Whisk
Personal Recipe Manager · Built February 2026
Designed, built, and shipped end-to-end. Used weekly by my wife and me for meal planning and grocery lists.
Why I Built It
I wanted a simple way to keep track of recipes, plan dinners for the week, and keep a running grocery list without jumping between three different apps. Most recipe apps are either bloated with ads or lock your data into formats you can never export.
I built Whisk over a couple of weeks in early 2026 as a Progressive Web App (PWA) that works like a native app on my phone. It runs entirely on Cloudflare's free tier, works offline, and is open source so anyone can fork it and have their own instance running in under 20 minutes.
The PWA choice was practical: we do most of our meal planning from our phones, and shipping a native iOS app would have meant paying for an Apple Developer account. A PWA gets me one codebase, installs from the browser, and works offline after the first visit. AI is configurable rather than hardcoded so anyone forking Whisk can plug in whichever provider they prefer (Groq, Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, or others) instead of being locked to whatever I happened to be running.
The PWA routes user actions through serverless Cloudflare functions, which read and write to edge storage (KV for data, R2 for photos, Vectorize for semantic search) and call a configurable AI provider for the smart features.
Whisk architecture: a user opens the PWA, which routes their action through one of five app surfaces (Discover Feed, Recipe Library, AI Assistant, Weekly Planner, Shopping List). All surfaces call into serverless Cloudflare Pages Functions, which read and write to Cloudflare KV for data, R2 for photos, and Vectorize for semantic search. The functions also call out to configurable AI providers including Groq, Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cloudflare Workers AI.
Features
Discover
Browse trending recipes from configurable sources. Auto-detects site frameworks for optimized scraping and uses AI to tag by cuisine, diet, and cook time. Add any recipe site as a source.
Recipes
Import from URL, Google Sheets, CSV, photos, or paste from anywhere. Full-text search, tags, favorites, and category browsing. Snap a photo of any dish and get the recipe identified automatically.
AI Assistant
Get recipe suggestions, ingredient substitutions, cooking tips, and meal planning help. Streams responses in real time with tappable recipe cards. Supports multiple AI providers including Groq, Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, and more.
Meal Planning
Weekly calendar with configurable meal slots for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, and more. Quick-fill with smart suggestions or plan your week conversationally through the AI assistant.
Shopping Lists
Auto-generate grocery lists from your meal plan or build them manually. Items are categorized by aisle for easier shopping. Scan handwritten lists with your camera to digitize them instantly.
Technology
Cloudflare carries most of the stack because I wanted hands-on time with its edge primitives and the free tier covers a personal app comfortably. Groq is the default AI provider because low-latency inference makes the chat experience feel responsive instead of laggy, which matters more than model sophistication for most recipe questions.
Run Your Own
Whisk is fully self-hostable. Fork the source, connect it to a free Cloudflare account, and have your own instance running in about twenty minutes. No coding required.
Questions about how this was built, or want to talk about a similar project? LinkedIn Email