Ratatouille — Written Proposal

RevenueCat Shipyard 2026 · Eitan Bernath Brief · by Nicolas & Gabrielle

Problem Statement

Eitan Bernath’s audience loves cooking. They discover recipes daily — on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, food blogs — but the journey from “saved recipe” to “dinner on the table” is broken.

The gap isn’t inspiration. It’s execution.

Today, home cooks face three friction points:

  1. Recipes are scattered and unusable. They live in screenshots, bookmarks, and social media saves. When it’s time to cook, you can’t find them — and when you do, they’re buried in ads, pop-ups, and life stories.
  2. Portions don’t match real life. A recipe serves 4, but you’re cooking for a family of mixed ages — a toddler, a child, two adults. Nobody eats the same amount. Scaling is mental math every single time.
  3. Allergens and dietary restrictions require constant vigilance. For families managing food allergies or specific diets (pescatarian, vegan, dairy-free), every recipe is a risk assessment.

These problems compound for families. Parents don’t have time to cross-reference, calculate, and double-check. They need a tool that does it for them — reliably, privately, and fast.

Solution Overview

Ratatouille is a recipe organizer built for families who cook. It bridges the gap between finding a recipe and getting dinner on the table.

Core workflow: Import → Adapt → Cook

  • Import from anywhere. Paste a URL, share from Instagram or TikTok, or scan a handwritten recipe. The AI (Gemini 2.5 Flash) extracts the title, ingredients, steps, and photo — then translates everything into the user’s language. The result is a clean, structured recipe with no ads and no clutter.
  • Adapt to your family. Each family member has a profile: age range, sex, allergens, and dietary restrictions. When you open a recipe, portions scale automatically based on who’s eating. A toddler gets smaller quantities; an adult gets more. No calculator needed.
  • Catch allergen conflicts. The app cross-references every ingredient against your family’s allergen profiles. Conflicts are flagged instantly with a visual alert. One tap shows AI-suggested alternatives — dairy-free margarine instead of butter, rice flour instead of wheat. Detection runs on-device via Apple Intelligence, backed by a local database of 975+ mapped ingredients for instant results even without AI availability.
  • Send to your grocery list. Scaled ingredients go to Apple Reminders in one tap — automatically shared with your partner via Family Sharing. No separate shopping app needed.

Audience fit for Eitan Bernath

Eitan’s brief asked for an app that takes users “from saved recipe to dinner made.” Ratatouille delivers exactly that — but goes further by making recipes family-aware. His audience skews young, mobile-first, and increasingly starting families. They need an app that meets them where they already discover food and removes the friction between inspiration and execution.

Ratatouille is also multilingual by design. AI import translates recipes automatically, which means Eitan’s global audience can import recipes from any language and cook in theirs.

Monetization Strategy

Ratatouille uses a freemium model powered by RevenueCat.

Free tier

  • 3 AI recipe imports (enough to experience the full workflow)
  • 2 family members
  • Unlimited manual recipe creation
  • Full allergen detection and grocery list features

Ratatouille Plus (subscription)

  • Monthly or Annual (with savings highlighted as “Best Value”)
  • Unlimited AI imports
  • Unlimited family members
  • Early access to new features

Why this model works

The free tier is enough to discover the real value — users complete the full import-to-grocery-list workflow three times before hitting any paywall. By then, they’ve experienced the time savings and understand what they’re paying for.

The paywall triggers naturally (on the 4th import or 3rd family member), not arbitrarily. Users convert because the app has already proven its worth, not because a feature was locked behind a wall.

RevenueCat integration handles subscription management, entitlement gating, purchase restoration, and paywall presentation. The paywall UI features animated visuals and a clear free-vs-premium comparison table, designed to convert without pressure.

Revenue potential

Family-oriented apps have strong retention: once your recipes, family profiles, and allergen settings are configured, switching costs are high. The subscription aligns value with usage — bigger families and active cooks get proportionally more value from the premium tier.

Roadmap

Near-term (next 3 months)

  • More robust allergen detection. Improve coverage for compound ingredients (e.g., “béchamel” contains dairy and gluten), regional ingredient names, and edge cases. Make substitution suggestions context-aware — the best butter alternative depends on whether you’re baking or sautéing.
  • Improved import reliability. Expand AI extraction to handle more recipe formats, paywalled sites, and video-only social media posts.

Medium-term (3–6 months)

  • Macronutrient tracking. Estimate calories, protein, carbs, and fat per ingredient, scaled to each family member’s portion. Surface nutritional info without turning the app into a calorie counter.
  • Weekly meal planning. Drag-and-drop meal calendar. Select recipes for the week; the app consolidates ingredients into a single grocery list, deduplicated and scaled.
  • Recipe collections and tags. Let users organize recipes beyond categories — “weeknight dinners,” “kids’ favorites,” “holiday meals.”

Long-term vision

  • Community sharing. Let families share adapted recipes (with their portion and allergen adjustments) with friends or other Ratatouille users.
  • Personalized nutrition tips. Contextual suggestions based on family composition — e.g., iron-rich recipe ideas for a toddler, calcium alternatives for a dairy-free child.
  • Cross-platform expansion. iPad-optimized layout app.

Our north star

Ratatouille doesn’t tell you what to eat. It helps you cook what you love — safely, efficiently, and as a family. More cooking, less friction.