Reference · The Questions

What people ask us.

A short index of the things that come up. Honest answers, written once.

The basics

01
How does CookSth come up with a recipe?
You type in the ingredients you have. Our smart kitchen — a tailored recipe engine our team hand-tuned — writes a structured recipe around them: a title, a short description, time and difficulty, an ingredient list, step-by-step instructions, and a few notes from the chef. We argued over every line in the engine's prompt so the writing reads like a person wrote it, not a manual.
02
Where do the photographs come from?
They are generated, in parallel with the recipe, by a separate image engine our team curated. The engine renders the finished dish from three angles — a plated three-quarter shot, an overhead, and a close-up — using the recipe's title and key ingredients as the prompt. They are illustrative, not photographs of a real kitchen test.
03
Are the recipes any good?
Most of them are very good. Some are better than they have any right to be. A few of them — usually when the ingredients are unusually adversarial — will be merely okay. We treat them as a starting point: a draft of a meal that you, in your own kitchen, finish.
04
Is there a recipe of the day?
Yes. Each morning a new recipe is generated around a fresh theme and pinned to the home page. It is permanent — once it leaves the home page it keeps its own URL inside the public collection, like every other recipe on the site.

Accounts & limits

01
Do I need an account?
No. You can use CookSth without signing up — type ingredients, generate, walk away. We added optional accounts for cooks who want a higher daily quota and a way to keep their session on more than one device.
02
Is there a daily limit?
Yes, a small one. Anonymous visitors get a handful of free generations per day; signed-in cooks get a meaningfully higher quota. The cap resets each day at midnight UTC. The limit exists so the recipe engine doesn't get hammered, not as a paywall in disguise.
03
What do I get if I sign up?
A higher daily quota, the option to sign in with Google or Facebook instead of a password, and the ability to return on a different device and pick up where you left off. That's it. There is no profile page, no follower graph, no social layer.
04
Is it free?
Yes. There is no paid tier, no premium feature, no future paywall we are quietly building toward. If we ever change that, we will say so plainly and not in a banner.

Languages & writing

01
Does CookSth speak Thai?
It does. The site has English and Thai editions, and a recipe generated in Thai is written in Thai end-to-end — title, description, steps, even the search keywords that help Google find it. Switch languages from the toolbar at the top of every page.
02
What's the Journal?
It is the slow, human side of the site. Short editorial pieces about cooking — ingredients we love, methods we keep returning to — written by people, not the engine. Anything filed under Journal is hand-written; anything filed under Recipe is generated.

Privacy & data

01
What do you collect about me?
If you visit anonymously: an approximate request count tied to your IP address, used only to enforce the daily limit. If you sign up: your email, and a Google or Facebook profile identifier if you chose that sign-in route. Nothing else. We do not sell, share, or rent any of it.
02
Do you use analytics or cookies?
Anonymous Google Analytics, and only after you accept the consent banner at the bottom of the page. If you decline — or simply ignore it — nothing fires. If you accept, we see aggregate page-view counts with IP anonymisation on. No advertising signals, no cross-site tracking, no demographic profiles. Your consent choice is stored in a single local cookie so we never have to ask twice.
03
Will you email me?
No marketing, no newsletter, no product nudges. The only mail you might ever get from us is a password reset, and only if you asked for one.
04
Where is the data stored?
Recipes live in a small MySQL database. Recipe images live in S3-compatible object storage. Both are under our direct control. There is no third-party recommender, no analytics warehouse, no profile pipeline.

The fine print

01
Can I use a CookSth recipe in my own cookbook or website?
Yes. Recipes are not copyrightable in the way prose is, and the ones the site generates are yours to take. A link back is appreciated but not required.
02
What about the photographs?
The same applies. Generated images are free to use. They will not, however, win you a James Beard award.
03
Found a bug or have an idea?
Send a note. We read everything.