Can I code this? A Recipe Organizer and Meal-Prep Planner
Saving your own recipes and dragging them onto a weekly calendar is well-bounded CRUD with no AI generation involved — genuinely simpler than an AI meal planner, just organizing recipes you already have.
Build it
Effort: an eveningRunning cost: $0/mo to start
Why CanICodeThis says Build it
Saving a recipe with ingredients, steps, and a photo is ordinary CRUD
Dragging saved recipes onto a weekly calendar grid is straightforward front-end work
Generating a combined shopping list from the week's planned recipes is simple text aggregation
The parts that'll cause problems
Auto-importing a recipe from a pasted URL needs a web-scraping/parsing layer, which breaks whenever a site's format changes
Nutrition information per recipe needs a real food-database lookup, not a guess
Scaling ingredient quantities up or down for different serving sizes needs careful unit-conversion logic
How I'd build this
frontend
Next.js
database
Supabase
hosting
Vercel
MVP scope
Save recipes with ingredients, steps, and a photo
Drag recipes onto a weekly meal calendar
Generate a combined shopping list for the week
Postpone to v2
Auto-import from a pasted recipe URL
Nutrition info via a food-database API
Serving-size scaling
What it actually costs to build
AI agent — with a subscription (Claude Pro/Max, Cursor, etc.)
$0 marginal
AI agent — pay-per-use API, no subscription
$16–$27 one-time
Hosting, once it's running
$0/mo (free tier)
Domain name, if you want your own
~$12/yr
The build prompt
Build me a recipe organizer: manually save recipes with ingredients, steps, and a photo, drag saved recipes onto a weekly meal-planning calendar, and generate a combined shopping list from the week's planned recipes. SQLite behind a small API, single-user login. No AI generation — just organizing recipes I already have.