What's changed?
With the release of CookBook 2.0 (May 2021), CookBook is now a subscription-based service (read on to find out why). We have given all legacy CookBookers an automatic 1 year subscription ending 1st June 2022 (will not auto-renew).
We have sent out individual 50% off coupons to all legacy customers for all monthly, yearly or lifetime pro plans for CookBook 2.0 (please get in touch if you are a legacy user and you have not yet received your code).
Please note that after this date if you do not have a subscription/plan, you will still be able to access your recipes in a 'read-only' format in CB 2.0, but you will not be able to edit or add more recipes.
What do you need to do?
Please note that after this date if you do not have a subscription/plan, you will still be able to access your recipes in a 'read-only' format in CB 2.0, but you will not be able to edit or add more recipes.
What do you need to do?
- Android - Download CookBook 2.0
- Apple - Update now
What's New?
Here's a quick summary of what we've added for CookBook 2.0:
- iOS Safari extension
- Google Chrome Extension
- Lots of meal planner updates! Monthly, weekly and daily views along with move and copy tools.
- Smart ingredient rounding
- Android sharing from Chrome
- Brand new fully featured Web App, included as part of your CookBook account & plan
- New PDF layouts, index cards, meal planner & shopping list print out
- OCR workflow redesign + CB now automatically saves your original OCR scans
- Add star ratings to your recipes
- Add custom serving sizes such as 2 jars
- Additional editable timer for cool, rest, chill times
- New ‘Last Cooked’ & ‘Cook Count’ fields – tap to update the date & the count will go up
- Duplicates checker
- Add additional pictures to your recipe without assigning them to a step
- Pairing notes field
- Shopping list design tweak for easier viewing + beta trial for smart ingredient merging
- Improved searching based on relevancy score
- Max cook & prep times have been upped to 99 hrs 59 mins
- New alarm sound
- Parser improvements
- Back-end updates to make CB faster
- Many more tweaks, changes & bug fixes based on feedback from our amazing users
Why the change?
CookBook started in 2016, 5 years on and we now have over 16,000 active monthly users!
We've come a long way in the last 5 years, but want to go even further in the next 5. We are committed to building you the most powerful recipe management solution on the market.
We have been running CookBook over the last 5 years in our spare time and between the two of us, we look after everything; development, servers, testing, customer support, marketing, design, finance, research, the list goes on! We never expected CookBook to grow like it did over the years and for the costs and need for support to keep adding up. What started out as a side hobby / project, became something much bigger!
We sadly were not earning enough from CookBook, nor able to keep dedicating so much time & money to running it based on the model we had initially set up. We decided our options were to let CookBook go or do something about it, to enable us to earn enough money from CookBook to devote time to developing, updating and supporting the app to make it into the recipe manager everyone is asking for. We know that many people rely on CookBook every single day and truly love the app, so we struggled with the idea of letting it go.
An app like CookBook that stores terabytes upon terabytes of data that has to go back forwards between our servers and users (and we pay for the good ones which are stationed in multiple locations all over the world so it's nice and quick), has pretty high costs (multi-server cloud computing for APIs, computational costs for ML & AI, machine vision costs for OCR, etc.) & on top of all of our other costs, the app stores take between 15-50% of all sales including taxes so unfortunately what it may appear we earn, is not what it seems!
Most apps chose to release brand new versions of their app every few years which you then have to pay for to use all the new features, the old apps are then no longer supported/developed and eventually stop working so customers are forced to buy the new version anyway if they want to continue using the system. We didn't want to get into that, so after much deliberation for the release of CB 2.0, we have opted to change our pricing model now for the future of CookBook and all versions.
We know subscriptions aren't for everyone, so we have added a lifetime purchase option too (valid for the lifetime of CookBook, no matter the version).
Please understand that this was not a rash decision, we are a very small business with two people, taking a big leap into devoting our time & efforts into CookBook to bring you the features you'd love to have. We appreciate every single one of our users and hope you join us on this journey.
If you have any thought's, feedback, suggestions or are generally unhappy with the changes, please do get in touch as we'd love to chat to you. We want to ensure all legacy users are happy with CookBook 2.0 🙂
Check out our other articles in this section for more info!