Your recipes are yours

Why anyone should care

A recipe you saved eight years ago is a different kind of object from a photo or a document. It is short, it is easy to re-find in theory, and in practice it is gone — the blog went down, the account was deleted, the app was acquired and the export button quietly disappeared with the old owners.

The thing people actually lose is not the recipe. It is the note in the margin. Whose it was, what you changed the second time, that the milk at the end is the whole trick. That part exists nowhere else, and no amount of searching brings it back.

Four things you can check right now

• The export format is published, not described

  The whole specification is on this site — every field, what it means, and a real example file. You do not have to take our word for what an export contains, because you can read what it contains before you ever make one.

  Read the format

• The format is already producing real files

  It is not a document describing something we intend to build. Run any supported export through the converter and the file that comes back is shallot-export/v1 — the same format, checkable against the same spec, today, without a Shallot account.

  Produce one and check it

• The converter works without us

  It takes an export from another app and gives you a standard file back. No account, no signup, no waiting list, and nothing fetched on your behalf. It is useful to someone who has decided not to use Shallot at all, which is the only real test of whether a tool like this was built for you or for us.

  Convert a file

• When we cannot do something, we say so

  Some apps export a web page rather than structured data, and a converter for one of those would mean scraping a layout we have never seen. Rather than ship something that might quietly mangle a library, we publish a guide explaining how to get your recipes out anyway.

  See an example

What “yours” can and cannot mean

Your notes, your tags, your collections and the order you put things in are yours completely. Nobody else sees them, and they come out in the export exactly as you wrote them.

A saved recipe is different, because part of it belongs to whoever wrote it. When you save a video or a blog post, we keep the link, the details we could read, and anything you added. We do not claim the original and we do not republish someone else’s instructions as though they were ours.

That boundary is also why a save survives the source disappearing but is not a perfect copy of it. If a post is deleted, you still have what was saved and what you wrote. You do not get back what we never had.

Nothing you save is public, and nothing will be

Not as a policy — as a fact about what exists. Shallot has no public pages, no shared recipe URLs and no feed. There is no mechanism by which anything you save could be seen by anyone else.

There was going to be one. A public page per recipe, opt-in, reversible — the usual shape. We took the legal review seriously and decided against building it at all, in July 2026. Not deferred, not behind a flag: not part of the product.

Which makes this the simplest section on the page. There is no publishing setting to get wrong, no default to audit, no preview to trust, and no accidental-share story. Your recipe box is a private thing, and the surest way to keep it private turned out to be not building the door.

What we are not promising

Shallot is made by one person and has not launched. Any sentence here about what the company will still be doing in ten years would be worth exactly what those sentences are usually worth.

So the promise is deliberately structural instead. An export file is plain JSON with no compression, no encryption and no custom container. It opens in a text editor. The specification is already published, which means someone could write an importer for it without our help or our permission — including after we are gone.

That is a weaker-sounding promise than “we will always be here,” and it is a much stronger one, because it does not depend on us keeping it.

Still being built

Shallot on the web is a marketing site and a set of free tools today. The recipe box itself lives in the iOS app.

In-app export is not built yet. The format is published and the converter already produces files in it, which is why this page talks about the format rather than about a button — but a published specification is not the same thing as a working export, and we are not going to blur those two together on the page whose entire job is being checkable.

The converters are written from each app’s published format specification, and we have not yet checked them against files real users produced. They are careful about it — anything a converter cannot read confidently is reported to you rather than dropped quietly — but “matches the documentation” and “matches what the app actually writes” are different claims, and only the first one is ours to make today.