Buddy Market, Food and beverages
AI menus and subscriptions on web, iOS and Android
Buddy Market turns "I don't know what to cook" into a weekly menu with recipes and a shopping list. An AI product on web, iOS and Android, with subscriptions.
Context
Buddy turns "I don't know what to cook tonight" into a weekly menu, its recipes, the shopping list and the state of the pantry. It is an AI product with subscriptions on web, iOS and Android, built and operated for Buddy Market.
The challenge
Generative AI is easy to show in a demo and hard to operate. Costs per request explode, every answer has to be reliable enough to shop from, and the product has to be paid for through subscriptions on three platforms with one codebase.
The work
- 01Conversational planning where the AI proposes and the code calculates quantities, nutrients and prices deterministically.
- 02Recipe generation with Claude, including batch processing to reduce costs, with two model providers and automatic failover if one fails.
- 03OCR of recipes and supermarket receipts that enter the pantry as structured data.
- 04Stripe subscriptions, per-plan limits, payment history, expert profiles, images on MinIO and deployment on Kubernetes.
- 05React frontend packaged with Capacitor for iOS and Android.
Outcome
An AI product billing by subscription on three platforms, with cost per user measured. It is the reference we use to tell a client what it really costs to operate an AI feature.
