Show HN: We're two coffee nerds who built an AI app to track beans and recipes
beanbook.appIt’s available on iOS now: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id6499280064
We got into specialty coffee during COVID and, like many others, fell deep down the rabbit hole. Along the way, we ran into the same frustrations:
- A drawer full of empty coffee bags.
- No simple way to track grind size, rest dates, notes—by bean.
- My coffee history scattered across photos, screenshots, notebooks, and half-memories.
- The unique traits, people, and stories behind each coffee disappearing from the internet once it sold out (since coffee is an agricultural good)
- In our opinion, no coffee tool really captures the flavor, emotion, and aesthetic of great coffee—from a design perspective.
So we built BeanBook—a coffee notebook log beans, extract recipes, and organize your coffee life in one place with just a snap, powered by AI
Here’s what it does:
- Snap a bag → Auto-detects roaster, origin, process, roast date, notes, producer, farm, and more
- Paste a YouTube link or photo → Extracts a structured recipe automatically
- Log grind size, roast timeline, ratings & notes → All saved in a clean, elegant UI
- See your coffee year in review → Track habits, trends, and favorites
- Ask BeanBook AI → From brew temps to bean facts, get instant answers
My co-founder and I built everything ourselves—branding, code, and UX design. If you’re into coffee (or trying to get more into it), we’d love your feedback.
- Rokey & Eric
Why only accept Google/Apple accounts? Why even require an account? :(
Google/Apple sign-in is a simple and secure way to reduce spam and support account-based features down the road. And having a sustainable model helps us maintain the team and keep improving the product.
Userbase for acquisition. We're on a site paid for by ycombinator remember.
Well explained, thank you!
Looks great, hopefully you have plans to bring it to Android. I've been tracking every shot I pull in a coffee journal for the last 2-3 years. While I love writing it all down, it would be quite nice to have all the stats related to habits, trends, spending, etc. I think the biggest frustration I have with home espresso is when I pick up a bag of new beans that I've never tried before, or have no point of reference for, and end up wasting coffee getting it dialed in. It would be great if there was a way to see other peoples brew notes, especially people using similar coffee hardware.
Thanks—that’s great input, and really appreciate you sharing your experience! We’re definitely working toward that direction: tool-first, then building more ways for people to connect and share notes—especially around specific gear or beans.
And yes, Android is on our radar too!
Amazing. Just downloaded! Excited to give it a spin!
Thank you! Glad you like it! Looking forward for your feedback!
Just FYI the text in each screen of the onboarding flow is cut off on my iPhone 14. For example screen 3/3 says "How far have your beans".
Thanks for reporting this! We found on similar issue on SE screen, sorry for the buggy start will definitely fix in next update
Nice app! Quick note of first thing I noticed: Would be nice to have a more detailed option for roast. In my case I have a DiFluid Omni and use it for roast analysis, so would like to be able to enter the data from it.
Thanks for the feedback! Using a DiFluid Omni—you’re definitely a hardcore coffee enthusiast
We do have a notes feature attached to each bean, so you can always save that kind of data there for now. At the moment, we’re focused on building a solid foundation for entry- to mid-level coffee lovers, but deeper roast profiling and advanced tools like Omni integration are definitely on our radar.
I've been wanting to build this forever now... I LOVE IT!
Would love to connect & share more ideas that I don't have time to build myself + feedback
Thank you for your kind words! That means a lot We’d absolutely love to connect! rokeyzhang@beanbook.app
Congrats on the launch! I have been making a similar app.
Happy for you for the launch, mad at my self for not finishing my side projects!
Cheers
Def will download and check it out. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks so much! Totally feel you on the side project struggle—it took us a while to get this one across the finish line too. Would love to hear more about what you were working on if you ever revisit it!
Congrats on the launch and good luck!
Back when I was home roasting as a hobby, I built a database to track my roast times and tasting notes. I thought it would be interesting to build a database of roast recipes and green bean sourcing, because that was the hardest to remember what I liked best.
As for purchased roasts, I just find a brand I like I stick to it. So not much for me to track.
Thanks for your feedback!
I’m home roasting too—using an entry-level FreshRoast SR800, which has been a ton of fun to learn on. I still buy from great roasters as well, since it’s a great way to rhetorically access to different processing methods and regions.
We also thought about home roasting. A few folks have mentioned wanting to log green bean origins, roast curves, and profiles—there’s a lot of potential there.
Right now, we’re focusing on making the bean & recipe tracking seamless for brewed coffee, we found good amount of people buying from roasters all around the world like us.
Appreciate you sharing your experience—it’s super helpful!
Haven't tried it myself yet, but this looks really good!
Thanks for your interested, looking forward for your feedback!
Do you have an Android version coming?
We just two person team, currently we trying to stabilize on iOS developing, then we’ll definitely looking for Android version, lots of people asked for this too!
A trivial idea that might help you: nowadays, you can easily build entire Android and iOS apps by using ChatGPT, even if you have no experience in either platform (though you will need some general programming experience to catch and work around occasional problems). Karpathy mentioned something similar in his recent talk.
Hah, thanks for the idea! Over the past year of developing, we’ve been constantly surprised by what AI can do—and how much it’s accelerated our workflow. Hiring an AI Android dev is definitely a direction we’ll look into more seriously :D