Plate Pro: Recipe & Food Costs

Recipes. Food Costs. Private

Mac

Productivity

Food & Drink

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I'm a developer working as a chef. Plate Pro started on a Mac in the kitchen I work in, costing my own recipes between services because the spreadsheet I was using kept breaking. Every chef I work alongside has the same complaint, so I started showing them what I was building and rebuilding around what they actually needed. The problem Recipe costing isn't hard maths, but it has a thousand small dependencies: ingredient prices change weekly, units rarely match between supplier and recipe, suppliers get added and dropped, and the moment one number is wrong, every recipe downstream is wrong too. Spreadsheets handle this badly because the formulas drift and the person maintaining them can't always trust the inputs. Most existing software is enterprise-priced and built for chains, not for the chef-owner running one or two venues. What evolved while building it I started with a Mac app because that's what I had on the pass and what other chefs around me were using. Building with real chefs in the kitchen meant features got cut fast. Anything that took more than a couple of taps to do mid-service got reworked or removed. Two decisions that came out of that process: 1. Native on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, synced via iCloud. Mac is where the office work happens: margins, supplier updates, monthly reviews. iPad sits on the line. iPhone goes shopping. The same recipe shows up on every device the moment it's edited, no manual export. Going native on all three meant I could lean on the OS for sync instead of building a server backend that could go down or get hacked. 2. No account required. Chefs are protective about their recipes, and they should be, because that's their IP. Removing sign-up entirely means the data stays in your private iCloud container and I have no access to it. This started as a privacy decision and ended up being the biggest reason early users tried it. What shipped Recipe costing with auto-recalc when supplier prices change Multi-unit support with automatic conversion: metric, imperial, volume Plating photo documentation per recipe Multi-business profiles for operators with more than one venue Native iPhone, iPad, and Mac with iCloud sync across all devices Free plan, monthly/quarterly/yearly subscriptions, and a Lifetime tier for people like me who hate subscriptions for tools they use every day I'd love feedback, especially from chefs, kitchen managers, and anyone running an operation. What's missing? What's confusing? Roasting welcome.