cd /news/artificial-intelligence/show-hn-i-built-a-free-app-that-turn… · home topics artificial-intelligence article
[ARTICLE · art-59121] src=souva.app ↗ pub= topic=artificial-intelligence verified=true sentiment=· neutral

Show HN: I built a free app that turns your fridge into recipes (solo dev)

A solo student developer launched Souva, a free app that turns photos of fridge contents into recipes using AI, with a cap on scans and generations to cover hosting costs. The app, built on React Native and Cloudflare Workers, generates new recipes from available ingredients and allows users to import recipes from URLs.

read1 min views1 publishedJul 14, 2026

Hi HN, I'm a solo student dev. Souva started with a problem my mom and I always ran into: we'd open a full fridge and have no idea what to make, then open a full pantry and still have no idea what to make. Most recipe apps expect you to find a recipe and go out and get everything, but we didn't have the time or the space for niche ingredients we'd only ever use once. Souva works with what you already have.

You enter what you have by snapping a photo of your fridge, scanning a barcode, or typing it in, and the app finds recipes you can actually make right now. If you're like me and always have a mix of niche ingredients, SouvAI will invent brand new recipes from exactly what you have. You can also import any recipe from a URL to save it.

Build details: React Native/Expo on iOS and Android, backend on Cloudflare Workers, and recipe generation runs through Hugging Face inference providers so I can route across multiple providers instead of marrying a single API. It's free and has no accounts. I run ads to cover hosting and AI costs, so photo scans had to cost around $0.002 each behind a cap of 3 per day, and AI generations are capped at 5 (watching an ad tops either up).

I'd most want feedback on how good the AI-invented recipes actually are. Generations provide users confidence scores, but the recipes' actual taste is the thing I want to test thoroughly. Try Souva on the weirdest ingredient combos in your fridge and let me know if you'd actually cook the recipes it generates you!

Free on iOS and Android: [https://souva.app](https://souva.app)

Comments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48908506](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48908506)

Points: 1

── more in #artificial-intelligence 4 stories · sorted by recency
── more on @souva 3 stories trending now
sponsored brought to you by zahid.host 4,200+ EU-deployed projects
reading about agents? ship yours in a single git push.

Run your AI side-project on zahid.host

EU-based hosting, git-push deploys, automatic HTTPS, no cold starts. Free tier with a custom domain — perfect for shipping the agent you just read about.

$git push zahid main
Live at https://your-agent.zahid.host
Get free account → Pricing
from €0/mo · no card required
LIVE [news/show-hn-i-built-a-fr…] indexed:0 read:1min 2026-07-14 ·