Some projects start with ambition.
This one started with annoyance.
I was tired of juggling recipes across bookmarks, screenshots, messages, and the occasional scribble in a notes app. A normal person would’ve organized things. I opened Cursor.
The plan was simple: a quick weekend hack. Nothing serious. Just a tiny tool to help me stop losing recipes.
But then it worked. And I liked using it. Then I showed it to a couple of friends. Then my family started using it. Then those friends shared it with their friends.
That’s when the “weekend hack” quietly transformed into SeasonApp—a small but mighty full-stack platform for cooking, powered by AI and built to remove friction from the kitchen.
Why SeasonApp Exists
If you cook…
Some projects start with ambition.
This one started with annoyance.
I was tired of juggling recipes across bookmarks, screenshots, messages, and the occasional scribble in a notes app. A normal person would’ve organized things. I opened Cursor.
The plan was simple: a quick weekend hack. Nothing serious. Just a tiny tool to help me stop losing recipes.
But then it worked. And I liked using it. Then I showed it to a couple of friends. Then my family started using it. Then those friends shared it with their friends.
That’s when the “weekend hack” quietly transformed into SeasonApp—a small but mighty full-stack platform for cooking, powered by AI and built to remove friction from the kitchen.
Why SeasonApp Exists
If you cook regularly, your digital life eventually turns into a disorganized pantry. Tabs everywhere. Screenshots mixed with flight confirmations. Recipe blogs where you scroll past a childhood memoir before finding the ingredient list. And once you finally want to cook something, you can’t find the right recipe—or you’re missing one ingredient and the whole plan collapses.
SeasonApp brings order to that chaos.
It gives recipes a home. It helps you create new ones. And it actually understands what you want to do with whatever’s in your fridge.
The more people around me used it, the more obvious the need felt. Everyone had the same pain; they just tolerated it. SeasonApp gives them a better way.
What SeasonApp Does (and why people keep returning to it)
AI-generated recipes that don’t feel robotic. Describe an idea—”gluten-free spinach-walnut pasta,” “one-pot chicken dinner with lemon,” “spicy tofu for picky teenagers”—and GPT-4o generates a clean, structured recipe you can cook tonight. Ingredients, steps, timing, optional variations. It feels like a sous-chef that never judges you.
Refinement that adapts to real life. Dietary restrictions? Kids to feed? Want to scale up for 10 people? Need to swap dairy or nuts or gluten? The AI handles these constraints gracefully. You give it the problem; it adjusts the recipe without breaking it.
One-click importing from any URL. Paste a link. SeasonApp scrapes, cleans, and extracts the actual recipe. You skip the blog chatter and keep the essentials.
Automatic imagery for every dish. Recipes feel alive thanks to images pulled from Unsplash and Pexels. Even simple dishes look good, which makes browsing your recipe collection surprisingly enjoyable.
Simple, secure sharing. Google OAuth keeps login easy. Token-based sharing means you can send a recipe to anyone—no sign-up required. My family now shares dinner ideas through SeasonApp instead of giant text threads.
The Tech Stack
SeasonApp is built with a modern, pragmatic stack:
Frontend: React 19 + Vite + Tailwind CSS + Zustand Backend: Node.js + Express 5 + Prisma + SQLite AI and integrations: OpenAI GPT-4o (but that will change in the near future as most cost/effective models come to life), Unsplash/Pexels APIs Infrastructure: Docker + Fly.io
Everything is designed to stay lightweight and fast. SQLite allows the whole system to run on a single Fly.io instance, which keeps hosting simple and inexpensive while still delivering great performance.
This wasn’t a “let’s architect a giant system” project. It was a “use the right tools and get out of the way” project.
What Building It Taught Me
This project grew fast and unexpectedly, and it came with some lessons worth highlighting. These are the five that stuck with me.
1. Structure wins over magic. AI feels magical, but it behaves much better when you force structure. Getting GPT-4o to return strict JSON made the whole app predictable. It turns your AI feature from a clever trick into a stable subsystem.
2. Lightweight infrastructure is underrated. Using SQLite instead of spinning up a full database cluster made deployments trivial. It also kept the app cheap. Fly.io + Docker + SQLite is a surprisingly powerful trio for small-to-medium full-stack apps.
3. Design matters more than fancy features. Tailwind and a clean UI gave the app a calm, minimal feel. Instead of overwhelming users with knobs and switches, SeasonApp focuses on clarity: ingredients, steps, images, and AI tools when you need them. That simplicity turned into real adoption.
4. People will surprise you with how they use your tool. I built SeasonApp to clean up my own mess. Friends used it to plan family dinners. Someone used it to build a weekly meal plan. Another imported their grandmother’s handwritten recipes to preserve them.
The real delight came from seeing people stretch the app into new shapes.
SeasonApp went from a weekend hobby to a tool that people actually rely on. And it’s still growing. So I added an option to export everything at any point of time – so you can own your recipes.
Be strong and cook something delightful 🙌🏾
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