Copycat Kitchen App
The authenticated companion app to The Copycat Kitchen.
Overview
The logged-in half of the Copycat Kitchen platform — saved recipes, personal collections, and cooking tools behind authentication, deployed as an independent service on its own subdomain.
Splitting the app from the marketing and content site keeps the public pages fully static and fast while the authenticated experience runs as its own service with its own scaling profile.
Users get accounts, saved recipes, and personal collections without any of that machinery loading for the 99% of visitors who arrive from search and never sign in.
A clean example of the architecture pattern we default to: static content site, separate app service, shared data layer.
Where the effort went
The interesting part of Copycat Kitchen App was never the page templates. It was pattern at split app / content, and getting the underlying model right so the product stays correct as it grows. That is the part we care about, and it is the part that determines whether something like this is still useful in a year.
It runs on infrastructure the owner controls — source in GitHub, deployment on Railway, DNS and CDN on Cloudflare — with no proprietary platform in the middle.