About FasterChef
FasterChef is an iPhone app that turns the cooking videos you save on Instagram and TikTok into structured recipes, generates a week of meals from the ones you saved, and writes a single shopping list with the duplicates merged and the rows sorted by supermarket aisle. It is pre-launch: the waitlist is open and the app has not shipped yet.
What it does
You tap share on a cooking video and pick FasterChef. It reads the caption, pulls out the ingredients, the quantities and the steps, and files a real recipe in your library — one you can shop from, cook from and search four months later. Every imported recipe keeps the creator's handle and a link back to the original post.
From that library it does the two things the rest of the category still asks you to do by hand. It generates the week — three, four or seven days, drawn only from recipes you personally saved, respecting what you don't eat and how long you have on a Tuesday. And it writes a shopping list that is actually correct: "2 cloves garlic" and "1 tbsp minced garlic" become one line, grams and tablespoons convert rather than sitting on separate rows, and the list is ordered the way you walk a shop.
How it works, roughly
The reading is done once. When a video goes around and five thousand people share the same reel, it is read once and the result is reused — which is why the free tier can exist at all.
The planning and the shopping list are not. They are plain deterministic code with no model call in them anywhere. A five-hundred-recipe library plans a full week in under 200 milliseconds, and that is asserted by a test that runs on every commit rather than claimed in a brochure. That matters for a reason beyond speed: a planner built on a language model can invent a recipe you never saved, and a planner that invents recipes is not a planner. Ours can only ever hand you something already in your own library.
The merging leans on a dictionary of 412 canonical ingredients with 1,370 written aliases — every reasonable way a person might write the same thing, mapped back to one. That dictionary is the difference between a list with garlic on it three times and a list with garlic on it once.
What it deliberately doesn't do
A short list, because the omissions are decisions rather than gaps, and knowing them is the fastest way to work out whether this is for you.
- It can't read a recipe the creator didn't write down. If the method is only spoken aloud, or sits in a pinned comment, we can't see it. The app says so plainly and gives you a box to paste into rather than guessing.
- It never connects to your Instagram or TikTok account and never asks for your password. It reads the public post you hand it, and nothing else.
- There's no feed to scroll. No discover tab, no recipes from strangers. Your library is the recipes you chose.
- No calorie or macro tracking, no cookbook scanning, no grocery ordering, no AI chat assistant.
- No Android version, and none planned in the near term. iPhone first, done properly.
Who it's for
Someone who cooks three to five dinners a week, does one big shop, saves cooking videos constantly and cooks almost none of them. If you have two hundred saved reels and no idea what's for dinner on Tuesday, that gap is the entire reason this exists.
It is not built for professional chefs keeping a permanent archive, for people tracking macros, or for people who want to browse recipes from strangers. Those apps exist and some of them are good.
Who makes it
FasterChef is built by a small independent team. There is no venture funding behind it, no advertising business attached to it, and nothing to sell except the app — which is the honest reason there is no tracking on this website: there's nobody to sell the data to.
The app runs on servers in the EU. This website stores nothing about you beyond an email address if you choose to give us one, sets no cookies, and loads no third-party code of any kind. That's set out in full on the privacy page.
Press and brand assets
The logo is available as a
512 px PNG and a
794 px transparent PNG. The brand orange is
#FE8B05. Please don't recolour the mark or set the name in anything
other than plain type.
Getting in touch
info@fasterchefapp.com reaches a real person. That's the address for press, for support, for creators who'd rather their recipes weren't imported, and for anyone who thinks something on this site is wrong.