I do the cooking for my family. I enjoy cooking, but it's tough to figure out what to cook, day in day out.

While I own a lot of cookbooks, I mostly cook recipes that I find on the internet. I used to keep a list of recipes in a note on my phone, but it got unwieldy, so I decided to build this website, to make it easy to bookmark and tag recipes.

My family has our favorite recipes, but eating the same dishes over and over can get monotonous. That's why Mealtime is social - so you can see what other people are cooking and find new recipes to try.

Mealtime also lets you keep track of your meals, so you can remember what you cooked and when. Look back through your meals and find recipes that you haven't cooked in a while is another simple way to add variety to what you eat.

Philosophically, the main inspiration for Mealtime is Pinboard, a "fast bookmarking website for privacy-minded people" that was itself inspired by Delicious, the original social bookmarking service (now defunct).

Pinboard does not make money from advertising, nor does it use the surveillance tools by which Big Tech tracks (and makes money off) the online activity of its users, i.e., you and me. Pinboard is independent, owned and operated by one guy, Maciej Cegłowsk, not a public company that must prioritize profit for its shareholders over the needs of its users.

Ads slow down websites and make them difficult and unpleasant to use, so keeping ads of Pinboard also serves the goal of speed.

Mealtime follows in the footsteps of Pinboard - no ads, no third-party tracking, no selling your data.

Running a large website like Pinboard costs money, so Pinboard charges its members a subscription fee of $22/year (as of May 2024).

Mealtime is new and small, so using it is free. As it grows, the cost of running it will grow. At some point, I may need to charge a reasonable subscription fee as well. If/when that happens, I will provide plenty of notice, so, if you prefer not to pay, you can download your recipes and meals. Your data is yours, not ours.

I hope you find Mealtime useful. Please let me know if any questions, suggestions, or problems. My email address is: [email protected]

All the best,
Michael Yoon