jack archbold
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VibePantry

live

Freemium pantry-to-recipe PWA

Visit site ↗
for
Anyone who cooks. My own product, not client work.
started
17 June 2026
in
Photos of your shelves and fridge
out
Recipes you can cook from what's actually there
price
Free to start, then $2 a month

VibePantry turns what’s in your pantry into recipes you can actually cook tonight. It’s a freemium PWA — a free tier plus an Unlimited plan behind a Stripe paywall — built end to end on Cloudflare’s edge stack.

Stack

Cloudflare Workers
Serves the app and runs the small API behind it.
D1
The database. Accounts, each account's credit, and a row for every AI call.
KV
Keeps sign-in sessions quick, and counts the daily limits that stop a script hammering the API.
Better Auth
Sign in with Google. No password, no form.
Stripe
The $2 a month subscription.
Gemini
Reads the shelf photos and writes the recipes. Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite, called from the server so the key never reaches your phone.

Build log

  1. Stripe switched on at $2 a month, and tested with my own card. The first paid-only feature went in too, a Sunday Plan of three, five or seven dinners with one merged shopping list.  Read →

  2. Rebuilt as a real product. Sign in with Google, the AI key on the server, every call metered, 20 cents of free credit. Once it was live, the real recipe prompt went through five models and Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite replaced Claude Haiku.

  3. Fixed a bug that only a real Android phone would show. A photo you'd just taken sometimes failed with a "low memory" error that had nothing to do with memory.

  4. Live on vibepantry.com. By that night it decoded photos straight down to the size it needs, so a big phone photo couldn't crash the browser.

  5. Started. The whole loop in a day: snap your shelves, confirm the list, pick a mood, get recipes, print the one you like. No backend, and you brought your own AI key.

Writing