Every family has the same problem in a different kitchen. The lasagne is on an index card in a drawer, the bread is in a voice note from an aunt, and the only person who knows the proportions for the Christmas cake is the one you cannot ask in December. The usual fix is a recipe app, and it stops at ten recipes, or wants a subscription from every cousin, or lives inside an app half the family refuses to install.
This guide is a different shape: a family recipe book online as one page of your own. Claude builds it from the recipes you paste, Hostus hosts it on a link, and the family opens it on a phone like any web page. Relatives add a recipe from the page without an account, anyone can ask the book which recipes use cardamom and get the answer with the recipe named, and there are no ads. Free to start, and it stays a file you own.
What it looks like
Here is one, live: a fictional family's recipe book, grouped by course, with an index at the top, an "Add a recipe" form at the end and Ask switched on. The family is made up and the recipes and quantities on it are illustrative, but the page is real. Ask it "which recipes use cardamom?", then add a recipe and open the link in another browser: it is already there.
It has what a folder of screenshots never gets: every recipe in one place, in one style; a way for the family to add theirs; a way to find a recipe by what is in it; and a link that works on a phone in the kitchen. Nothing else, which is why it is one file.
What a family recipe book online needs
Strip away what recipe apps sell and the list is short:
- Every recipe, in one place, in one style. Title, who it comes from, ingredients, steps.
- Room for decades of recipes. 1,000 added recipes on the free plan, 20,000 on paid, and the ones in the file itself are not counted.
- Relatives can add theirs, without installing anything or creating an account, from the same link you sent.
- Find by ingredient. "What can I make with the leftover ricotta" is the question people actually ask a recipe book.
- No ads.
- Opens on a phone from a link, in the kitchen, one hand busy.
Meal planning, grocery lists and nutrition tracking are not on this list. They are what the apps are for.
How relatives add a recipe without an account
A single HTML page can hold the recipes you pasted. What it cannot do on its own is accept a new recipe from an aunt in another city and show it to everyone else: a page that stores things in the browser with localStorage keeps the aunt's recipe on the aunt's phone.
On Hostus the page gets storage of its own. If the file references hostus.data, the server injects a small SDK before the script runs, and the page can read and write records that belong to that document. In the default mode, called shared, every reader reads and writes everything.
const { data } = window.hostus;
data.watch("recipes", render); // now, and on every change
await data.add("recipes", {
title: "Aunt Rosa's lemon cake", by: "Rosa",
ingredients: ["4 eggs", "200 g sugar", "..."],
steps: ["Whisk the eggs with the sugar...", "..."]
});Nobody logs in. A relative who opens the link gets a signed cookie from the server, enough for the page to know which recipes are theirs and let them fix a typo in their own. A record can be up to 32 KB, which is a very long recipe, and the free plan holds 1,000 records per collection, more than any family will write down; the page lists the first 200 added recipes unless the prompt asks it to page through them.
Added recipes appear on the page after the fixed ones. You also see them in the Data tab on the document, a table with search and a CSV or JSON export, and Claude reads them through the connector. When a few have come in, paste them into the next version of the HTML and upload it to the same link.
The prompt
With the Hostus connector on in Claude, this builds the book and publishes it in one turn. Paste your recipes at the end, in whatever shape they are in.
Make me a family recipe book from the recipes below.
Group them by course: starters, mains, sides, desserts, drinks. Each recipe is a section with an id: the title, who it comes from, the ingredients as a list and the method as numbered steps. Put a short index of the courses at the top.
Add an "Add a recipe" form at the end of the book: title, your name, ingredients, steps. Use the hostus.data SDK so the added recipes live on the document: data.watch("recipes", render) and data.add("recipes", { title, by, ingredients, steps }). Render the added recipes after the fixed ones, in the same style, each with its own id, and let a person edit or remove the recipes they added. No backend, no localStorage, no key in the page. One HTML file, mobile first, large type. Then publish it to Hostus and give me the link.
[paste your recipes here]The page is born private: in the Hostus dashboard, switch it to public (or email-gated) before you send the link to the family. Ask is already on. The ids matter: Ask cites the recipe by its section, and reading by section shows you which recipes the family opens. Ask for a photo per recipe or a "serves" line, and the next version goes up on the same link with the added recipes where they were.
Hostus first, then the recipe apps: which one to pick
Hostus. Best if you want the book as a page of your own, with no ads, that the family reads and adds to. Claude builds it from the recipes you paste, Hostus hosts it on a link, relatives add a recipe from the page without an account, and anyone can ask the book and get the answer with the recipe cited. Room for 1,000 added recipes on the free plan, no subscription per cousin, and the free plan has no clock and asks for no card.
Hazel's Recipes. Pick it if you want a phone app for your own recipes and you have fewer than ten. Its App Store listing says you start with 10 free recipes with no time limit, that there are no ads, and that a Pro subscription lets you save more and share directly with other people who use the app; the listing shows $0.99 a month or $7.99 a year. Without Pro, sharing means a PDF by text or email.
Paprika. Pick it if you want meal planning and grocery lists built around the recipes, and a clipper that imports a recipe from any site. It is a buy-once app sold per platform: its site says each version is sold separately, and today the App Store lists it at $4.99 for iPhone and iPad and $29.99 for Mac; for Windows and Android, check their site. The book lives in the app.
Plan to Eat. Pick it if the point is planning the week: a calendar, a grocery list that fills itself, and a clipper. Its pricing page lists $5.95 a month or $49 a year, with a 14-day free trial and no credit card to start; its site says one account gives you and your family access on all your devices.
A Google Doc or a Canva template. Pick it if you want something printable, today, with no software at all. Free, and you own the file. It does not answer "which recipes use cardamom", and a relative cannot add a recipe without edit rights to the whole document.
The printed binder. Pick it if you want the object itself: the stains, the handwriting, the shelf. It is the baseline, and the one copy there is.
Side by side
| Option | Relatives can add from the page | Asks the book | No ads | Opens on a phone from a link | Who owns it | Free plan |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hostus, one HTML page | Yes, no account, shared mode | Yes, from the page, recipe cited | Yes, there are none | Yes, the same link | You, it is a file | Yes, no clock: 20 documents, 2 MB, 1,000 records per collection |
| Hazel's Recipes | Pro users, per its listing; otherwise a PDF | No | Yes, per its listing | It is an app | Lives in their app | 10 recipes free, then $0.99 a month or $7.99 a year |
| Paprika | Check their site | No | Not stated on the pages we read | It is an app, sold per platform | Lives in their app | No: $4.99 on iOS, $29.99 on Mac; Windows and Android, check their site |
| Plan to Eat | The family shares one account, per its site | No | Not stated on the pages we read | Web and apps | Lives in their app | 14-day trial, then $5.95 a month or $49 a year |
| Google Doc or Canva | Only with edit rights to the whole document | No | Yes | Yes, cramped | You | Yes |
| Printed binder | Yes, with a pen | No | Yes | No | You | Yes |
Prices and limits were read on each vendor's own site or App Store listing on 18 October 2026 and change without notice. "Check their site" means the vendor did not publish the fact on the pages we read.
Ask the book, and notes pinned to a recipe
Every page published on Hostus carries Ask, and it is on by default. A relative types "which recipes use cardamom?" or "what did Nonna put in the Sunday ragù?" and gets a short answer written from that page only, with the recipe cited. No account, nothing to install. The free plan allows 20 reader questions a day, the paid plan 200.
Two things to know. Ask answers only what the page says: if the book has no gluten-free bread, it says so instead of inventing one. And it does not transform the content: it will not scale the lemon cake to two tins or convert cups to grams. The questions it could not answer are listed for you, in the family's own words: the honest list of what to add next.
Notes work the other way round. A relative can reply on a recipe, "the oven runs hot, I do 160 not 180", anchored to that section. The reply is private between that relative and you, you get an email, and you answer from the dashboard or through the connector. When the note is right, fold it into the recipe on the next upload.
Keeping it going for years
A recipe book is updated more often than it is created. An update is a new upload to the same link: the address does not change, the previous versions stay in the document's history, and the recipes relatives added stay on the document. With the connector on, "add this recipe and publish" is one line to Claude.
Reading by section tells you what the book is for: every recipe is a section with an id, so you see which ones the family opens and for how long. If the family is large, split by branch, one page per household, in a folder: one document is one page, so write the links between books into the books.
Good to know before you switch
The free plan holds 2 MB in total, and photos count. Recipes as text are tiny; a photo per recipe is not, so keep images small or save the gallery for the paid plan, which holds 200 MB. Ask answers what is written and cites the recipe; it will not scale a recipe, convert units or do arithmetic, so write quantities the way you want them cooked.
Shared mode means shared: anyone with the link can edit or remove the recipes added through the form, so keep the link in the family, or set the page to email-gated so each relative types their email first and you see who opened it. The storage works because the page is hosted on Hostus; open the file from your desktop and the added recipes are not there. Public pages carry a noindex and do not appear in Google, and the address is your-slug.hostus.page: there is no custom domain.