tapa.
Adulting, minus one decision. It feeds you with what you have, wherever you are: one meal from your own ingredients, your diet respected, the power back to you.
tapa. answers one question: “what can I cook with this?” Type it, say it or take a pic of what you have, plus how long you have and how many you are feeding. One considered recipe back, not fifty results. This is what keeping it that simple costs.
The mental load nobody prices in
68% of Americans call deciding what to eat their biggest mealtime challenge (Wakefield Research). Work out what you have, then what it could become, and because that is tedious you cook the same three things forever. Recipe sites answer with fifty results and a life story above each.
tapa. deletes the decision. Type it, say it or take a pic of what is in the fridge, and get one meal built around your tastes. Allergies and dietary needs are set once and enforced every time.
Simple on purpose
Every number in the product is small, and each one is a decision to leave something out:
- 3 → 1
- Ways in, one recipe outType it, say it, or take a pic, and one recipe comes back. Choice is the load the app exists to remove, so it never returns a list.
- 1×
- Set your constraints onceAllergies, dietary rules, household size, skill. Captured in onboarding, applied to every recipe after, editable any time.
- 3
- Recipes of historyEnough to go back to last night, not enough to become a database you manage. Favourites are saved deliberately or not at all.
The same discipline runs through the engineering: when a second account on a shared phone could see the first account's recipes, the fix was ownership at the data layer, every row belonging to an account rather than a device, not a patch on the sign-out path.
Pricing it against how people actually cook
A free tier is a product decision, not a marketing one. Set it too high and nobody ever meets the upgrade; too low and the app is a demo. It took three moves in two days to find the honest number.
| Iteration | Free recipes per week | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| Launch | 3 | Generous, but the median cook makes 3–4 dinners a week, so free covered everything and the upgrade question never arrived. |
| Revision | 1 | Too far the other way. Live for about an hour before the reasoning was rechecked. |
| Settled | 2 | Real weekly value free, and anyone cooking regularly meets the upgrade at a genuine moment of need. |
The honesty rule ships in the code: upsell copy is derived from the configuration that enforces it, so the app can only promise what it actually delivers.
