What we believe
A manifesto.
Block is a tool for people who already know how to cook.
You know the routine. You search a recipe. You land on a page that buries the ingredients under a photo of someone’s kitchen, a memoir about their grandmother, and a “Jump to Recipe” button that admits the whole page exists for someone else’s benefit. Block is the opposite of that page.
The confident cook is the underserved middle. Past tutorials. Not professional. Three to seven nights a week. Opinions about salt. Burned out on every recipe app they’ve tried, because every recipe app was built for someone earlier in the journey.
Block is the tool we wanted.
Assume competence
No reminders to preheat the oven. No photos of every step. No narrator voice. Steps are short imperatives. “Render guanciale, no oil.” You don’t need cold rendering explained. If you ever do, you’ll look it up.
Reference, don’t guide
The Cook view is a glance surface, not a checklist that walks you through your own kitchen. Numbered steps, timers built into the steps that need them, the screen stays awake. The recipe doesn’t gate progress, doesn’t nag, doesn’t insist on being followed in order. It sits there. You look when you need it.
One gesture, one outcome
Tap an ingredient mid-cook to flag it running low or out. The Pantry Flip lives entirely inside the Cook view. One tap to open the sheet, one tap to flag it. No confirmation. No “are you sure?”. The toggle between Prep and Cook is one control. Everything Block does, it does in one move.
Show what matters, hide the rest
Quantities right-align so the eye can scan them. Timing is a quiet annotation, not chrome. Notes live on the recipe but don’t intrude on it. The shopping list strikes items off and shrinks. Less interface, more cooking.
Beautiful by default
Serif for the recipe title. Mono for the numbers. Cream paper and terracotta accent. Generous whitespace. The aesthetic itself is the promise. This isn’t another food blog.
What Block never does
- Put recipes behind a paywall. Recipes are culture. Charging for them feels wrong.
- Show display ads or autoplay video.
- Ask you to rate a recipe before you’ve cooked it.
- Put a life story above the ingredient list.
- Email you every Tuesday.
- Force a tutorial or onboarding flow.
- Need a “Jump to Recipe” button. The recipe is already at the top.
One library, contributed by everyone
Recipes live in a central library that anyone can search. Paste a link, snap a photo of a cookbook page, or type a dish name and Block writes a clean version. Either way the result lands in the shared library. Other cooks can find it. They can cook from it. They keep their own notes on it. The recipe belongs to the library; your notes, your saved collection, your weekly plan, all belong to you.
The bargain
Recipes are always free. Every recipe, fully readable. Import from anywhere. Cook from the Prep or Cook view with timers. Up to three recipes on a week’s menu and a shopping list with one store, all free.
Block+ is for households that cook together. It unlocks the planner past three recipes a week, lets you share recipes and the weekly menu and the shopping list with the people you live with, and turns the shopping list into a multi-store list grouped by store and section. One subscription covers the whole household.