Good questions, straight answers.

Hedgehog Chef is a recipe box, meal planner, shopping list and pantry that your whole household shares: every recipe you care about in one place, help deciding what to cook, and a plan that turns into a shopping list sorted by aisle.

Hedgehog Chef is a web app you install from your browser: on iPhone, open app.hedgehogchef.com in Safari and choose Share → Add to Home Screen; on Android, Chrome offers Install app. It then opens full screen like any other app. There's no App Store or Google Play version yet.

Not fully. Hedgehog Chef needs a connection to load and save your kitchen, and shows when you're offline. Recipe photos you've seen are kept on the device. If you cook somewhere without signal, open the recipe before you go.

Paprika is a mature, offline-first app you buy per device. Hedgehog Chef runs in any browser, syncs instantly between everyone in a household with their own logins, has a real step-by-step cook mode and an AI planner, and works with Claude. Paprika still wins on offline use, native watch and widget support and printing. The comparison page goes row by row.

Email hello@hedgehogchef.com. A person reads every message.

Ask it what you'd ask a friend who cooks: plan a week of high-protein dinners under $150, use up the spinach before Friday, make Tuesday vegetarian, turn a recipe into a list for six. It reads your recipes, pantry, meal plan and (when you've set up stores) prices, then proposes a plan, a list or a new recipe. Nothing changes until you tap Apply.

The planner, photo imports and receipt reading use Claude, by Anthropic, through Anthropic's API; recipe photos are generated with FLUX on Cloudflare Workers AI. Under their commercial terms neither provider trains its models on what we send. We only send what a request needs, such as the recipes and pantry items relevant to your question.

Yes, with one switch in Settings. The planner disappears, AI imports and photos switch off, and nothing you do is sent to an AI provider — enforced on the server, not just hidden. Hedgehog Chef is still a complete recipe box, meal planner, shopping list and pantry without it.

No. The AI planner is built in. If you already use Claude, you can also add Hedgehog Chef as a connector and save recipes, plan meals or add to your shopping list from a Claude chat.

There are live prices at Kroger-family stores in the US (Kroger, Ralphs, Fred Meyer, King Soopers, Harris Teeter, Smith's, Fry's, QFC and others), from Kroger's public product API. Other stores get community prices from Open Prices when there are any, and otherwise estimates from US average and typical supermarket prices, scaled to your state, always labeled as estimates. Where a store doesn't offer prices to apps, the list says so instead of guessing.

Yes. Everyone gets their own login and joins your kitchen with an invite code. Recipes, the plan, shopping lists and the pantry are shared, and changes show up for everyone instantly. Free kitchens have up to 2 people; Hedgehog Chef Plus kitchens up to 8.

Yes. Use Paprika's Export to save your recipes as a .paprikarecipes file, then open Import → Paprika in Hedgehog Chef and choose it. Photos, ratings, notes and categories come along, and you see which recipes you already have before anything is imported.

Most of them. Nearly every recipe site publishes recipe data for search engines, and that's what gets read; pages without it are read with AI. A few sites block importers or sit behind a paywall; for those, paste the recipe text and it's structured for you.

Only the people in your kitchen and apps you connect yourself (such as Claude). Recipes are never public, there are no ads, and the app and this site have no trackers or analytics scripts.

Yes. Settings → Import & export downloads every recipe as JSON. You can delete your account in Settings → Account; when you're the last person in a kitchen, its recipes, plans, lists, pantry and photos are deleted with it.

No. Not on any plan. Hedgehog Chef is paid for by Hedgehog Chef Plus subscriptions, not by showing you ads or selling your data, and recipes you import arrive without the ads and pop-ups of the page they came from, with the original site credited and linked. A few store links (a tool you don't own, Walmart prices) are disclosed affiliate links — never banners or paid placement — and you can turn them off in Settings.

Hedgehog Chef is free to use, with daily allowances for AI features. Hedgehog Chef Plus costs $5.99 a month or $49.99 a year and raises those allowances, adds live grocery prices and fits a bigger household. One subscription covers the whole kitchen on every device.

Yes. When paid plans open, you'll be able to cancel from Settings → Plan & billing and keep Hedgehog Chef Plus until the end of the period you paid for; your recipes stay either way.