What a Recipe Vault Is — and Why Yours Should Be Private

“Recipe vault” sounds grand, but it describes something simple and specific: a private, permanent place for the recipes you'd be upset to lose. Not a feed, not a social network, not someone else's database — yours.

Vault, box, or app?

The words get used loosely, but the distinction that matters is who owns the contents. A recipe site's saved list belongs to the site — when it closes, your list closes with it. A vault belongs to you: private by default, exportable on demand, and independent of anyone's business model.

What makes a vault a vault

• Private. Nothing public, nothing indexed by search engines, nothing shared until you deliberately share it.
• Permanent. A free tier that stops working shouldn't take your recipes hostage. Your content should stay readable even if you stop paying.
• Portable. A real export — a documented file you can open elsewhere, not a screenshot of a list.
• Complete. The original source kept alongside the tidy parsed version, so nothing is lost to a machine's interpretation.
• Yours, not training data. Family recipes shouldn't quietly become someone's model weights.

The failure that keeps happening

Yummly shut down in December 2024 and took millions of saved recipe boxes with it. It wasn't the first: recipe services close, get acquired, or move features behind a new paywall regularly. Anyone who had exported was fine. Everyone else started over. That's the whole argument for a vault over a saved list — and the reason “can I get my data out?” is the first question to ask, not the last.

Sharing without giving it away

Private by default doesn't mean sealed. The useful middle ground is a link you control: send one recipe to a friend, let them cook from it or copy it, and revoke the link later if you want. That's sharing on your terms — unlike posting a recipe into a public feed you can't take back.

Where iwant2eat fits

iwant2eat is built as a vault first. Your recipes are visible only to you; nothing is public or indexed; nothing is used to train AI models. If your subscription lapses, your recipes stay readable and exportable — the AI features pause, the content doesn't. Export the whole vault as a documented ZIP + JSON file, or any recipe as a PDF, any time. Share a single recipe or a collection by private link and revoke it whenever you like.