Last updated: July 19, 2025
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Alex Hollender
So you are a chef, baker, cook, or recipe developer/creator of some kind, and you want to put your recipes on the internet. You’re thinking about a website, a newsletter, or some combination of the two. Maybe you want to put some recipes behind a paywall. What are your options?
This post covers the various platforms available, both from the perspective of the creator experience (getting set up, publishing recipes, etc.), and the resulting experience for at-home cooks using the recipes. I’ve been learning about this space for the past two years while researching, designing, and building Recipe.Site. I have had conversations with 80–100 recipe creators, and many at home-cooks. I’ve become quite interested in the challenges, romantic about recipes, and continue to get more excited about, and confident in, the solution we’re building.
Tech companies often publish product comparisons as marketing material. They are usually short, and always include a chart that shows their product as the best option. This is sort of one of those posts, but it’s much more detailed and hopefully less self-serving. I am obviously biased—I wouldn’t be building Recipe.Site if I didn’t think we could do better than the existing options. That being said, I’ve tried my best to represent the advantages of each platform.
The platforms I cover are:
Great for discovery and audience building, bad recipe experience
Powerful but expensive, complex, and frustrating to maintain
Great newsletter tool for audience building, no recipe features, 10% fees
Influencer-focused, simple recipe builder, 20% fees
Influencer-focused, great newsletter tool, simple recipe builder, 10% fees
Professional recipe builder, design-focused websites and newsletters, 6% fees (capped at $8,000/month)
I think it’s fair to say that most of the recipes on the internet are not well formatted, and lack basic utilities like scaling, measurement conversion, timers, and preventing your screen from falling asleep. I’m talking about recipes in Instagram comments, Substack posts, on personal websites, and even recipes published by food media companies like Food52, Bon Appetite, and America’s Test Kitchen. Some sites have nice formatting and utilities like scaling, but ironically they are overwhelmed with ads so the design doesn’t really matter.
At the other end of the spectrum is New York Times Cooking, which in many ways is the gold standard for digital recipes. But even they don’t have scaling, your screen will continuously fall asleep, you can’t make your own notes, etc. Sooo, what’s the deal? We have modern software and fantastic user experiences for almost everything in our lives, but the experience of recipes online is still so bad that it has become a cliche. And that isn’t even to mention the hassle creators go through to publish recipes in the first place [1].
My evaluations of the platforms are based on:
Let’s begin.
Even though Instagram and TikTok aren’t proper solutions for creating a recipe website or newsletter, it is necessary to mention them. Partially because at this point most of the recipes on the internet are probably in Instagram or TikTok comments. But also because they provide a helpful baseline for comparing other options with. I assume anyone reading this post is already publishing content on Instagram and/or TikTok.
Summary: Great for building an audience. These platforms are where a lot of people get inspiration, find recipes, and find new creators to follow. For creators, it is easy to get set up and publish. However, cooking from Instagram or TikTok comments sucks, and it’s very difficult to search for recipes.
Experience for creators:
Super easy to set up, and publishing is easy by virtue of how limited it is. It’s not possible to publish a well formatted recipe, and obviously there are no recipe utilities (scaling, conversions, etc.). There is no easy way to manage the recipes you’ve published, i.e. you can’t see all of your dinner recipes, or all of your vegetarian recipes, etc., so over time it gets very cumbersome.
Experience for people at home:
It’s a bad experience. Everyone complains about how much cooking from Instagram or TikTok comments sucks, and how difficult it is to search for recipes and find your way back to things you’ve saved.
Monetization tools:
Limited tools. Both platforms have subscription tools (Instagram, TikTok) but the fee structures are unclear, and generally creators seem hesitant to rely even more on large social media platforms. Plus, since you can’t provide a good recipe experience it doesn’t seem like the right place to be charging people for that content.
Again, these platforms are great for discovery and are a critical piece of building an audience. Creators should post on them, and then drive the traffic to their websites where the recipes live.
Up until recently probably 99% of recipe websites were WordPress sites. WordPress is the old guard. The 100lb gorilla. And until Substack came along, it was the dominant solution. It has been popular for long enough that there are several businesses that exist solely to serve WordPress recipe websites (e.g. FoodBloggerPro, Feast, WPRecipeMaker, GrocersList, MediaVine). Suffice it to say, there are lots of people using WordPress for recipe sites, and a few of them, who have been working hard at it for over 10 years, are making a lot of money.
Summary: WordPress is very complex to set up, and therefore very expensive/time consuming. It is an open source platform that you can technically do anything with, however it’s also a very old platform, and is often described as a dumpster fire. If you have a large budget, a relationship with an agency or talented WordPress developer, and super specific needs, WordPress might be the right solution. For example, a handful of awesome creators have worked with Wonderly and have beautiful recipe websites built on WordPress. However, no matter how good your WordPress site looks to the outside world, behind the scenes it will always be frustrating to use, will rely on plugins that may or may not be well maintained, and will require ongoing maintenance and updates (all of which costs money).
Experience for creators:
Costly and ultimately frustrating. You will spend a few months and $30K–100K to get set up (I know people who have spent over $200K). If you try to do it yourself you will easily spend 80+ hours setting up your site, installing plugins, trying to make things look good, getting lost in the maze that is WordPress. And most likely won’t be happy with the result. The recipe plugin most creators use is WP Recipe Maker (this is what creates the recipe cards with scaling, conversions, “cook mode”, etc.). Like the rest of the WordPress “it works”, but it’s clunky, limited, and sort of stuck in 2016 (when it was released). And it’s difficult to manage your content once it’s in there. So you end up painting yourself into a corner, which is expensive to migrate out of.
Experience for people at home:
This depends entirely on how the WordPress site is built, and whether or not there are ads on it. As mentioned above, the sites Wonderly builds are beautiful. As far as WordPress sites with ads on them go I think my friend Maggie’s siteOmnivores Cookbook is as good as it gets.
Monetization tools:
The longstanding approach was: get lots of pageviews to your site by ranking high in Google search results, once you have over 100K visitors/month apply to Raptive or MediaVine, and let them monetize your site by plastering ads over every last inch of it. Everyone who is interested in publishing recipes online has heard of someone who makes over a million dollars a year from their ad-monetized WordPress site. And I think this is the main reason newcomers are still choosing WordPress—the myth that with low effort you can get very rich. However It is not at all easy, and it’s a dying business. Why?
Instead of the ad route, you can use Memberful’s WordPress plugin, and run a subscription business (this is one of the things Wonderly helps people do).
Don’t get me wrong, I believe in open source software. I was a lead designer at Wikipedia for 5 years, supporting free knowledge and the open source movement. However, in practice, if you’re not technical it ends up being a big, expensive hassle, and doesn’t give you the freedom it promises. I think people assume that there are only two options: open source software (like WordPress), or evil, VC-backed tech corporations (like Substack). But there are also small, good tech companies, providing great software at a fair price (like us).
Oh glorious Substack, the talk of the town, the rising star. People started using Substack for recipe websites and newsletters around 2021 (Caroline Chambers, a reigning Substack royal, made her first post on Dec 7, 2020). If you’re not familiar, Substack makes it dead simple for people to put content behind a paywall, charge a monthly subscription, and deliver it to people’s inboxes. Recipe posts usually look like this. Most creators sell subscriptions for around $5/month, and Substack takes a 10% fee of the subscription revenue. They have an aggressive discovery and recommendation system, which is one of the things creators talk about the most; they unanimously say that Substack helps them get new subscribers.
There is plenty to criticize about Substack—this is a good summary—but I’m just focusing on Substack as a recipe tool.
Summary: Substack is easy to set up and free to use. It’s a great, simple newsletter tool, and is useful for building an audience. However, it is not a good recipe platform. Recipes are plain text, lack formatting, and there are no utilities. It also lacks key features like filtering, recipe tags, advanced search, etc. The platform is made for plain-text newsletters and short form social media posts, not recipes. Substack effectively owns your content, and prioritizes their brand over yours. The fact that people refer to their own sites as “my Substack” is the most clear indication of this.
Experience for creators:
Similar to Instagram and TikTok—super easy to set up, and publishing is easy by virtue of how limited it is. It’s not possible to publish a well formatted recipe. And there is no easy way to organize and manage recipes, i.e. as a creator you can’t see all of your dinner recipes, or all of your vegetarian recipes, etc.
Experience for people at home:
Not great. The platform is made for plain-text newsletters and short-form social media posts, not recipes. For example, there will never be simple things like a “cook mode” option that allows people to keep their screen from going to sleep, let alone things like scaling, ingredient substitutions, or timers. There is no built in filtering, categories, or tagging system, and search isn’t great (especially when creators include multiple recipes in a single post). Shout out to Chuck Cruz and Ali Slagle, who do as good of a job as possible of hacking Substack into a usable recipe platform. But the fact that they have to do stuff like this is evidence that the platform is not made for recipes.
Monetization tools:
You can sell monthly and annual subscriptions (Substack takes 10%). You cannot sell individual recipes or collections of recipes. You can do sponsored posts/sell ads in a manual way, but there are no built-in tools.
I think creators should use Substack similarly to how they use Instagram and TikTok—as a way to build their audience. If you are serious about recipes, and are asking people to pay you for your recipes, you should give them a better experience. Your recipes should be a pleasure to interact with, easy to filter through and find, etc. And you should be building your recipe catalog in a tool that supports you, and will allow you to do cool things with your content down the road (like convert it into a beautiful digital cookbook, or easily change all mentions of scallions to green onions, etc).
Provecho was launched in 2021/2022. Similar to The Clubb, it is a recipe website builder and newsletter tool (basically built because of how difficult it is to set up a recipe website in WordPress). In just a few minutes you can sign up, publish recipes, and offer monthly subscriptions to your content. They take 20% of your subscription revenue. Provecho websites look like this or this. Recipe pages look like this. Like The Clubb, the creators skew fitness/wellness/diet-influencer, rather than more serious chef types, which makes sense given the lack of recipe-specific features. Newsletter support is unclear. And in the two years I’ve been paying attention to it, there have not been any improvements to recipe pages.
Summary: It is a simple solution that works for simple recipes (smoothies, protein bowls, etc.). It lacks design polish, looks like a generic social media app, and the recipe tools are very basic. While you do get your “own” website, your content is owned by Provecho, and you are contributing to their catalog of recipes. Whenever someone tries to subscribe to your content they get upsold on a bundled subscription to all Provecho content (for $9.99/month). Unclear what percentage they pay back to creators.This is the website where you can see recipes from all of their creators.
Experience for creators:
Easy and straightforward. Anyone who is familiar with Instagram, Substack, and other content/social media tools can get up and running in an hour or less. No ability to customize anything on the recipe pages, and limited recipe functionality in general.
Experience for people at home:
Like The Clubb, recipe pages have formatting, scaling, and conversions, but lack other basic features like keeping your screen from going to sleep. The ingredients list lacks any useful formatting, and the way they repeat the list of ingredients below each instruction step is the right idea, but poor execution. The inclusion of icons for all ingredients clutters the interface and doesn’t improve the experience in any way. Decent search search experience, minimal filtering.
Monetization tools:
Subscriptions are the only monetization tool (Provecho takes 20% of subscription revenue). And, as mentioned above, they try to upsell their bundled subscriptions. Unclear how the payouts are distributed among the creators. You can’t sell individual recipes or collections of recipes. There are no advertising solutions.
The headline of Provecho’s marketing site used to be “Premium Recipe Websites”, and they had a great little writeup about how well designed the New York Times Cooking app is, and that they believe every creator should have the ability to create an experience as nice as that for themselves. In my opinion, they have not delivered on that vision.
The Clubb was launched in 2024. Similar to Provecho, it is a recipe website builder and newsletter tool (basically built because of how difficult it is to set up a recipe website in WordPress). In just a few minutes you can sign up, publish recipes, and offer monthly subscriptions to your content. They take 10% of your subscription revenue. Clubb websites look like this or this. Recipe pages look like this. The Clubb is more feature-rich than Provecho. The focus seems to be on newsletter and growth tools, rather than recipe-specific features. Like Provecho, the creators skew fitness/wellness/diet-influencer.
Summary: A good starter solution for people who aren’t particular about how their websites and recipe pages look. If you are a yoga instructor or a nutritionalist who occasionally posts simple recipes (bowls, wraps, smoothies, etc.), this might be perfect for you. Like Provecho, it lacks design polish, looks like a generic social media app, and the recipe tools are basic.
Experience for creators:
Easy and straightforward. Anyone who is familiar with Instagram, Substack, and other content/social media tools can get up and running in an hour or less. No ability to customize anything on the recipe pages, and limited recipe functionality in general.
Experience for people at home:
Like Provecho, recipe pages have formatting, scaling, and conversions, but lack other basic features like keeping your screen from going to sleep. My biggest gripe is that you can’t see the ingredients list and instructions side-by-side (even on a laptop/desktop)—they are in separate tabs. The checkboxes to the right of the ingredients are confusing to me. Hot take: it seems a bit like a first draft that they haven’t thought about since.
Monetization tools:
Subscriptions are the only monetization tool. They take 10% (pricing page). You can’t sell individual recipes or collections of recipes. There are no advertising solutions.
At the end of the day, the website and the recipe pages that you get from The Clubb don’t look great and aren’t particularly easy to use. It feels a bit cheap—like a one-size-fits-all solution that doesn’t really look great for anyone in particular. It satisfies the minimum requirements of a functional recipe website, but nothing beyond that.
It is of course difficult for me to write the same kind of summary/evaluation for my own product, so this section is longer than the others and has more backstory.
Conor and I started working on Recipe.Site in 2024. We knew we wanted to help people create really beautiful and functional recipe websites, and vastly improve the recipe experience for at-home cooks. We weren’t sure if we wanted to start an agency (providing custom design and development for each client), or build a tool/platform that anyone could easily use to create a recipe website on their own.
We started by building the best possible recipe page—thinking carefully about the formatting, scaling, conversions, timers, and other needs people have. We did (and continue to do) user interviews with people who cook from recipes on their phone, laptops, cookbooks, notebooks, etc. For digital recipes, the three fundamental issues people deal with are:
The first problem is easy to solve—your phone/laptop will not fall asleep when you’re on one of our recipe pages (and you don’t need to switch a toggle to enable that, it just does it automatically).
For the second problem, our recipe editor creates a link between an ingredient you mention in an instruction, and an ingredient on your ingredients list. The result is:
...add the soy sauce (1 tsp) and cucumbers (1/2 cup)
So they don’t need to scroll back up to the ingredient list—the information they need is right there, in a simple, unobtrusive way. And it isn’t just plain text, it’s dynamic. So if someone doubles the recipe, it automatically updates to:
...add the soy sauce (2 tsp) and cucumbers (1 cup)
And if they convert it to metric, it becomes:
...add the soy sauce (2 tsp) and cucumbers (120 g)
As the creator, you can configure this however you like. If you don’t want the inline references, or if you want them to display more/less information, you have the flexibility to do that. And because many of you reading this might not be familiar with other recipe editors and content management systems, let me assure you that there are none that come even close to this level of nuance and attention to detail.
For the third problem, messy hands, we’re releasing a cooking mode feature which allows you to progress through the recipe instructions without having to touch your phone as much. And that’s just the start. There are so many things we’re working on improving (which I’ll be explaining in detail in other blog posts). We are obsessed with recipes/cooking/food, user experience/design, and engineering. And those obsessions are leading us to creating solutions that nobody else—not even NYT Cooking—is.
We offer several solutions. We have a recipe website and newsletter tool that allows anyone to easily publish beautiful, functional recipes. We offer white-label, enterprise solutions for bigger creators and businesses who have unique needs and want something more branded and custom. And we offer plugins and integrations for companies (e.g. grocery stores, food brands, restaurants, etc.) who have existing websites and want to display recipes on them.
Our monetization tools are flexible as well. You can sell monthly subscriptions, Substack-style. You can sell recipe collections or digital cookbooks. You can work with brands directly and sell ad spots on your website. Or you can work with ad providers and run ads programmatically.
Currently Recipe.Site is being used by all sorts of people and brands. At-home cooks who want to document their recipes for friends and family. Emerging culinary professionals and creators who want to experiment with selling their recipes. Experienced professionals with large followings. Chefs who have published multiple cookbooks and want to offer enhanced digital cookbooks. And food companies who use recipes as a way to connect with their audience. What all of these people have in common is that they care deeply about the craft of cooking, they prioritize good design and recognize that well-designed user experiences have significant value both for themselves and for the people using the recipes they publish, and they want a purpose-built solution that understands and respects the nuances of recipes, won’t break down on them, and is constantly improving.
Summary: Recipe.Site is a best-in-class recipe publishing tool that allows anyone to easily create a recipe website or newsletter. The Creator Plan ($4/month) allows you to create a simple, elegant, and functional website and newsletter. The Pro Plan ($32/month) allows for more customization and branding. There are flexible monetization tools—you can sell subscriptions, recipe collections, and ads. We charge 6% on all revenue, but we cap our fees at $8,000 per month (which nobody else does). This means as your business grows, our percentage gets smaller and smaller. There is also a digital cookbook product (example here), which you can use to create an enhanced digital version of your physical cookbook, or to create digital-only cookbooks.
Experience for creators:
Easy to use, professional software. The recipe editor is a professional tool while still being very approachable. It is easy to create recipe collections, customize your homepage, add featured products, and configure settings like comments, newsletter, paywalls, etc.
Experience for people at home:
I can confidently say that our recipe pages are the best on the internet. We hear feedback nonstop from creators using our platform about how much people love using their websites. I hope someone out there is inspired to do a side-by-side comparison of our recipes pages and NYT Cooking :)
Monetization tools:
Subscriptions are the only monetization tool. They take 10% (pricing page). You can’t sell individual recipes or collections of recipes. There are no advertising solutions.
Flexible. You can sell monthly subscriptions Substack-style. You can sell recipe collections or digital cookbooks. You can work with brands directly and sell ad spots on your website. Or you can work with ad providers and run ads programmatically. We take a 6% cut of revenue (lower than Substack and The Clubb), capped at $8,000/month. We are the only platform that offers a cap on our fees—meaning as your business grows and grows, our fees are capped and won’t continue eating into your business.
Please reach out to me at alex@recipe.site to let me know what this post is missing. I would be happy to include other tools and/or more details about certain aspects of the tools that are interesting and helpful to you.
1. It seems necessary to mention that one supposed solution to this problem is “recipe keeper” apps, like Mela, Paprika, Crouton, Just the Recipe, and ReciMe. You enter the URL of a recipe you want to keep, they scrape the recipe from the website and format it nicely for you. I think some of these apps do a nice job, but they sort of miss the point. For one thing they do nothing for the creators who are doing the hard work of publishing recipes for all of us (in most cases they hurt the creators because they sever the connection between the creator and the consumer). And ultimately they are a workaround—they help people deal with the fact that recipes online are so annoying to use, but they don’t fix the issue.
Every few months we send an email announcing new features, future plans, etc.