Kitchly
Recipes, meal plans, and a shopping list that writes itself.
v– · walker-jones.eu
Add the first one, import a spreadsheet, or take a copy of something from the community.
Kitchly v– · walker-jones.eu
When somebody shares a recipe it appears here for everyone to try. Share one of yours to start it off.
Plan a few meals, then build a list from them. Everything gets added up for you.
Paste the address of a recipe from any cooking site and Kitchly will read it in. Nothing is saved until you have looked it over.
A picture of a cookbook page, a screenshot, a scribbled card, a PDF — anything with a recipe on it.
Kitchly reads it for you.
No key and nothing to pay. Three steps:
Bring in a whole cookbook at once — one recipe per row.
A header row, then one row per recipe. Only title and ingredients are required; the rest are used if they are there.
title — the recipe's nameserves — how many people it feedsingredients — separated by | or line breaks, e.g. 200g flour | 2 eggssteps — the method, separated the same wayprep — preparation steps, if you keep them apartcategory, cuisine, tags, prep_minutes,
cook_minutes, equipment, notesTake a copy whenever you like. The spreadsheet is the same shape Kitchly imports, so it will go straight back in — here or anywhere else.
Kitchly v– · walker-jones.eu
This list fills itself in as you write recipes. Add a price and a shop to the things you buy often, and your shopping lists will total up and say where to get them.
Write a recipe and its ingredients appear here automatically — or add one now.
Step 1 of 5
Four things, and each one feeds the next:
There are four ways in, and all of them end in the same editor so you can check things over before saving:
The last three live behind the upload button on the Recipes tab.
The name, how many it feeds and the ingredients are all a recipe really needs — everything else is optional.
The quick way to type ingredients: tap Paste a list and put them in one per line, exactly as you would write them:
200g plain flour2 eggs1 onion, finely choppedsalt and pepperKitchly works out the amount, the unit and the note by itself. Anything it cannot make sense of it keeps as the ingredient name, so nothing is lost.
Method: one step per line. A line reading just Prep:
starts the preparation steps and Method: starts the cooking ones.
Units are a dropdown rather than a box to type in, so "tbsp", "Tbs" and "tablespoon" cannot end up as three different things and quietly break the shopping list. Anything unusual goes in under Something else.
Photographs can be added once the recipe has been saved once.
Under Add recipes, "From a photo or a document" will read a recipe out of a picture of a cookbook page, a screenshot, a scribbled card or a PDF.
The free way, which always works. Tap Copy the prompt, paste it into whatever AI you already use — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini — along with your photo, and paste its answer back into Kitchly. No account, no key, nothing to pay.
The one-tap way. If whoever runs this site has set up a key — or you have added your own in Settings — you can just choose the photo and Kitchly does the rest.
Either way you get the recipe in the editor to look over before it is saved. It copies what is there; it does not convert or improve anything.
Cook this now on any recipe gives you one step at a time in big type, and holds the screen awake so it does not lock while your hands are covered in flour.
Tap anywhere to move on, or use the buttons. The list button at the top shows the ingredients, which you can tick off as they go in.
Where a step mentions a time — "simmer for 40 minutes" — a timer appears for exactly that long. It chimes and buzzes when it is done.
Every ingredient you use goes into My ingredients — the tag button on the Recipes tab — without you doing anything. When you type an ingredient into a recipe, it suggests the ones you already use.
Open any of them to add:
Shopping lists then show a running estimate and mark which shop each thing is from. Anything without a price is simply left out of the total, and the list says how many items the estimate covers.
Turn on I always have this in for salt, oil, flour and the like and they stop appearing on new lists. A list that tells you to buy salt every week is a list people stop reading. Kitchly says how many it left off.
The Planner shows a week at a time. Tap + on any day, choose a recipe, and say how many people are eating.
The week starts when your week starts. If you do the big shop on a Saturday, set that in Settings and the planner runs Saturday to Friday — and the shopping list covers the same seven days.
That last number is the important one: it is what the shopping list scales to. A recipe written for four, planned for six, buys one and a half times the ingredients. Tap the little people icon on a planned meal to change it.
From the Planner, tap Make a shopping list from this week, or use the + on the Shopping tab. Pick the days, untick any meals you are not shopping for, and build it.
Everything is scaled and added up: each line shows the ingredient, the total amount, and how many of the week's meals it is for.
Going round the shop: tap a line to tick it off. Drag the handle on the left to move things into the order your own supermarket is laid out in — Kitchly remembers that order and every list you build from then on comes out in it. Use A–Z at the top to flip to alphabetical when you are looking for one thing; it does not disturb the order you set.
You can add anything else you need with the box at the bottom — 2 pints milk
is understood — and send the whole list to someone with the share button.
Just cooking one thing? Shop for this on any recipe puts its ingredients straight onto a list without planning it first. Add a second recipe to the same list and the amounts genuinely add up — 500g of mince becomes 750g rather than mince appearing twice — and anything you had already ticked off gets unticked, so you do not walk past it.
Finding one in a long list. Above the recipes are filters — My recipes, Saved from other people, and Favourites — and a dropdown to order them A–Z, by what you have cooked recently or most often, or by what is quickest. Search looks inside the ingredients too.
How about… At the top of the list, one suggestion for when the question is "what are we having" rather than "where is that recipe". It leans towards things you have not cooked for a while. Tap the arrows for another.
Cooked it. Every recipe counts how many times you have made it and when you last did. Finishing cook mode marks it, or use the button on the recipe. Nothing is counted from the meal plan — a planned meal is not the same as a meal that got made.
Amounts in your units. Settings lets you read everything in metric or imperial whatever the recipe was written in — ounces become grams, cups become millilitres. Weighing and measuring are never mixed up: a cup of flour and a cup of treacle weigh nothing like the same, so cups never become grams. Spoons stay spoons. What you typed is never changed, only how it is shown.
Copy last week. The planner can lift a whole week onto this one, on the same days, for the weeks that repeat themselves.
Print. Any recipe prints properly, without the app furniture.
Your data is yours. Settings will hand you a spreadsheet of every recipe — the same shape Kitchly imports, so it goes straight back in, here or in another app — or a full backup of everything.
Sharing a recipe puts it on the community list with your name and the date. Anyone using Kitchly can take a copy.
If you stop sharing later, it comes off the list — but anybody who already took a copy keeps theirs. Their copy is genuinely their own, and nothing you do afterwards changes it.
Sending a recipe to someone: the share button on a recipe sends a link that opens in any browser, no account needed. A recipe you have not shared is sent as plain text instead, so it stays private to whoever you sent it to.
Comments and tips sit under every shared recipe. Mark one as a hint or tip and it stands out.
The upload button on the Recipes tab takes a CSV file — one recipe per row. Only
title and ingredients are required.
Separate the ingredients and the steps with | or with line breaks.
Column names are matched loosely, so Prep time, servings
and Method all work.
You get a preview before anything is saved, and any row that cannot be used is listed rather than silently dropped.
iPhone or iPad: open Kitchly in Safari, tap Share, then Add to Home Screen.
Android: open it in Chrome, tap the menu, then Install app.
It then behaves like any other app, and keeps working when the signal drops — recipes you have already opened stay readable in the shop.
Updates happen by themselves. There is never anything to reinstall. If you want to check, Settings has a Check for updates button.
The sign-in code has not arrived. Give it a minute, then check the
spam folder — it comes from noreply@ this site's own domain. Each new
code cancels the one before it, so use the newest email.
Amounts look wrong on a list. Check how many people the meal is planned for in the Planner — the list scales to that, not to what the recipe says.
Something will not load. Close the app and open it again; if you were offline it will catch up on its own.
Starting the shop order again: Settings → Forget my shop order. New lists go back to A–Z and start learning from scratch.
Kitchly is one of a family of small, fast, no-nonsense apps — all free, all built the same way.
See the other appsKitchly v– · walker-jones.eu
One per line. Kitchly works out the amounts and units.