Family Recipe Box
for the recipes worth keeping

Take a photo of the card.
Get the recipe back.
Keep the card, too.

Family Recipe Box reads the handwriting on old recipe cards — cursive, faded ink, the one with the butter stain — and turns each one into a proper recipe you can search, cook from, share with family, and print as a book. The photo of the original stays attached, because the handwriting is half the point.

Get the Android app Open on the web Android now (direct download while our Google Play listing is in review) · iPhone later · free to start
The app showing a scanned recipe next to the photo of the original handwritten card
the whole idea, in one picture

This card became this recipe

A handwritten recipe card for Grandma Bach's molasses cookies
→ about eight seconds later
The same recipe in the app, with ingredients and steps

You photograph the card with your phone. The app reads it — the ingredients, the amounts, the instructions, even "bake till done" — and shows you the recipe to check before it goes in the box. Fix a word if you need to. The card photo is saved right alongside it.

A whole tin of cards takes an afternoon, not a winter. Printed cards, clippings, cookbook pages and screenshots work the same way.

The Library screen, a grid of family recipes

Everything in one boxSearch it, sort it by family side, group it by collection. Grandma's recipes next to your own.

The shopping list, with the onions from three recipes added up on one line

Cook from itCook mode, scaling, a shopping list that adds the same onion up across recipes, and a log of what you actually made.

A recipe page for beef stew

Share it with the familyInvite people to your box, or send one recipe to one person. Everyone keeps their own copy.

A bundle of old recipe cards tied with kitchen string
why this exists

It started with my mom's recipe box

When Judith Bach Dixon passed, her recipe box was the thing none of us could bear to lose. Decades of cards from both sides of the family — some in her hand, some in her mother's, some from church friends whose names we'd half forgotten.

Typing them out would have taken months and lost the handwriting. Photographing them kept the handwriting and lost the recipes, because you can't search a photo. I wanted both, so I built it.

It's the app I use for our own family's box. It's ready for yours now.

— Teagan, Sand Point Studios

the gift that gets used

Then print it as a real book

One tap turns the box into a print-ready cookbook — organized by side of the family, with the original card photos and a dedication on the first page. Take the PDF to any print shop.

And your recipes stay yours. Export the whole archive — every recipe, every card photo — whenever you like, in ordinary formats. If we ever disappeared, you'd still have everything.

A printed family cookbook open on a kitchen table
start free — pay when the whole box comes out

What it costs

Typing in recipes, importing from recipe websites, sharing and cooking are free, and stay free. Reading handwriting costs us real money per card, so that part is the paid bit. Everyone gets two weeks of it to try.

Free

$0
no time limit
  • Type in as many recipes as you like
  • Import from recipe websites
  • Join a family's shared box
  • Cook mode, shopping list, meal log
  • 14 days of Premium to try the scanning

Premium

$5 / month
or $39.99 a year — two months free. No card needed for the trial.
  • Scan handwritten cards, clippings, PDFs and screenshots
  • Share your own box and send recipes to people
  • The printable cookbook
  • Photo notes on your meal log

Questions people ask

How well does it read handwriting?

Well enough that we built the product around it. It handles cursive and faded ink; you always see the result before it's saved, and the card photo is right there if anything looks off. Truly illegible cards are illegible to it too.

Is my family's stuff private?

Yes. Nothing is visible to anyone unless you share it with them. There are no ads and we don't sell anything about you. The privacy policy is short and in plain English.

Can my mom join without paying?

Yes. Joining a shared box, browsing it and cooking from it are free. She only needs Premium if she wants to scan her own cards.

Where's the iPhone version?

Android first. iPhone is next; in the meantime the whole thing works on the web at go.familyrecipebox.app.

What happens to my recipes if I stop paying?

Nothing. They're yours, they stay in the app, and you can export them any time. You just can't scan new cards until you subscribe again.