Why I built TasteBuds. No ads, no essays, no allergens, just dinner.
By David Marcus, Founder
The world of online recipes is in crisis and I blame Google.
Why is it that nobody can find a recipe without scrolling past pages of pablum about how grandma used to make it? Ads everywhere. Mediocre instructions. Paragraphs of irrelevant prose. That's the world Google has created for us because they've decided this is what a high-ranked recipe should look like.
There is a better way. ChatGPT and similar AIs help, especially with customizing recipes for those of us with allergies in the family. But of course, a chat transcript is not a real recipe. The layout is all wrong and good recipes get lost in the chat logs.
I built tastebuds.ai to help my family cook. We not only love experimenting with new recipes, but we have a lot of restrictions to navigate. My wife is allergic to common ingredients like dairy and soy. One daughter won't eat lamb. The other won't eat seafood. Sometimes my nut-allergic friend comes by.
Nowadays though, dietary restrictions are just the norm. Other friends' families manage diabetes or need to account for GLP-1s. TasteBuds is the perfect tool to help.
And as I built out the application, I fixed the things that have always driven me crazy about recipe apps. I've gotten to the end of a recipe before I noticed I was supposed to have cooked rice! I've preheated an oven as the first step in a recipe, then watched it stay at full heat for a good hour before the food went in. TasteBuds recipes integrate prep into the steps and carefully account for when each step should happen, guiding you to chop the carrots while the onions are sautéing. And TasteBuds eliminates the glancing back and forth between instructions and quantities. The quantities are right there in the instructions.
When you're shopping, TasteBuds shows all the ingredients grouped by aisle with an easy interface for marking off items as you go.
When cooking, the screen never turns off and the timers are part of the interface. Every step of the experience is thought through and refined.
Behind the scenes, TasteBuds runs on the latest Claude models and updates to new versions as they get released. The site has no ads. There's a $4.99/month subscription for regular users that unlocks premium features, but also a free tier to try it out.
I hope you enjoy cooking with TasteBuds as much as my family does. Give it a go!