Turn handwritten recipe cards into a book

The idea

Every family has the shoebox: index cards in a grandmother’s handwriting, splattered, fading, and one house move from gone. The recipes matter less than the handwriting — nobody actually needs another chicken casserole method, but a card written by someone who has died is irreplaceable. Custom family cookbooks already sell for USD 50-100 a copy through Etsy makers doing this manually, which proves the price point and exposes the gap: no self-serve tool does the scan-transcribe-layout pipeline.

The wedge is the spread design: the cleaned-up scan of the original card on one page, the legible typeset transcription facing it. Vision-model transcription makes this a review job instead of a typing job, and marginalia (“double the cinnamon”) gets kept, because the annotations are half the heirloom. Print-on-demand closes the loop from shoebox to wrapped gift without the user touching a PDF.

Who pays

Adult daughters and granddaughters making Christmas, Mother’s Day, and wedding gifts, which makes this brutally seasonal in the good sense: a giftable deadline drives conversion. GBP 35 to unlock ordering plus GBP 30-40 per printed copy, and the average project orders four to six copies for siblings and cousins. The relative share link turns every finished book into more orders. Distribution: Pinterest and Instagram (the product photographs perfectly), gift-guide SEO, and genealogy communities where preservation is already the hobby.

MVP scope

• Mobile-first card photo upload with auto-crop, perspective and contrast cleanup
• Claude vision transcription into structured fields with low-confidence flagging
• Side-by-side correction UI, marginalia captured as notes
• Chapter organiser, dedication page, and spread-by-spread preview
• Print-ready PDF generation and Lulu ordering with relative share links
• Skip for v1: non-recipe documents, ebook export, recipe scaling or search features, and multi-contributor projects

Build Heirloom Kitchen, a web app that turns a shoebox of handwritten family recipe cards into a printed hardback. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Claude API (vision) for transcription, Lulu Print API for print-on-demand, Stripe.

Core flow: user photographs recipe cards with their phone (the upload page must work beautifully on mobile — this happens at a kitchen table). Each photo goes to Claude vision for transcription into structured fields: title, ingredients, method, plus marginalia captured separately ("Mum's note: double the cinnamon"). A correction UI shows the card image beside the transcription with tap-to-fix editing, flagging low-confidence words for review rather than guessing silently.

The book layout is the point: each spread pairs the cleaned-up scan of the handwritten card with its typeset transcription facing it. The handwriting is the product; never hide the original. Users organise recipes into chapters, add a dedication page, then order copies.

Pages: project dashboard, mobile upload flow, transcription review queue, book organiser (drag recipes into chapters), spread-by-spread preview, and order/checkout.

Implementation details: auto-crop each card, correct perspective, and boost contrast while keeping the aged-paper feel, with a before/after toggle. Generate the print-ready interior PDF server-side against Lulu's spec (bleed, gutter, 300dpi) and submit orders through the Lulu API with shipping quotes at checkout. Include a share link so relatives can order their own copies.

Pricing: free to build and preview; GBP 35 one-time to unlock ordering, plus per-copy print cost and margin (a 100-page hardback lands around GBP 30-40 retail per copy).