Recipe manager and meal planner mobile app - Outside The Pan

Outside The Pan is built on one bet: providing value to users by connecting the whole chain of meal planning; from finding recipe inspo or importing one from online, schedule when you'll cook it, get the grocery list built for you automatically, then cook from a screen made for the kitchen. One seamless, continuous flow from inspiration to dinner.

It's live on the App Store today with 1,500+ installs, this is the store page.

I designed, built, and released it solo. The React Native app, the backend API, the payments, and the App Store launch.

Finding a recipe is easy. Cooking it is its own thing. But the bridge between them, deciding to cook something and actually having the right ingredients in your kitchen, is where the whole promise lives. Here's where most recipe app drops the ball. That gap is exactly where good intentions go to die.

So the most valuable thing I could build was also the least glamorous and the most technically involved: schedule a recipe onto a day, and have it automatically assemble your grocery list across every recipe you've planned for the week.

That integration is the difference between four features sitting next to each other and one product that actually flows. It's also the part of the build that proves the most as anyone can ship a screen, but making separate features cohere into a system is the real work.

A flow like this only works if the data layer underneath is solid, and that's where most freelance mobile developers stop: someone else has to build the server, the auth, the database. I built mine.

The backend is a Hono API on Cloudflare Workers with a proper auth system: OAuth sign-in with Google and Apple, JWT access tokens with refresh-token rotation, and account merging, which is when you sign in with Google today and Apple next month on the same email, and it's still one account, not two orphaned profiles. The kind of detail a user never notices when it works and never forgives when it doesn't.

I come from a full-stack web background, so owning the server side isn't a stretch goal at all.

This is where most side projects die: App Store submission and payments. Building the app is the fun part; getting it reviewed, approved, and actually taking money is the part that ends projects. I got Outside The Pan through it.

There's a real monetization flow, beginning with onboarding into a short demo, then a paywall at the moment the value is clear, wired through Superwall and RevenueCat, built and released with EAS. The product judgment mattered as much as the code: what stays free, where the paywall sits, how to introduce it without the first run feeling like a toll booth.

Regardless of the tools, the point is I can get apps across the finish line: store listing, review and approval, payments, all of it, instead of leaving them 90% done in a TestFlight build.

The next chapter is the honest one: turning those free users into paying ones.

I build flows, not screens, Outside The Pan is the proof. I took a fuzzy idea and turned it into a coherent end-to-end product: front end, backend, payments, launch because I think about the whole journey a user takes, not just the piece in front of me.

That's what I'd bring to your app: someone who can own the entire thing from idea to a live, monetized product, without you assembling a team. If you've got an app idea, or one stuck halfway to launch, let's talk.