Frequently asked questions

A cooking app focused on regional recipes from around the world, with cultural context, authentic variants, and on-device dietary filtering. iOS-only for now.

Yes — the Free tier is genuinely useful: full recipe catalog, dietary filters, hands-free cooking mode, bilingual voice commands, Live Activity timers, and limited AI features (3 AI Chef questions / week, 2 Pantry Chef scans / month). For unlimited AI, the cloud-vision Pantry Chef (93% accuracy vs the on-device 55%), the medication food–drug interaction checker, and Instacart shopping integration, there's Sofrito Plus at $4.99/month or $39.99/year with a 7-day free trial. No ads on either tier.

Everything in Free, plus: unlimited AI Chef chat, unlimited recipe import, unlimited AI image generation for personal recipes, cloud-vision Pantry Chef (93% accuracy), the medication interaction checker, hydration / kidney / sodium-aware dietary filters, multi-recipe meal planner with consolidated shopping list, Instacart one-tap shopping, unlimited saved recipes, and priority support. See the pricing section for the full split.

No. Sofrito works without sign-in. Favorites, history, your dietary profile, medications, timers, and achievements all live locally on your device. The Plus subscription is managed by Apple's StoreKit — Apple is the merchant of record, and you can cancel anytime from iOS Settings → Apple ID → Subscriptions.

Yes. Apple handles subscription billing, so you cancel from iOS Settings → Apple ID → Subscriptions → Sofrito → Cancel. Your access continues through the end of the billing period you've already paid for, then reverts to the Free tier.

iPhone and iPad running iOS 17 or later. Android isn't on the roadmap yet — we're keeping the team small and iOS-first to ship features quickly.

Only what's needed for the specific feature you tap: an AI question to the cooking assistant, an ingredient list to Instacart when you pick 'Order Online', a medication list when you tap 'Check Interactions' on a recipe, a recipe submission when you contribute to the community catalog. Everything else stays local. Read the full privacy policy.

No. We don't have ad partners, no third-party analytics, no cross-app trackers. The backend logs are minimal and used only for rate limiting and debugging.

Only when you explicitly tap 'Check Interactions' on a recipe. Your medication list is sent once, together with that recipe's ingredients, to our proxy which forwards it to an AI model for analysis. Nothing is stored; the result is shown and forgotten. Medications are never logged with any identifier tied to you.

A mix of hand-curated regional recipes, AI-structured entries reviewed by us, and community submissions moderated before they appear. Every recipe includes an origin, history note, and ingredient list we can back up.

We aim for 'trusted home cook' authenticity: the canonical version a family in that region would actually make, plus well-known variants. Regional disputes (who 'owns' jollof, paella, etc.) are handled by surfacing the variants side by side with their cultural notes.

Yes. Use the Import screen to scan a photo or paste a URL, mark it 'share with the community' when prompted, and it goes into the moderation queue. Approved recipes join the public catalog with attribution to your chosen alias.

Yes. Imports default to private — they live on your device, never leave it, and can be exported as PDF. Handwritten recipes (like a grandmother's card) auto-suggest the private option.

The tags come from a deterministic classifier — it reads the ingredient list and applies rule-based logic (FDA Big 9 allergens, vegan/vegetarian/pescatarian, no-pork, no-alcohol, low sodium/sugar/cholesterol/potassium). It's conservative: when in doubt, we don't claim the tag. For severe allergies always cross-check the full ingredient list — cross-contamination during cooking is something no app can verify.

Conditions like hypertension, diabetes, renal insufficiency, and high cholesterol translate to food attributes (low-sodium, low-sugar, low-potassium + low-sodium, low-cholesterol). The app then only shows recipes that meet those attributes. We never claim a recipe is 'medically safe' for a condition — your clinician knows your targets, we don't.

Yes. The filters stack. A kosher + hypertension + peanut-allergy user sees only recipes that satisfy all three (no pork, no shellfish, low sodium, peanut-free).

When we can't ground at least 60% of a recipe's mass in USDA data, we refuse to show a nutrition card rather than fabricate numbers. Obscure or very regional ingredients sometimes fall outside USDA's dataset.

It's a recipe-aware AI chat. You can ask things like 'can I swap paprika for something else?' or 'is this freezable?' and it answers in the context of the specific recipe you're looking at.

Tap 'Cook Now' on a recipe. The app reads steps aloud, listens for 'next', 'repeat', 'pause', and handles timers when a step has a duration. All speech recognition runs on-device. You pick the voice in Settings → Cooking voice.

Take a photo of what's on your counter; Sofrito detects the ingredients on-device, then suggests recipes you can make with what you have. No photo ever leaves your device — only a list of detected ingredient names, if you tap 'Find recipes'.

Your shopping list is sent (through our backend) to Instacart's Recipe Pages API. They return a shoppable URL with your items already matched to store products. You pick a store, swap brands if you want, and check out inside Instacart. Sofrito earns a small commission on qualifying purchases.

Playful progress markers — 'Cook in 10 regions', 'Try a winter recipe', 'Use Spanish for a week'. They're local to your device and don't require an account. Nothing is broadcast or shared.

Most recipe images are served from Cloudflare R2 and load quickly on a real device. If you're running an iOS simulator, you may see intermittent image failures due to a known simulator networking issue; images work normally on physical iPhones.

Check that microphone permission is granted in iOS Settings → Sofrito. Voice recognition runs fully on-device, so there's no network to troubleshoot — usually it's either permissions or a very noisy room.

The tag system errs conservative — we'd rather miss a tag than claim a wrong one. If you spot a recipe that's confidently mistagged, send a note via Support and we'll correct it.

Most data is local — deleting the app removes it. Community submissions and support messages stay in our database until you ask us to remove them. Email via the Support form with rough details (date + a few words) so we can find the entry.