Is it OK to save someone else's recipe from Instagram?
Saving a recipe you found on Instagram for your own cooking is fine. A list of ingredients and plain functional instructions generally isn't protected by copyright, but the creator's video, photographs and written descriptions are theirs. The line falls between the facts of a dish and the expression around them.
People ask this quietly, usually somewhere between saving their fortieth video and wondering whether an app that reads captions is doing something slightly dodgy.
It is a fair question and it has a reasonably clear answer, with one genuinely grey area in the middle.
Nothing here is legal advice. It is a plain-language account of how recipes are generally treated, and where we have chosen to draw our own line — which is deliberately more conservative than the law requires.
The short answer
Cooking a recipe you saw on the internet is completely fine. It has always been fine. Recipes have been copied out of magazines, off packets and from neighbours for as long as all three have existed, and the entire culture of cooking depends on it.
Saving one for your own use is also fine.
Republishing someone's video, photographs or written words as if they were yours is not.
Why recipes are treated oddly
In most jurisdictions, including the US and across the EU and UK, copyright protects expression, not facts or procedures.
A list of ingredients is generally treated as a statement of fact. "400 g tomatoes, 3 cloves garlic, 60 ml olive oil" is information about a dish, not a creative work, and one person cannot own it — otherwise the first person to write down carbonara would own carbonara.
Plain functional instructions tend to be treated the same way. "Boil the pasta. Fry the garlic in the oil until golden" is a procedure.
| Usually not protected | Usually protected |
|---|---|
| The list of ingredients | The video itself |
| Quantities and measurements | Photographs of the dish |
| Bare functional steps ("simmer 10 minutes") | Headnotes, stories, jokes, personal commentary |
| The idea of the dish | Distinctive phrasing and descriptive style |
| The name of a classic dish | A substantial creative arrangement of a collection |
The grey area is real and sits in the second column. Plenty of creators write instructions with genuine voice in them — the aside about why you should not rush the onions, the specific way they describe the texture you are looking for. That writing is expression, and it is theirs.
What that means in practice
Saving a recipe for yourself is fine. Writing the ingredients into your notes app, screenshotting the overlay, keeping it in a personal collection — all of this is ordinary personal use and nobody has ever seriously suggested otherwise.
Cooking it, changing it, cooking it for other people is fine. Nobody owns a technique.
Reposting the video is not. That is the creator's work, straightforwardly.
Stripping the source is where it turns sour. Even where copying a bare ingredient list is lawful, presenting a recipe with no indication of where it came from takes the part that is legally free and quietly discards the part that is owed. Those are different questions and only one of them is about law.
Where we've drawn the line
FasterChef imports what a creator publicly wrote in a caption and turns it into a structured recipe for the person who saved it. Three rules constrain that, and they are stricter than they need to be:
- Attribution is not optional and cannot be switched off. Every imported
recipe carries the creator's handle and a link back to the original post, permanently. There is no setting to remove it — not because someone would sue, but because the credit is the whole reason this is reasonable.
- We never touch your accounts. No login, no password, no scraping of a
feed, no following anyone. The app reads the single public post you deliberately handed it and nothing else. There is no bulk harvesting here.
- Recipes stay private to the person who saved them. There is no discover
feed, no public library, no browsing other people's collections. Nothing you import is republished to anyone. This is the big one: an import that becomes a personal note is a different act from an import that becomes a listing on somebody's website.
And if a creator would rather their work was not imported at all, emailing info@fasterchefapp.com is enough. We would rather honour that than argue about whether an ingredient list is protected.
Why we care about this more than we have to
The honest commercial answer is that this whole category only exists because tens of thousands of people make cooking videos for free.
An app that treats their work as raw material — scraped, stripped of attribution, resurfaced as its own content — is drawing down the thing it depends on. It also, eventually, makes creators hostile to the entire category, which is bad for everyone including the people who just wanted to cook the noodles.
The creator keeps the credit. That is not a setting.
There is a second, smaller reason. A recipe with its source attached is simply more useful to you. You can rewatch the technique, check whether you misread a quantity, and find the rest of that person's work. An app that hides the source has made your recipe worse in order to look like it wrote it.
What to check in any app you use
- Is the creator's handle on every imported recipe? Look for it on the
recipe itself, not just in a settings page.
- Does it link back to the original post? A name without a link is half a
credit.
- Does it ask for your Instagram or TikTok password? If so, stop. No
legitimate importer needs your account credentials — the posts it reads are public.
- Is your library private by default? If saving a recipe publishes it
anywhere, that is a different product with different obligations.
The practical summary
Save what you like, for yourself. Cook it, change it, feed it to people.
Keep the creator's name on it — for your own benefit as much as theirs. And be wary of any app that would rather you did not know where your recipes came from.
If you want the mechanics of getting a recipe out of a post in the first place, start here. Our full position on creators is in the terms.