Export recipes — and never lose them in an app again

There's a story that repeats itself almost word for word across the app-store reviews of many cooking apps: «After the update, all my recipes were gone.» Or: «I cancelled my subscription — and suddenly couldn't access my own collection anymore.» Or simply: «There's no way to export my recipes.»

This isn't a fringe problem. It hits exactly the people who use an app most intensively — the ones who've built up a collection of 100, 200, 400 recipes over the years. The more work that's gone in, the bigger the loss.

Three patterns keep coming up:

1. Data loss after an update. A big version update migrates the database — and something goes wrong. Collections vanish, folders can't be created anymore, favourites are empty. If you don't have your own backup, you're out of luck.
2. Loss on cancellation. With some subscription apps, you lose access to the recipes you entered yourself the moment you stop paying. The recipes are technically still there — but behind the paywall. You typed them in, and you can't reach them.
3. No export, full stop. Other apps don't lose anything — they just never let you back out. There's no «Export collection» button. Your recipes are in there, and in there they stay.

What all three share: you created the content, but the app decides whether you get to keep it. This is called vendor lock-in — and it's the most important, most often overlooked point when choosing a recipe app.

Export is the feature nobody thinks about as long as everything works — and the only one that matters when it stops. That makes it one of the few features you should check before you commit, not after.

The logic is simple: an app you can leave anytime is one you never have to leave — but you can. An app you can't leave is one you'll have to leave eventually — and won't be able to. Export isn't an emergency exit for the worst case. It's the insurance that lets you use an app with peace of mind, because you know: this is mine, I'll take it with me whenever I want.

Concretely, «real export» means three things:

• Complete. Not just the recipe titles, but ingredients, steps, quantities, categories, notes — and ideally weekly plans and shopping lists too.
• In open formats. More on this in a moment — but the short version: in formats you'll still be able to open in ten years, without needing that exact app.
• Without hurdles. One button, one download. No support ticket, no «write us an email», no hidden premium feature.

If an app delivers all three, the lock-in is broken. If it fails even one of them, you're stuck deeper than you'd like.

With mangia, you export your entire account with one click as a ZIP file. Inside isn't a single inscrutable blob of data, but several formats for several purposes:

• `rezepte/…md` — your recipes as Markdown. Each recipe becomes its own readable text file: title, ingredients as a list, preparation, quantities, categories, source. You can open Markdown in practically any note app (Notion, Obsidian, Bear, Apple Notes) or in a plain text editor. No special software needed.
• `wochenplaene.csv` and `einkaufslisten.csv` — your plans and lists as a spreadsheet. Double-click, and they open in Excel, Numbers, or Google Sheets.
• `data.json` — the complete, machine-readable dataset. This is the mandatory part under GDPR Article 20 («right to data portability»). It contains literally everything — including fields that don't appear in the readable files.
• `README.txt` — an explanation of what lives in which file, so you can still find your way around a year from now.

What matters is what doesn't happen here: there's no mangia-specific secret format that only mangia can read back in. There's no paywall in front of the export. And there's no difference between «free» and «paying» — the export belongs to the account, not to the subscription.

In short: if you want to leave mangia tomorrow, you take everything with you today. That's by design.

When people hear «export recipes», many think of PDF first. Understandable — but for this purpose PDF is the worse choice, and it's worth understanding why.

PDF is frozen. A PDF looks like a printout and behaves like one too: you can read it, but you can't sensibly do anything more with it. You can't generate a shopping list from a PDF, can't search for an ingredient, can't rescale a portion, can't import a recipe into another app. It's a photo of your recipes, not a moving box.

Markdown is alive. A Markdown file is plain text with a bit of structure (headings, lists). That very simplicity is the strength: almost any program can open, search, edit, and process it. A recipe collection in Markdown can be dropped into Notion or Obsidian, converted by a script, or simply read in an editor — today and in ten years.

CSV is the spreadsheet lingua franca. For weekly plans and shopping lists — that is, for anything with rows and columns — CSV is what Excel, Numbers, and Google Sheets have understood for decades. No provider can «take CSV away» from you.

The rule of thumb: a good export format is one that doesn't need the app it came from. Markdown and CSV meet that. PDF only meets the «view it» part — and even that worse than it sounds. That's why mangia gives you both: readable (Markdown/CSV) and fully machine-readable (JSON). You can always print a PDF for yourself from those — the other way around doesn't work.

Exporting from mangia is deliberately unspectacular:

1. Go to Profile → Settings → Account & subscription.
2. Tap Export data.
3. mangia packs your entire account into a ZIP file and downloads it.
4. Unzip the file. You'll see the folder `rezepte/` with your Markdown files, the CSVs, and the `data.json`.

The whole thing is limited to five exports per hour — not as a hurdle, but because the process gathers up all your data, and that costs compute. For a backup you only need it occasionally anyway.

What you do with it afterwards is up to you:

• Keep it as a backup. Put the ZIP on your hard drive or in your cloud — done. If anything ever goes wrong, you've got everything.
• Drag it into Notion or Obsidian. The Markdown files import directly; you have your recipes in your note app right away.
• Move house. If you ever switch to another app, you've got your recipes in a format other tools can read.

Our honest advice, completely independent of mangia: do a test export at least once with every app that holds a valuable collection. If it comes out clean, you know your data is yours. If no export button exists, you also know something important — before it's too late.

Before you build a collection anywhere, ask the app these five questions. The more «yes» answers, the more the recipes truly belong to you:

mangia answers all five with yes: export button in the settings, complete, in Markdown/CSV/JSON, included in the free tier, and your imported recipes stay yours — even if you cancel mangia Pro or never had Pro at all.

This isn't a marketing gesture. It's the consequence of a simple stance: an app should hold on to you because it's good — not because you can't get out.