Why We Built a Cloud for a Format That Doesn't Need One

I built Cooklang because I was tired of my recipes living in other people's databases. Apps I'd trusted got acquired, shut down, or quietly broke their sync, and each time I had to scramble to get my recipes out — or lost them.

So the whole premise of Cooklang is independence: recipes are plain-text files you own, readable in any editor, with no company in the loop. You don't need me, or Cook.md, or anyone, to open a .cook file.

Which makes Cook.md a strange thing to build. If the format's entire point is that you don't depend on a company — why build a company's cloud and a paid AI on top of it?

Fair question. Here's the honest answer.

Plain text is the foundation, not the whole house

A plain-text file is durable, but it doesn't sync itself across your phone and laptop. It doesn't read a cookbook photo and structure it for you. It doesn't merge five recipes into a shopping list grouped by aisle, or draft next week's meal plan around what's in your fridge.

Those are real conveniences, and they take real work to build and run — servers, sync infrastructure, AI inference that costs money every time you use it. Someone has to pay for that. I'd rather charge for the convenience than do the thing everyone else does: give the software away and quietly monetize your data.

So Cook.md is the convenience layer. The foundation underneath it — your recipes as files you own — never moves.

The line I won't cross

There's a version of this that would be a betrayal: make the cloud the only place your recipes fully exist, so leaving means losing everything. That's how most recipe apps work, and it's exactly the trap Cooklang was built to escape. I'm not going to recreate it.

So Cook.md has a hard rule: the canonical copy of your recipes is always on your disk, as plain text.

  • Cook Editor is free and open source. So is the CookBot integration — you can read exactly how it handles your files.
  • Sync keeps copies of your files agreeing with each other. It doesn't swallow them into a database only we can read.
  • If you cancel Cookbot Pro, you lose the AI features — not a single recipe. Your .cook and .menu files keep working in any editor, on the mobile apps, forever.

The test I hold myself to: if Cook.md disappeared tomorrow, would you still have every recipe? The answer has to be yes. If it's ever no, I've built the wrong thing.

What you're actually paying for

When you subscribe, you're not buying access to your own recipes — those are free and yours. You're paying for the work that genuinely costs money to run: AI inference (CookBot is powered by Claude Sonnet, and every conversation has a real cost), sync infrastructure, and the time to keep all of it working.

That's it. €10 a month for the AI and the convenience. The format, the editor, the files — free, open, and yours.

Why this matters to me

I'm an indie developer in Greystones, Ireland. Cook.md isn't venture-funded, so there's no pressure to grow at all costs, lock you in, or sell your data to make the numbers work. The business model is simple and old-fashioned: build something useful, charge a fair price for the expensive parts, and let people leave with everything if they want to.

That alignment is the whole point. A company that needs you trapped will eventually act like it. A company you can walk away from at any moment has to keep earning the subscription. I'd rather be the second kind — and build the kind of recipe tool I wished existed when my own collection kept getting stranded.

Your recipes are yours. Cook.md just makes them easier to live with.

Try Cook Editor — free and open source — or see what Cookbot Pro includes.