Build/Recipes
❖Recipes Namespace

Build a recipe business.
100 owned recipes, 20 cuisines.

100 originally-authored recipes across 20 world cuisines — fully owned, zero licensing risk. No scraped content, no third-party API quotas to worry about. Search, detail, random, and a cuisine index, ready to power a recipe site, a meal planner, or a diet-specific recipe finder today.

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The opportunity

Real numbers. No projections inflated to impress.

100
Originally-authored recipes
Written for Aplicious — fully owned, zero licensing risk
20
World cuisines covered
From Indian and Thai to Mexican and Mediterranean
6
Endpoints: search, detail, random, cuisines
Small surface area, fast to integrate
$9–29
Monthly Aplicious cost for most indie apps
Starter/Growth plan covers typical recipe-app volume

3 businesses you can build this month

Each one is a complete business, not a demo. Revenue estimates are conservative and show the math. These are illustrative estimates based on stated assumptions, not guarantees of revenue.

Decision fatigue is the #1 reason people order takeout instead of cooking. WhatToCook is a dead-simple app: tap a button, get a random recipe filtered by cuisine or category, cook it. No account needed to browse, paywall kicks in after 5 free spins/day. Sticky daily habit, very low build complexity.

Pricing Model
$2.99/month for unlimited spins + saved recipes
Build Time
1–2 weeks solo
Revenue Target
$1,495/month
Gross Margin
98% gross margin
Revenue Math

500 subscribers × $2.99 = $1,495. Conservative — "what should I cook" is a top-10 searched food query, and similar random-recipe apps clear a few hundred paid users within 90 days of an App Store feature.

Endpoints Used
/recipes/random
/recipes/cuisines
Aplicious Cost
$9 (Starter plan — 500 users × 4 × 30 = 60,000 calls; upgrade to Growth at scale)
~4 calls/day

All 6 endpoints

Originally-authored recipe data, owned outright. No third-party calls, no licensing risk.

Starter code — WhatToCook

Pull a random recipe, then fetch its full detail — ingredients and steps included. Two calls, ready to cook.

whattocook.ts
// WhatToCook — Random Recipe App
// Built with Aplicious Recipes namespace
// Replace YOUR_API_KEY with your key from aplicious.com/dashboard

const API_BASE = "https://aplicious.com/api/v1";
const API_KEY = "YOUR_API_KEY";

async function getSurpriseRecipe(cuisine?: string) {
  const url = new URL(`${API_BASE}/recipes/random`);
  if (cuisine) url.searchParams.set("cuisine", cuisine);

  const random = await fetch(url.toString(), {
    headers: { "x-api-key": API_KEY },
  }).then((r) => r.json());

  const summary = random.data;

  // Pull the full recipe (ingredients + steps) for the cook view
  const detail = await fetch(
    `${API_BASE}/recipes/detail?slug=${summary.slug}`,
    { headers: { "x-api-key": API_KEY } }
  ).then((r) => r.json());

  return {
    title: detail.data.title,
    cuisine: detail.data.cuisine,
    totalTime: detail.data.total_time_minutes,
    ingredients: detail.data.ingredients,
    steps: detail.data.steps,
  };
}

// Example output:
// {
//   title: "Butter Chicken",
//   cuisine: "Indian",
//   totalTime: 55,
//   ingredients: [{ quantity: "500", unit: "g", ingredient: "chicken thigh", notes: "boneless" }, ...],
//   steps: ["Marinate the chicken in yogurt and spices for 30 minutes.", ...]
// }

Revenue calculator

Slide to see how the numbers stack up. The API cost is real — pulled from our pricing page.

500
5010,000
Gross MRR
$1,495
at $2.99/user
Aplicious Plan
Growth ($29)
60,000 calls/mo
API Cost
$29
per month
Net MRR
$1,466
98.1% margin

Model: WhatToCook — $2.99/month, ~4 API calls/user/day. API plan auto-selects based on call volume. These are revenue projections, not guarantees. Build quality and distribution determine actual results.

❖

Start building today

Free plan. 250 API calls per month. No credit card required. The Recipes namespace is live and ready.

Questions? Talk to us