🍳 Pinch: brief your kitchen, get a costed menu back (yes, like a pinch of salt) My family ran a restaurant. Full house, busy nights, and somehow still not enough to cover the loan. The prices underneath us crept up quietly, and we only saw it when it was too late.

That's the problem I built Pinch to solve. ⚙️ How it works: Brief it like you'd brief a sous chef and it designs the whole menu, every dish costed in your kitchen's own real prices. Snap a supplier invoice and it flags the dishes whose margin just slipped.

I built it with my brother-in-law, a working pastry chef who briefed and tested every build. He is also a hotel pastry chef who has to dream up new themes every week and still hit a food-cost target on every single dish! It was fun having to learn more about their processes and admin work behind it. Being creative and protecting the margin at the same time is exactly the job Pinch is built for. 🛠️ How I built it: Planned with Claude , built it in Figma Make, generated every watercolour illustration in Figma Weave from one spec, and took the design tokens into Figma as variables over MCP. This was my first time generating images and assets with AI. I wanted them to read as clearly AI made but not as slop, so I held every illustration to one watercolour spec for a consistent hand. Weave is new to me, so a few are still a little raw, which is part of learning a tool in public.

To keep it cohesive rather than thrown together, the whole app runs on a small design system: two typefaces on one size ramp (Fraunces for display, IBM Plex Sans for text), a single palette, and shared radius and elevation tokens across every surface, with the colour roles contrast-checked to WCAG AA. That consistency is what keeps an AI-built app from feeling vibe-coded (a bit) 😂

It runs live on Render, which I honestly could not have shipped without. Every number is honest. Real food-price data from the UK, US and PH or your own invoices, anything estimated says so, nothing faked.

🧂 A pinch of salt. Never pinching pennies. 👉 Try it live (no login): pinch-e6su.onrender.com Built in Figma. 🍽️ Open the files: • Figma Make file: https://www.figma.com/make/RUUfn1EDR4ANsf19ZaHe6c/Pinch-Figma-Make?t=ayTG8P1m7gpSjObv-1 (where Pinch was born. Make shaped the vision and the front end. It then grew on GitHub with Claude Code, so the live app has evolved beyond this file. The live URL is the current product.) • Figma Design File (end to end frames and design tokens) https://www.figma.com/design/nUTH2kMrU7ANPAc0L2B8Bp/Pinch-Design-System?node-id=161-2&t=ivmgeSl19yWwWmQU-1

• LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7472659310100115456-Lv8N

this is so well thought out. amazing work!