Why Bite Exists
I cook almost every day. I love finding new recipes — on Instagram, YouTube, random food blogs. And for years I've had the same problem: I save everything and find nothing when its time to cook. Instagram saves buried under 100 posts, screenshots lost in my camera roll, and bookmarks I forget even exist.
One day I searched my own phone for a dinner recipe I remembered loving and spent 15 minutes just finding it. That was the moment I decided to just build Bite.
But I didn't want to build another recipe box. Recipe boxes are fine. What I actually wanted was something closer to a cooking companion — something that doesn't just store recipes but helps you actually cook them. Guides you through steps, knows what's in your fridge, suggests what to make tonight based on what you have, and remembers the pantry items that needs to be cooked before they go bad.
That's Bite. An AI cooking companion that happens to also keep your recipes organized.
What It Does
You can throw anything at Bite and it figures it out. Paste a YouTube link, a TikTok, a blog URL, a screenshot from Instagram, a photo of a cookbook page — Bite extracts the recipe, structures it, and saves it with zero copying or reformatting.
Bite flow diagram
Once it's saved, Bite actually helps you use it. Cook Mode walks you through recipes step by step, keeps your screen on, listens to voice commands, runs timers, and reads steps aloud if your hands can't reach your phone. The meal planner helps you figure out the week. The grocery list generates itself from whatever you planned. The pantry tracks what you have and tells you what you can cook right now.
It's the cooking workflow I always wanted.
The Stack
Next.js App Router, Drizzle ORM on Neon PostgreSQL, Clerk for auth, Google Gemini for AI extraction, UploadThing for images, Tailwind CSS v4. Vercel for hosting, Cloudflare for DNS.
Bite tech stack
The Build Log
Six weeks, solo. Here's everything that shipped.
Auth, database, deployment, relational schema. The groundwork that saves you from extra work later.
Dashboard, recipe cards, search, filters, URL import, favorites, categories. The week Bite started looking like something I'd actually use.
Drag-and-drop meal planning calendar. Built with @dnd-kit and date-fns — no calendar library.
Grocery lists that generate from your meal plan and combine ingredients intelligently. Two recipes needing chicken breast? One line item.
Cook Mode with Wake Lock, voice commands, and auto-detected timers. Pantry with AI receipt scanning and `What Can I Cook?` matching. Onboarding that seeds 18 personalized recipes on signup.
New landing page, custom auth pages, settings wired end-to-end, ingredient groups for complex recipes.
What I Learned
Building in public sounds great. It's mostly just hard. Every week had a moment where I thought something would take an afternoon and it took a few days.
The part that surprised me most was how much the AI features changed what was possible. Gemini Vision reading a grocery receipt. Gemini parsing a TikTok transcript into a structured recipe. Things that would've been weeks of custom engineering. The barrier to shipping real, useful software has never been lower.