Budget Bytes for Pc

First off, I love this app online. The blog is great: it has price breakdowns of each ingredient if you use the exact amount, it’s easy to search, and it’s free. The app is $3 to even see the app, and then you have to pay more to see 80% of the recipes you can see online for free. The layout is terrible, the search bar is unusable and you can’t get out of it once you tap on it unless you search something and luck out with the home bar coming back, and overall while I bought this on an iPad and it says it’s compatible for the iPad...it’s not at all. I couldn’t even type anything in the search bar or this review when trying to review in app because it won’t allow my Bluetooth keyboard to type AND for whatever reason blocks the iPad on screen keyboard (wether or not my physical keyboard is disconnected). It won’t rotate in landscape view so also weirdly unusable.....and it just point blank doesn’t have a lot of the great recipes and features the FREE site does. The recipes don’t show the cost per ingredient use and take an extra input step (that’s broken) to even see the cost per serving, and the whole app reads more like the cooking channel or some standard food app than this app and all the things that are wonderful about the site. I’m not an old person who’d demand a refund typically but I feel scammed and genuinely feel like I need to ask for my money back. What a rip off!

I want to start off this review by saying that I LOVE the blog and I also understand that content creators need to get paid. BUT I purchased the app before the in app purchase/credit feature was added and I feel like I paid for a product thinking I was getting access to one thing and am now being asked to purchase more to get access to what I want. I would be less upset about this if it had been clear when I was purchasing the app that this was going to be the case, but it feels like a bait and switch to me. I do appreciate that you can earn free credits, but the avg recipe is 10 credits, so those free credits don’t really go that far. I would have been happy to pay far more for the app upfront (or a yearly or monthly subscription fee) with the guarantee I was getting access to everything as opposed to this new credit system, which is confusing, hard to use and doesn’t always work properly. Prior to this change, I enthusiastically recommended this app, but the new credits system is not an improvement. If the app developers are reading this, I would highly encourage you to consider a new pricing system - either charge more for the app up front or a monthly or yearly subscription fee. A monthly or yearly subscription fee would help cover some of the cost of new content and continued development of the app, but also allow you to abandon the very clunky credit system.

So I pay $2.99 for a completely dysfunctional app. Not only do I have to “sign-up” for an app I already paid for, I can’t access recipes without using “credits” to unlock them. How do you get credits you ask? You HAVE to interact with the app on a daily basis, leave reviews, etc. Then you can “unlock” the recipes you seemingly already paid to have. Ridiculous. Are here people trying to emulate EA games? I can tell you it won’t go well. Not to mention the login function didn’t work when I attempted to log in several times. When it finally did work, the app FROZE MY ENTIRE PHONE. I had to depress my power off button and even that wouldn’t work. Suddenly it would come out of the freeze and things would be wonky. Deleted the app and will be asking for a refund from iTunes as this is such a disingenuous way to do business with customers. At least make the app free with all the hoops you make your paid users jump through. I hope this app fails miserably in its current state.

This is an amazing app! A digital cookbook of 500 recipes for $3 is a great deal. And, more importantly, the recipes are delicious and help you save money while also LEARNING how to use simple ingredients to ear healthy. I use this app on a daily basis. The star score is lower because folks were upset when a credit based marketplace update was implemented, but all these folks just wanted things for free and didn’t understand the amount of time and education required to create the step-by-step videos w voiceover that come with this package. App developers have modified this credit system, so now there is no reason to pass up buying this cookbook.