Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmathai | Hacker News Reader

This is a dilemma I'm deferring making a decision about on my most recent product (named Preppy [1]). I created an app which simplifies meal planning by letting you add ingredients for any online recipe to your grocery store's shopping cart for pickup or delivery.

It uses LLMs for many things including parsing ingredients from the site.

The ethical dilemma is that the recipe website owners have spent time creating and publishing these recipes. They make their money by people visiting their site and clicking on ads. My app reduces a user's dependency on their recipe site once they've added a recipe to Preppy.

I'm genuinely interested in ways my app can benefit users and recipe website owners. I don't know what that solution is yet but would love to figure this out. Generally speaking, I don't think these recipe website owners are going to come out ahead with the availability of LLMs.

[1] https://getpreppy.app

View on HN

I don’t think you have deferred resolving the dilemma—you have firmly decided the question in favor of your product and the LLMs you are using!

Sure, that's one way of looking at it. My product may fall flat on it's face (most likely outcome) so I wasn't interested in solving the problem before I had it.

But my mindset isn't YOLO. I genuinely would like to find a mutually beneficial way for it to work. Lots of ideas like revenue share but I'm hoping other ideas emerge.

The most straightforward way would probably be using your model to learn what recipes to serve to what users, but then requiring users to leave your app (or just open a window in-app) that loads the website so they can use the recipe. That wouldn't even necessarily be a bad thing; it could open the door for you include recipes delivered in non-text format, too, assuming you can figure out how to digest them.

+1 - There's already integrated search in the app where users can search for recipes from the web and preview the recipe site where ads are displayed. They don't have to leave the app to do it if they don't have a URL to paste in.

How about share revenue with them? Sadly if you don't do it, someone else will (not condoning it). You might as place yourself as a channel for them and incentivised to create more recipes for you?

Agreed. The brave/BAT model fits here: create an "account" for each recipe author (could just be an entry in the database), and set aside money for each of them. Then reach out to each one and say: "hey do you want this money?"

That's a great idea. Recipe authors can be compensated by the number of times Preppy adds their recipe to a user's grocery store's online cart.

I imagine it would be cumbersome to manage many relationships with recipe authors and that the actual payments made would be small enough that it might not be worth the effort to set up.

Imagine being a recipe author and having 15 or 20 AI app authors trying to each give you $0.25 a month. At some point it makes sense to handle flows like that without requiring the humans to explicitly set them up, at which point you might as well use BAT, but since so many are allergic to crypto--with good reason--maybe that's a non starter also.

If you don’t do it, someone will, and the opportunity will be lost. Move quickly.

While true, that's not my ethics framework! :) But to your point, it's not a problem unless my product is successful.

If you become really successful you can just buy ethical offsets.

Not sure if I should laugh or cry.

Is this like a SaaS version of mealie?

It's less of a robust meal planner. It's meant to get the ingredients from an online recipe into your Kroger/Safeway/etc cart for pickup. We use it to find 4-5 meals we want to cook for the week and it takes about 15 minutes instead of an hour.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com