The Honest Cost of a Family Recipe App
Recipe app pricing pages tend to be vague.
"Premium" and "Pro" tiers with feature lists that do not quite explain what is in or out. Per-device pricing not labeled per-device until you read the fine print. Annual prices in one place and monthly in another, with the conversion math left as an exercise.
This post does the opposite. Plain pricing, plain math.
What Flour Power costs
Two prices and a free tier.
Free tier. $0. Up to 25 recipes. No family sharing. No AI features (substitution suggestions, difficulty analysis, photo import OCR).
Paid. $4 a month, or $30 a year. The annual price is the better deal by a margin. On Apple's App Store, the equivalents are $4.99 and $39.99, because Apple takes a cut and the math has to absorb it.
The paid tier covers a household of up to 5 family members. The price does not change whether you have one user or five. Household subscription, not per-user.
That is the entire pricing structure.
The per-user math
A five-person family on Flour Power at $30 a year is paying $6 per person per year.
That is half a cup of coffee per person.
The same family on a per-user app charging $5 a month is paying $300 a year. On a per-user app charging $50 a year, $250 a year. On a per-user app at $20 a year, $100 a year.
Recipe app pricing varies considerably, and several popular options charge per user. The patterns you will see:
Per-device or per-platform. You pay separately for iOS, Android, and desktop. A family with mixed devices pays multiple times.
Per-user subscription. Each family member is their own subscriber. Some apps offer a small family discount. Many do not.
Free with paid premium. A "free" tier that gates the features you actually want.
Free with ads and tracking. Supported by behavioral advertising. The price is paid in data.
In-app purchase only. No subscription, but features unlock through individual purchases that add up.
None of these are inherently wrong. They just have different total costs for different shapes of family. For a five-person household, the per-household model is structurally cheaper.
What $30 a year includes
The annual price covers everything in the app. Not a stripped-down "personal" tier with extras hidden behind a higher subscription.
- Unlimited recipes
- Family accounts of up to 5 members, each with their own login
- Shared cookbooks, shopping lists, and meal plans
- URL import, photo import with OCR, file import from Paprika, CopyMeThat, and Pepperplate
- AI ingredient substitutions and difficulty scoring
- Cooking sessions with per-step timers
- Full export in JSON, PDF, Markdown
- Private share links and optional public recipe pages
- iOS, Android, and web access for every family member
There is no second "premium plus" tier. New features go to existing subscribers at the same price.
Why the price has stayed where it is
I want the business to work with the customers I have, not the customers I wish I had.
A higher price would price out the families who would benefit most from a shared collection. A lower price would not sustain the development and infrastructure required to keep the app working across iOS, Android, and web.
$30 a year is where the math works for a small independent company that is not trying to bolt on revenue through ads, data sales, or aggressive upsells.
If the price ever changes, I will say so. Existing subscribers get at least 30 days of notice and a chance to renew at the existing price. Price increases will not be sneaked into a renewal cycle.
What I do not do
Common pricing practices in this category that I have chosen not to do.
No credit card on the trial. The 14-day trial takes only an email. No auto-billing because I never had your payment information.
No data resale. The subscription fee is how I pay the bills. I am not selling your recipe data, meal plans, or dietary preferences to advertisers.
No advertising. No banner ads, no native ads, no sponsored recipes.
No paywall on the export. Your full collection is exportable any time. Free tier, trial, after cancellation. The export is a feature, not a retention lever.
No per-member charge up to 5. The household is the unit of subscription. The people in it are not.
No platform charge. One subscription covers iOS, Android, and web.
What "free" actually costs
Free apps are free in one of three ways, and each has a real cost.
Free with ads costs you attention and data. The advertiser is the customer. You are the product.
Free as a trial wedge costs you time. The free tier is limited enough you cannot really use it, but pulls you in far enough that you have to commit to paying or migrate out.
Free as open-source self-host costs you setup and maintenance. Tandoor and Mealie are real options if you have the skills. You pay with your own time.
None of these are wrong. They are trade-offs.
The comparison that matters
The comparison that actually matters is not Flour Power versus the cheapest competitor. It is what a recipe app is worth to your family at all.
If you already have a working system (handwritten cards, a shared note, a folder of bookmarks), no recipe app is worth $30 a year. If recipes get lost, meals get less varied, and grocery shopping is reactive rather than planned, a working recipe app is worth quite a bit more than $30 a year.
I cannot make that math work for you. You know your household. What I can do is be straightforward about the price, what it includes, and what I will not do to extract more from you.
Price is the easy part. Trust is the part that lasts.