Dillr vs Paprika
Paprika is a great recipe manager. Dillr is something different — an AI cooking assistant that treats recipes as living documents.
Paprika has been around for years, and for good reason. It does one thing well: it lets you save, organize, and scale recipes. You clip a recipe from a website, it pulls in the ingredients and instructions, and you’ve got a tidy digital cookbook. If you want a reliable place to store recipes, Paprika is a solid choice.
Where Paprika works
Paprika is built for the organized cook. The person who clips recipes, sorts them into folders, plans meals on a calendar, and builds grocery lists. It’s a digital recipe box — clean, functional, and offline-capable. For collecting and retrieving recipes, it does the job.
If what you need is a place to keep your recipes organized, Paprika handles that well.
Where the gap is
The challenge comes when you actually cook. Recipes in Paprika are static — they’re the same every time you open them. If you made the dish last week and realized it needed less salt, there’s no natural way to fold that learning back in. You can edit the recipe manually, but most people don’t. The recipe stays frozen at the version you first saved it.
There’s no way to ask a question mid-cook. No way to say “I’m out of heavy cream, what can I use instead?” and get an answer that knows the recipe you’re making and what your family can eat. The recipe just sits there, waiting to be followed.
And if your household has dietary needs that don’t fit a simple checkbox — like ours, where we eat fish but not dairy or eggs — Paprika can’t adapt recipes to match. You do that adaptation in your head, every time.
What Dillr does differently
Dillr treats recipes as living documents. You can adjust them through conversation before you start cooking — change the portion size, swap an ingredient, adapt for dietary needs. While you cook, you can ask questions and get answers that account for your specific recipe and your family’s preferences. After you cook, you debrief: what worked, what to change. Those notes get folded back into the recipe, so next time you start from a better place.
Dillr also maintains a persistent memory of your family — who eats what, what you’ve cooked before, what worked and what didn’t. Over time, suggestions get more personal because the context is always growing.
It’s not a better recipe box. It’s a different kind of tool — one that cooks with you rather than just storing instructions.
That’s what we’re building at Dillr.