№ 01
1862
How to Mix Drinks, or The Bon Vivant's Companion
Speakeater · the back room
The cooking app that
reads your fridge.
Photograph your shelves. Get back recipes you can actually cook tonight, ranked by what you already have.
No spam. No upsell. The install link, and one note when launch hits.
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Volume I · № 001
Est. June 10, 2026
A field manual for the home kitchen
the recipe matcher never gets the ingredients right
scanned my tomatoes as apples
ads literally between every screen
feels like AI slop, not actual recipes
no way to add my own ingredients
constant nag screen for the subscription
saved recipes never load when I need them
the cook timer stops when the screen sleeps
free tier is unusable, just a paywall demo
every recipe wants me to buy something specialty
ten step intro before any actual cooking
ingredients I have are never in their database
force-quit every other launch
search returns the same five recipes no matter what
good idea, broken execution
deletes my pantry list every update
no offline mode, useless when wifi drops
subscription auto-renewed at full price after the trial
recipes by someone who has never cooked
asks me to rate the app before I've used it
paywall before the first recipe
why is there a quiz to make pasta
just give me the recipe
Knock once
Tonight there is a place for the food in your pantry. It is here.
The flow
Start with photos.
Let us do the rest.
Speakeater reads what's on your shelves and ranks tonight's recipes by what you actually have.
New · Allergen layer
We catch allergens. Then we suggest the swap.
An amber bar at the top of every recipe flags dairy, wheat, gluten, nuts, soy, eggs, shellfish, fish, sesame.
If a clean substitute exists, we put it right there. Swap ratio. One line on what changes in the final dish. No more cross-referencing four blog posts to find out if oat milk works.
Substitutions are rated by the people cooking. The ones that actually work rise.
The score
Every recipe shows what you have.
100% means dinner is one tap away. 80% means one quick run. 50% means save it for next week's plan.
The score reads from your real pantry. Anything you've added, scanned, or photographed.
Tap the score and you see what's missing. The gaps drop into your shopping list with one tap each.
The library
Save into your own cookbooks.
Library, Books, Chapters, Recipes. Two starter Books on day one. Saved, and My Recipes. Build as many as you want.
Share a Book with one link. Whoever you send it to doesn't need the app. The Book opens on speakeater.com as a clean read-only page. They click. They cook.
The best partYour cookbooks belong to you. Want to download them and shove them in a Google Doc? Go for it. Want to leave Speakeater entirely and take everything you've saved with you? That's fine too. I'd rather you walk than feel stuck.
Two cocktail eras
Bootlegger or Mixologist.
2,000+ pre-1930 recipes shown straight, no editor pass, no modern rewrite. Plus thousands of modern craft cocktails with measurements and glassware.
The toggle on the page switches everything. Recipes, photography, even the typography shifts. Same drink. Different read entirely.
Bootlegger
Mixologist
1908
2026
The cellar
Five manuscripts form the spine of the cellar.
Working bartenders, working bars. The books that taught a country to drink before the lights went out in 1920.
№ 02
1878
American & Other Drinks (London, Criterion)
№ 03
1882
New & Improved Bartender's Manual
№ 04
1908
The World's Drinks & How to Mix Them
№ 05
1917
Recipes for Mixed Drinks (the last one before 1920)
+ contemporary
Death & Co. Attaboy. PDT. Milk & Honey. The 21st-century cellar. Only the drinks worth pouring.
4,037
drinks in the cellar. The manuscript page they came from, opened next to your phone.
I built this in my own kitchen.
It was 9pm on a Tuesday. I had ingredients. Real ones — half a chicken, a head of broccoli, garlic, parmesan, lemons. Genuinely cookable.
I pulled up a recipe to figure out what to do with the chicken. The page opened with fourteen paragraphs about Sandra's nonna in a Tuscan hillside village hand-cracking peppercorns harvested by a goat farmer named Giuseppe. I scrolled past the watercolor of an olive grove. I scrolled past the SEO keyword paragraph. I scrolled past three banner ads and a newsletter popup. By the time I finally hit the actual ingredient list, I was on UberEats. The chicken stayed in the fridge. Now it was haunting me, and I had pad thai too.
"Open the fridge. Take some photos. Tell me what to cook."
That's it. That's the whole pitch. No nonna. No olive grove. No newsletter. Snap a few shots of your shelves, and Speakeater tells you what's actually within reach tonight.
I'm one guy doing this. I'm shipping it slow because I'd rather you trust the app than feel hooked by it. The cocktail side is in there because there are recipe books from 1862, 1882, 1908 that nobody has properly digitized, and that bothered me enough to fix it.
If something breaks the first time you cook with this thing, email me. I'll fix it the same day.
— Kyle
A speakeater principle
Your data is yours.
Your pantry, your saved recipes, your shopping list, your cook history. Export it anytime, in plain JSON. Take it with you. Most apps don't do that. I'll be straight with you about what we keep, what we don't, and why.
01
Export, anytime.
One tap in Settings. You get a JSON bundle of every saved recipe, every cookbook, every pantry entry, every fridge scan. Standards-based, portable, opens in any tool. Take it whenever you want.
02
Take every book. Even ours.
Export anytime. Every book in your library, including the curated ones you didn't build yourself. The only thing we ask: keep our photo credits and source attribution where they came from. Same deal as most stock photo libraries. Walk out with the recipes. The credit line stays put.
03
Account delete, anytime.
Hit delete in Settings and your account closes. Account-only delete, same as everyone else. Your photos and personal info go. The aggregate ratings and cook signals stay (anonymized) because that's what's making the app work. Grab your export before you go if you want it all.
Cook mode
Screen stays awake. Timers run.
Cook mode shows the step you're on, runs the timer for that step, and locks the screen awake until the dish is done.
Works offline once a recipe is on screen. Saved recipes cache locally. The fridge scan and the link import are the only things that need a network connection.
I'm Kyle. Sole founder, building Speakeater on my own. If something breaks during your first cook, email me. I respond inside the day.
Honest table. What we do, what we don't.
Other apps do plenty we don't. We're going to be straight about it.
If a row says no, that's the truth on day one. Some of those become yes in v2. Some don't. We'll mark the date when each one ships, in this same table, on this same page.
Speakeater
SuperCook
Cooklist
Paprika
Discovery
Photo your fridge → recipes
Yes. Vision-scanned.
No
Receipts only
No
Tonight deck. Swipe-ranked match.
Yes. Multi-factor.
No
No
No
Adventure / novelty slider
Yes
No
No
No
Adaptive taste profile
Yes. Learns every action.
No
No
No
Cocktails
Vintage cocktail corpus (pre-1930)
2,000+ recipes
No
No
No
Era toggle. Bootlegger ↔ Mixologist.
Yes
No
No
No
Bar-shelf scan. Bottle detection.
Yes
No
No
No
Pantry intelligence
Receipt scan
Yes
No
Yes
No
Barcode scan
Yes. ML Kit.
No
Yes
No
Expiry alerts
Yes. Per-ingredient.
No
Yes
No
Allergens & substitutions
15-allergen profile
Yes. FDA Top 9 + 6 more.
Filter only
Filter only
Manual tagging
Inline allergen banner with subs
Yes. Tri-state.
No
No
No
Click-and-hold ingredient swap
Yes. 120 SEED + AI.
No
No
No
Imports & contribution
TikTok / YouTube → recipe
Yes. Pro.
No
No
Manual URL only
Photo-to-recipe (handwritten / printed)
Yes. Vision OCR.
No
No
No
First-cook credit on the card. Forever.
Yes
No
No
No
Library & sharing
Books → Chapters → Recipes
Yes. Three levels.
Lists only
Categories
Categories
Shareable public cookbook link
Yes. Signed token.
No
No
Email PDF
Aisle-grouped shopping list
Yes. Walk-order.
No
Yes
Linear list
Cooking
Cook mode. Per-step timer. Hands-free.
Yes
No
No
Yes
Servings scaling
Yes
No
Yes
Yes
Data ownership
Full JSON export
Yes. GDPR. 30 days.
No
No
Sync, not export
Account delete
Account only. Aggregate stays.
Account only
Account only
Local-first
24h fridge-photo auto-purge
Yes
No
No
No
Gaps we won't hide
Grocery store price tie-in
No
No
Yes
No
Meal plan / weekly calendar
Lite. v2 deepens it.
No
Yes
Yes
iOS
ETA August 2026
Yes
Yes
Yes
Web
No
Yes
Limited
Limited
Pricing
Free tier
Yes. Ad-supported.
Yes. Ad-supported.
Limited
No free tier
Subscription option
$4.99/mo or $29.99/yr
Subscription
Subscription
No
Lifetime / one-time purchase
Yes. $59.99 once.
No
No
$5 per platform
The resolution
we heard you.
Every complaint that flew past the door, answered.
| What people kept saying | What Speakeater does |
|---|---|
| Recipe matchers don't know what's actually in your fridge. | Fridge-photo scanComputer vision identifies what's in front of the camera and ranks tonight's recipes against it. |
| Recipes read like AI slop and nobody actually cooks them. | The Great ArchiveEvery recipe is ranked by save rate and cook count. The ones that fall short get demoted, reviewed, and only republished when they earn it back. |
| Subscription pressure ruins the free experience. | Free, ad-supported, always20 swipes a day. No email wall to start. Pro is for people who want unlimited and ad-free, not a tax on anyone who opens the app. |
| Ads jammed between every screen kill the flow. | One banner. One interstitial.Free tier only. Pro removes both. No mid-recipe popups, ever. |
| Adding your own ingredients is impossible. | Tap to add anythingPantry is a single editable list. Custom items match into recipe scoring the same way scanned ones do. |
| Cook timer stops when the phone sleeps. | Wake-locked timerHolds wake lock for the full duration of the step. Audible alarm fires whether the screen is on or off. |
| Offline mode does not exist. | Cook offlineSaved recipes cache locally. Cook mode runs without a network. The fridge scan needs connectivity once, everything after is offline. |
| Force-quits on launch. | Cold-start under 1.5sEvery release crash-budgeted. CTO blocks any deploy with a regression in launch time or stability. |
Get the install link before launch.
A few photos of your shelves. Tonight's dinner. A drink nobody under ninety has heard of.
$0to start. Free forever.
27,998recipes · 3,946 cocktails
July 10Android launch · iOS late summer
No spam. No upsell. The install link, and one note when launch hits.