swan tron dot com

Chomptron: AI Recipe Generator

Do you hate cooking blogs? Sure, we all do..

Inane story, some ads, ingredient somewhere, more adds, quatities somewhere else, another ad. Like and subscribe..

It is embarrassing to say that I bought the domain name with that sort of thing in mind. I have some of our go-tos in texts from Katie and others that I have emailed to myself (from texts from Katie). I parked some stuff on WordPress and promptly remembered that I hate WordPress about as much as I hate cooking blogs. We know what we have and what we like—it wasn’t a very practical idea. No reason to host that sort of thing.

So instead, I sort of built an anti-food-blog: Chomptron. It’s an AI-powered engine that turns whatever’s in your fridge into actual recipes. No fluff, no life stories, just dinner.

Chomptron in action

The Problem

You’ve got chicken, some tomatoes, garlic, and half an onion. Or maybe just sriracha and some leftovers. You don’t want to read an article; you just want to know how to combine those things into something edible without making a grocery run.

The Solution

Type the ingredients, hit generate, and get a recipe with scaled measurements and instructions. It uses Google Gemini under the hood to handle the logic. Bam..

Features that actually matter:

  • Scaling that works – Most sites make you do the math. Chomptron scales from 0.25x to 4x automatically
  • Privacy by default – It saves up to 100 recipes in your browser’s localStorage. I don’t want your email, I don’t want your data, and I don’t want to manage a user database
  • Dietary logic – Filters for everything from Vegan to Shellfish-free
  • Dark mode – Wreck your eyes!

The Stack

I wanted this to be fast and ’tidy.’ No framework bloat, no heavy lifting on the client side:

  • Backend: Node.js 20 + Express
  • AI: Google Gemini (gemini-2.5-flash-lite)
  • Frontend: Vanilla HTML/CSS/JavaScript
  • Platform: Google Cloud Run (Serverless)

Why Serverless?

Chomptron runs on Google Cloud Run, which fits the old ‘cattle, not pets’ thing nicely:

  • Scales to zero: If nobody is using the site, I pay $0. It costs me effectively nothing to keep this live.
  • Auto-scales: If it suddenly gets traffic, GCP spins up containers to handle it.
  • Zero maintenance: No OS to patch, no server to reboot.

I built in some smart caching (24-hour TTL) and rate-limiting to keep the Gemini API costs under control, but otherwise, it’s a hands-off deployment.

CI/CD Workflow

The deployment cycle is refreshing. Push to main triggers a Cloud Build which handles the Dockerization and pushes to Cloud Run. It’s a gang of tests and a few seconds of waiting before it’s live.

It’s got the regular dev junk:

  • Health checks (/health, /ready)
  • Proper SEO/Open Graph tags
  • PWA support so you can pin it to your home screen

Check it out

Live: https://chomptron.com

Source: https://github.com/swantron/chomptron

It’s free to use and nearly free to run (plz don’t spam it). It was a fun excuse to get back into GCP and keep a JS project clean. No bloat, no stories—just the recipes. Chef kiss..