How can I read recipes without ads?

You're looking for a spaghetti carbonara recipe. You click the first result. Then:

• A cookie banner covering half the image
• A newsletter pop-up: «Don't want to miss anything?»
• An ad video that starts on its own, with sound
• Three paragraphs about the author's trip to Tuscany
• An in-article banner between every paragraph
• Finally: the ingredient list — which you now have to hunt for, because the layout was built around the ad inventory

The frustrating part isn't a single banner. It's all of it together: ads break your concentration, cookie banners interrupt, pop-ups steal time. Right at the moment when all you want to know is how much salt to put in the pasta water.

In the kitchen it's twice as bad: your hands are floury or oily, the pan is hot, the screen dims after 30 seconds — and every unnecessary tap is one too many.

Recipe pages make money with two things: ad placements and affiliate links. Both scale with the attention of your eyes. More banners = more revenue per page view.

For Google to rank the page high, it also needs lots of text. A bare recipe with an ingredient list and 6 steps is too short for Google — the page looks «thin». That's why before every recipe there are five paragraphs of personal anecdote, a family photo, and the note that this carbonara is «authentically Roman». That's no accident, it's SEO — search engine optimization. More text, more ad slots, higher ranking, more clicks.

The second layer is tracking. Ad networks like Google Ads or Taboola want to know who you are, what else you look at, and whether you bought something after the click. Hence the cookie wall: «We and our 847 partners process your data». You know the buttons.

The business model isn't evil — journalism has to be paid for. But if you want to cook and not «consume content», you're in the wrong format.

There are three realistic ways to cook ad-free in daily life:

1. Reader mode in the browser. Safari (the reader icon in the address bar), Firefox («Reader View») and Edge («Immersive Reader») extract the main text and hide the ads. Works for many recipe pages — but not all, and images often get lost. Awkward in the kitchen, because you can't save anything.

2. Print the recipes. Classic, it works. But: printing before every cooking session isn't practical, and paper in the kitchen always ends up greasy.

3. A recipe app that imports. You toss a link, a PDF, or a photo into the app. The app extracts only the title, image, ingredients, and steps — the ads stay out. That's exactly what mangia does.

The advantage of way 3: you collect at the same time. Whatever you've imported once stays there forever — even if the original page disappears or the ads get worse.

mangia has three ways to bring a recipe in:

• Share from the web. On the recipe page, tap «Share», pick mangia. mangia reads the page automatically, extracts the actual recipe, and leaves everything else out.
• PDF or cookbook photo. You send a PDF (e.g. a recipe collection you bought) or photograph a book page. mangia recognises ingredients, amounts, and steps automatically.
• Manually. If you'd rather type it yourself, that works too — with auto-suggestions for ingredients and categories.

The recipe view then shows only: title, image, ingredient list, steps. No preamble, no anecdote, no banner. While cooking you switch to cooking mode — the screen stays on, you see only the current step with the related ingredients and tools. Swipe for the next step. Hands stay clean, eyes stay on the recipe.

And because mangia has extracted the recipes once, you no longer need an internet connection to read them. A train station on patchy carriage wifi, a mountain hut with no signal, a basement kitchen with a weak connection — none of it matters.

«Ad-free» at mangia also means tracker-free for advertising purposes. We use neither Google Ads nor a Facebook pixel nor any other ad network. There's no personalisation of your ads based on your recipes — simply because there are no ads.

For product analysis we use PostHog, a GDPR-compliant tool that measures anonymously which features are used. On your first visit you'll see a cookie notice — you can also accept only the essentials. That's transparent and traceable.

What you cook, plan, and shop for stays in your account. We use it for your recommendations (browse, taste profile, seasonal suggestions) — not to sell it on. There are no «data partners» we pass information to. That's not just a promise — it's our business model.

Ad-free and without selling data means: someone has to pay for the app. At mangia, that's you.

The basics are free: import recipes, collect them, cook, share the shopping list. With that you can cook completely ad-free, forever.

The Pro features (nutrition balance, browse mode, taste profiles per family member) are optional and cost about as much as a coffee a month. Whoever uses them helps fund development — whoever doesn't still has the ad-free basic app.

We believe: 6.90 CHF a month is a fair deal for an app that takes daily friction off your hands. And it's an honest deal — you know what you're paying for. With a free ad-funded app, all you know is that someone is making money off your seconds of attention.