Lupita：我如何打造 TikTok 和 YouTube 食譜擷取工具，並將其上架 App Store

I spent months manually saving recipes from cooking videos. Pause, screenshot, type ingredients. Repeat. It was painful.

So I built Lupita — an iOS app that does this automatically.

How it works

You paste any TikTok, Instagram Reel or YouTube cooking video link. Lupita:

Downloads the audio from the video
Transcribes it with AI
Extracts ingredients with exact gram measurements
Scales to your serving size

The result is a clean, structured recipe saved offline to your phone.

The tech stack

Swift / SwiftUI — native iOS app
Node.js backend — on a shared cPanel server
yt-dlp — video audio extraction
OpenAI Whisper — transcription
GPT-4o-mini — ingredient parsing and gram conversion

The trickiest part was handling the huge variety of video styles — some recipes are in metric, some imperial, some just say "a handful" or "to taste." The AI handles this reasonably well now.

Lessons from the App Store review

It took 4 submissions before Apple approved it. The main issues:

Privacy policy had to be accessible without login
The paywall copy couldn't say "free trial" if there was no trial
EULA had to be shown before purchase, not after

What's next

The app has 5 free imports on install. Paid plans start at $2.99/month.

If you cook and watch food videos, give it a try: lupita-app.com

Also on the App Store: Lupita — Recipe from Any Video

Curious if anyone else has built similar tools — what did you use for the AI parsing step?