I spent months manually saving recipes from cooking videos. Pause, screenshot, type ingredients. Repeat. It was painful.
So I built Lupita — an iOS app that does this automatically.
How it works
You paste any TikTok, Instagram Reel or YouTube cooking video link. Lupita:
- Downloads the audio from the video
- Transcribes it with AI
- Extracts ingredients with exact gram measurements
- Scales to your serving size
The result is a clean, structured recipe saved offline to your phone.
The tech stack
- Swift / SwiftUI — native iOS app
- Node.js backend — on a shared cPanel server
- yt-dlp — video audio extraction
- OpenAI Whisper — transcription
- GPT-4o-mini — ingredient parsing and gram conversion
The trickiest part was handling the huge variety of video styles — some recipes are in metric, some imperial, some just say "a handful" or "to taste." The AI handles this reasonably well now.
Lessons from the App Store review
It took 4 submissions before Apple approved it. The main issues:
- Privacy policy had to be accessible without login
- The paywall copy couldn't say "free trial" if there was no trial
- EULA had to be shown before purchase, not after
What's next
The app has 5 free imports on install. Paid plans start at $2.99/month.
If you cook and watch food videos, give it a try: lupita-app.com
Also on the App Store: Lupita — Recipe from Any Video
Curious if anyone else has built similar tools — what did you use for the AI parsing step?
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