Recipe App Boilerplate for iOS

A recipe app is a content app with a paywall — the kit ships both halves

Strip a recipe app down and it is two things: a well-built content browser and a business model. The content half is lists of recipes, detail screens with ingredients and steps, search, categories, and favorites. The business half is a premium tier — unlock the full cookbook, remove limits, or generate recipes on demand. The Swift Kit gives you the foundation for both. A centralized design system makes recipe cards, category chips, and step lists retheme from one file, Supabase Postgres stores recipes and the favorites a user marks, and RevenueCat gates the premium content behind an entitlement. You write the recipes and the cooking experience; the browsing, syncing, and billing scaffolding is already there.

import Foundation

struct Recipe: Codable, Identifiable {
    let id: UUID
    let title: String
    let ingredients: [String]
    let steps: [String]
    let minutes: Int
    var isFavorite: Bool = false
}

// The kit's Supabase layer persists favorites to Postgres,
// so a recipe favorited on iPhone shows up on iPad.
func toggleFavorite(_ recipe: Recipe) async throws {
    try await Database.shared.upsert(
        table: "favorites",
        values: ["recipe_id": recipe.id.uuidString,
                 "is_favorite": !recipe.isFavorite]
    )
}

AI recipe generation — the feature that sells the premium tier

The most compelling premium feature in a modern recipe app is generation: type in what is in your fridge, get a recipe back. The Swift Kit ships a multi-provider AI layer built for exactly this, and it handles the part that trips people up — where the request runs and who pays for it. For a genuinely free feature you can use Apple Foundation Models, which run on-device at zero marginal cost, so a basic what-can-I-make suggestion costs you nothing per call. For richer generation you route to OpenAI or Claude, with keys proxied server-side through Supabase Edge Functions rather than shipped in the app. That means you can offer a limited free generation experience and gate unlimited, higher-quality generation behind the paywall — the exact structure that converts free users to paid.

func generateRecipe(from ingredients: [String]) async throws -> Recipe {
    let prompt = """
    Create a recipe using mainly these ingredients: \(ingredients.joined(separator: ", ")).
    Return a title, an ingredient list, numbered steps, and total minutes.
    """
    // AIService is the kit's multi-provider layer: on-device
    // Foundation Models for the free tier, OpenAI/Claude for Pro.
    return try await AIService.shared.generateObject(
        prompt: prompt,
        as: Recipe.self
    )
}

Favorites, collections, and sync across a user's devices

Cooking happens across surfaces — you save a recipe on your phone at lunch and cook from your iPad on the counter that night. That only works if favorites and collections are tied to an account and synced, not stored on one device. The Swift Kit gives you that from launch. Sign in with Apple and email auth anchor a user's data to a real account, Supabase Postgres holds their favorites, custom collections, and any shopping-list state, and Supabase storage handles user-uploaded photos of their own dishes. Onboarding walks a new user from install to their first saved recipe, and analytics show you which recipes and categories actually get cooked.

• Sign in with Apple + email so favorites and collections follow the user, not the device
• Supabase Postgres for favorites, custom collections, and shopping-list state
• Supabase storage for user-uploaded dish photos and reviews
• Onboarding flow to get a new user to their first saved recipe quickly

What you build on top

The Swift Kit is not a finished recipe app. There is no bundled recipe database, no proprietary nutrition engine, no opinionated meal planner. That is intentional — your recipes, your curation, and your cooking experience are the product, and no boilerplate should dictate them. You bring the content (your own recipes, a licensed database, or AI-generated ones), the category structure, and any nutrition or meal-planning logic. The kit removes the roughly 30% of any recipe app that is identical to every other app: accounts, sync, AI plumbing, storage, paywall, onboarding, and a design system that keeps your brand out of a fight with the boilerplate. Localization is included too, which matters more for recipes than most categories — measurements and cuisine names change by region.

Building a recipe app: from scratch vs with The Swift Kit

Frequently Asked Questions