Private Recipe Vault for Families & Friends

Don’t Let Grandma’s Handwritten Recipes Fade Away.

Distant Kitchens is a private, permanent recipe vault for your family or your circle of friends—built to preserve your heritage, protect your food traditions, and bring the people you cook with together around the dishes that shaped you, wherever they live.

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14-day free trial, cancel anytime. $6 a month or $60 a year for up to 6 people.

Distant Kitchens is a paid web app: an admin starts a subscription and invites members, who can sign in with a password or with Google. Google sign-in shares only your name and email address with us. See our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

Added by Aunt Linda

The problem

The recipe card is fading in one drawer. The people who love it are in six states.

Fading index cards

Grandma’s stained, handwritten index cards get a little harder to read every year. The ink fades, the corners tear, and the one copy is the only copy.

Locked in one home

The family binder (or the friend group’s favorite dinner party recipe) lives on a single shelf in a single house. Everyone else is hundreds of miles away and has to call just to ask what goes in the gravy.

Lost in group texts

The rest of the recipes are buried in endless group text threads and screenshots nobody can ever find again.

The group text isn't a cookbook.

Not just family

Any group that cooks apart can share a kitchen.

The friend-group potluck

Everyone has a signature dish and a half-remembered story about it. Put the lasagna, the guacamole and the “you have to try this” dessert in one place instead of a thread nobody scrolls back through.

Friends who scattered

College housemates, old neighbors or a supper club that moved to four different cities can still cook the same meals on the same night.

Recipe swappers

A book club, a church group, a running crew: if you trade recipes, you can keep them private and permanent, with your own photos and notes.

Family first, friends welcome. One cookbook, up to 6 people on the base plan.

The solution

One permanent home for the recipes your family and friends love.

One private server per cookbook

Your vault runs in its own isolated environment on Fly.io. It is never a shared database with anyone else’s cookbook, and there are no ads or ad tracking.

Zero tech friction

Family and friends just open a link in their phone’s browser. Nothing to install, and they can sign in with a password or Google, so it works for the least tech-savvy people at the table.

Original and transcript, side by side

Keep an HD photo of the handwritten original right next to a clean, typed version you can cook from. Type it in yourself, or screenshot a printed recipe and we read the words for you.

Before and after

Those screenshots nobody can ever find again? Turn them into recipes.

Choose the screenshot, drop it in, or paste it with Ctrl+V (on a phone, long-press and choose Paste), and the app reads the printed words into a draft recipe. A recipe that runs over several screenshots is fine: add them all and they are read as one, in the right order. Some recipe websites block apps; a screenshot or a saved PDF is the way around it.

Screenshots, photos of a printed recipe, or a PDF, up to 8 at a time
You check the draft; nothing is saved until you say so
Read on our own server, and the picture isn’t kept
Printed or typed English text for now; handwriting isn’t read yet

The Import a recipe page with its two tiles, Paste a link or text and Photo, screenshot or PDF, showing one screenshot ready with a small picture of it

See it in action

This is what your family will see.

Real screens from the app, with a made-up family's recipes. Pick a feature, then flick through.

Try each color scheme, in light or dark:

The Family Cookbook page on a phone, with Add a recipe and Import recipe buttons, a search box and a grid of recipe cards — Family Cookbook: every shared recipe, with search and filters.

The recipe page for Sunday Spaghetti and Meatballs, with Favorite, Edit and Add photo buttons — Family Cookbook: every shared recipe, with search and filters.

Founder photo coming soon

Where this came from

It started as one family's cookbook.

"I built Distant Kitchens for my own family. We're spread out all over the country, and our recipes were scattered the same way. Some were in Mom's recipe box, some in texts, and some were only in someone's head."

"So I made us a shared family cookbook where everyone could add what they knew and cook it anywhere."

It worked so well that other people started asking for one. Now any family, or group of friends, can have it. Our own family's cookbook is still called Coast to Coast Cookbook — Distant Kitchens is that same idea, built for any family or friend group that's spread out but still wants to cook together.

— Matt, founder

Pricing

One price for the whole family or friend group.

No per-person fees for your first six people — about a dollar each. No ads, ever.

Monthly Annual 2 months free

Family Plan

$ 60 /year

Up to 6 people. 14 days free. Need more room? Add another block of 6 for +$60/year, any time.

✓ Unlimited recipes, thousands of photos*
✓ Cook Mode, meal plans, and party plans
✓ Smart shopping lists
✓ Your own separate, private cookbook space

Start your free trial

* No limit on the number of recipes. Each cookbook has 2 GB of storage, room for thousands of photos (up to 3 per recipe; we shrink them for you). 14 days free; cancel any time.

Give as a gift

One year of the Family Plan for $60, up to 6 people. It starts when they're ready, any time within 24 months of buying.

Give a year

See all pricing and how we compare · How it works

Your family's next Thanksgiving, or your friends' next potluck, deserves a better place than a group text.

Get everyone's recipes in one place before the holidays. Start your 14-day free trial: card required, but you won't be charged until the trial ends. Cancel anytime.

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