A fair deal
for everyone.

Weeknight Dinners is a personal recipe index — an app that lets you save, organize, and schedule any recipe you find anywhere on the internet. Think of it like a bookmark manager built specifically for cooking, with a shared calendar layered on top.

When you share a recipe with Weeknight Dinners — from your phone, from a browser, however — we store a reference to that recipe: the title, the source URL, and enough metadata to make it searchable in your collection. That’s it. The recipe itself stays on the creator’s website.

This is by design. Recipe creators — food bloggers, home cooks, professional chefs — depend on traffic to their websites. We have no interest in stripping that away. The whole point of Weeknight Dinners is to make it easier to find and use the content they’ve made, not to replace it.

For any cooking site we crawl and index — blogs, recipe sites, anywhere a creator has built their own home for their work — we don’t parse instructions, extract ingredients, or reproduce the body of the recipe. We store a reference and we link back. That’s the deal.

When you open one of those saved recipes in the app, you open the original page in a browser view pointed directly at the creator’s site. Their ads load. Their traffic analytics fire. Their content stays theirs.

The exception is for content that lives on platforms that aren’t built for cooking — TikTok, Instagram, and similar. Those apps don’t give you a usable recipe view, so when a user shares a video or post into their own personal cookbook on Weeknight Dinners, we may parse what we need to make it cookable for that user. We try to balance utility for the cook against sending traffic back to creator sites where one exists. This is an area we expect to keep evolving.

We know the link-out experience is sometimes less polished than a native recipe card. A webview with cookie banners and ads is not as clean. That trade-off is intentional. The utility Weeknight Dinners provides is in organization, scheduling, and sharing — not in consuming someone else’s work without permission.

For sites where a creator has built their own home for their recipes — blogs, Substacks, recipe sites — Weeknight Dinners offers a native experience (parsed ingredients, clean recipe cards, offline access) only when the creator has opted in through a partnership agreement with us. We don’t do this for those sites without an agreement, and we don’t do it for things like TikTok or Reddit content as a public-facing index.

These agreements are bilateral. The creator gets something in return: attribution on every save, a direct channel to Weeknight Dinners’s users, and a share of any revenue tied to their content in the app. We do not offer native ingestion as a default.

The bar for a partnership is not audience size. It’s consent. A small blogger who wants their recipes shown natively in Weeknight Dinners can get that. A large publication whose content we can’t reach an agreement with will always open in the browser, no matter how frequently it gets saved.

Most recipe aggregators are built on a simple logic: extract as much content as possible, surface it inside their product, and let the creator chase traffic somewhere in a footer link. That model has made recipe SEO a race to the bottom — creators write novels before the recipe because they have to, and users scroll past them because they have to.

We think there’s a better model. Weeknight Dinners is subscription-funded. We don’t need to maximize time-on-site or page views. We need to be useful enough that people pay for it — and that means it has to be a genuinely good tool, not a content harvesting machine dressed up as one.

That alignment of incentives matters. When Weeknight Dinners sends you to a creator’s website, we’re not losing anything. We want you to go there. We want the creator to get the visit. The value we provide is in the layer on top — the calendar, the search, the shared planning with your family — not in owning the content itself.

Weeknight Dinners is a small, independent project. It’s one person building something they want to exist in the world. Part of wanting it to exist is making sure it doesn’t contribute to the same problems that made every other recipe platform frustrating. This content policy is how we try to hold that line.

Weeknight Dinners complies with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). If you are a copyright owner and believe that content indexed or displayed in Weeknight Dinners infringes your copyright, you may submit a formal takedown notice and we will act on it promptly.

Because Weeknight Dinners is primarily a search index that links to content rather than hosting it, most takedown requests will result in the removal of the URL reference from our index. If you are the owner of the underlying website, the more effective remedy is usually to remove or restrict the content at the source — we will then stop indexing it automatically.

A valid DMCA takedown notice must include:

• A description of the copyrighted work you claim has been infringed
• The specific URL or content in Weeknight Dinners that you believe infringes your copyright
• Your contact information (name, address, phone number, email)
• A statement that you have a good faith belief that the use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law
• A statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information in your notice is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or authorized to act on their behalf
• Your physical or electronic signature

The formal submission form is coming soon. In the meantime, send takedown requests to the contact address on the feedback page with the subject line “DMCA Takedown Request.” We will acknowledge receipt within 5 business days and action the request within 14.