handwritten recipe, and a food blog URL all need to produce the same clean, structured output. Getting speech-to-text transcription accurate enough for cooking terminology, handling OCR on messy handwriting, and stripping the noise from recipe blog HTML all required significant iteration. We also spent time fine-tuning how we present the paywall so it feels natural rather than aggressive, making sure users understand the value before they commit.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that SuChef actually solves a real problem we experience daily. The AI import pipeline works across video, image, and URL sources, which means users can throw virtually any recipe at it and get a usable result. We're also proud of the subscription model. By gating the app behind RevenueCat-managed trials, every user who sticks around has real intent, and our unit economics work from day one. Getting a polished iOS app live on TestFlight with a full Supabase backend and RevenueCat integration as a two-person team feels like a real accomplishment.

What we learned

We learned how powerful Supabase Edge Functions are as a serverless compute layer, especially for AI workloads. We also gained a deep appreciation for RevenueCat's SDK. Handling App Store subscription logic manually would have added weeks of work, and RevenueCat abstracted all of that away while giving us real-time analytics on trial conversion and churn. On the AI side, we learned that no single parsing technique works for every recipe source. The key is layering multiple approaches (STT, OCR, HTML parsing) and letting the AI model normalize the output.

What's next for SuChef

Next up is launching on Android, which Flutter makes straightforward. We're also building out social features so users can share collections with friends, a meal planning calendar, and smarter AI suggestions based on what's already in your pantry. On the monetization side, we want to experiment with RevenueCat's paywall testing tools to optimize trial conversion rates and pricing. Long-term, we see SuChef becoming the place where food content turns into real cooking, for every creator's audience, not just one.

Built With

• flutter
• openai
• revenuecat
• supabase