SideСhef: Easy Cooking Recipes

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1. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

   Can’t even access the app. I was going to give this a shot after budget bites is being planned to close, but I can’t even get into the supposed replacement app. No matter how many times I change my password the app won’t recognize the account and can’t log me in. Recognizes the email though when I try to create a new account with it. 🤷🏻‍♂️

2. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

   Budget bytes terminated and replaced with whatever this is. I know I’m late to the game but I was going through my apps and forgot budget bytes was replaced by this. This app is hard to navigate and pointless. Budget bytes was meant to help people find affordable meals that were easy to cook. This is not that.

3. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

   Misleading free trial. Largely misleading free trial and also full of bugs. Churned user

4. ★★★★★subscription and paid restrictions

   Paying for disappointment.. I originally paid for this app while it was BudgetBytes. It then changed to SideChef and now charges for a premium membership. I didn’t pay for an app once to be asked to pay again.

5. ★★★★★saving, exporting or sharing the result fails

   What happened to budget bytes and my saved recipes?. Not liking the app. Had all my recipes in budget bytes. All appear to be lost.

6. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

   Awful. Almost all the budget bytes recipes aren’t on the app. Not sure why. Likely will not be using this.

7. ★★★★★subscription and paid restrictions

   Must really hate us. Since the company won’t tell us if BudgetBytes has been bought out or rebranded or whatever, let me just point out that all the recipes that I loved from that app are nowhere in this one. The app and blog are identical except these new versions have worse recipes with worse pictures and more ads and premium features and money grabs. Just another stupid company more interested in money than providing a solid experience.

8. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

   RIP Another Victim of Monetization. I was quite saddened to see the predecessor app to this one (the fantastic BudgetBytes) be discontinued in favor of SideChef and in a way, the transition to me represents just another illustration of the way the digital world is slowly changing and in my view leaving its golden age behind. I really appreciated how before this change one could purchase the budget bytes app one time using what I thought was a fair amount of real money, and then access an elegantly designed and seamless program to find and catalogue recipes. While this new app is free initially, it is clearly now designed more as a shopping and advertising app than a recipe app. I am saddened that this has become the new normal. While you can change the view of the ingredients list to remove ingredients shopping links, there does not seem to be a way to make this the default setting meaning you in effect have to click past advertising in every recipe. As a person who will not abide advertising in any form, this is intolerable to me. I received the notice that budget bytes will soon lose developer support and be unavailable after 7/6/2023. I downloaded and tried out sidechef, realized what had happened, shed a single tear for the days before freemium products, deleted the app, and dusted off my recipe spreadsheet. As the sinister creep of engagement and advertising continues to permeate every aspect of the digital experience, perhaps someday I will be even forced to start an actual recipe notebook on paper like this is the 1970s.

9. ★★★★★crashes, freezes and errors

   False promises. I tried out this app when they had it for $100 visa gift card in December 2021. I waited the full 15 days as stated when it should arrive. Well to my surprise if did not and the customer service is just an automated message saying someone will respond in 2 business days. It’s been many business days and me emailing them several times. Do not fall for this company’s so called promotion try out their app. It is overall an ok app but Pinterest is also an app you can use to look up recipes and is won’t crash on you. Basically they wanted my information and for me to do a survey so they could use that information than ghost you. Horrible company. Stay away from them and do not fall for their promotions

10. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Unusable. Crashes non stop whenever I try to switch to another tab in the menu or scroll. I can open the app for a solid 6 seconds.

11. ★★★★★crashes, freezes and errors

    Broken. Using an iPad, this app does not work. It is locked in a long-ways side view at a right angle to the bottom of the screen, cutting off the menu and making it impossible to use. Restart and re download had no effect. CHECK YOUR APPS FOR BUGS, DEVS. Update: I wrote the above review over SIX YEARS AGO...and just got a notification *today* from the devs, begging me to try this app again & give them a better review. Six. Years. Yyyyyeah, no.

12. ★★★★★subscription and paid restrictions

    Premium Promotion Is a Joke!. I brought a new Panasonic Microwave, which supposedly came with a free one year digital subscription of SideChef Premium with a promotional code. The whole idea is laughable, because you get nothing and they don't even bother to tell you that the promotion is a scam, but what they do, is make sure nothing works on premium, even after putting in all of your personal credit card information. A pure waste of time, and energy. Be honest with your customers, it's nothing but a farce!

13. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Useless. I installed this on my iPad only to find out it doesn’t work in landscape mode, so it turned out to be useless.

14. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    iPad support. No support for iPad in landscape mode.

15. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Doesn’t have much function to limit based on allergy. I set it to no dairy and low carb. First recipe is a cheesy buffalo wings and nearby is a recipe for Coca Cola ribs. On top of not limiting based on my set preferences, it doesn’t have near the limit/filtering function necessary to be useful and differentiate from other apps. Like ginger - I need to remove that, but I could easily substitute for something else in most recipes. So at the database level, each ingredient almost needs to have a field for “substitutable” so it doesn’t so drastically limit the number of recipes. While this may be a niche, it would be an excellent functional addition to an app with regular recipe and shopping function.

16. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Difficult to use. Thought this app and it’s features was difficult to use. The layout made it tough to choose recipes and then added them to a cookbook was near impossible. I’m not patient enough to learn this. Just going to handwrite our plans instead. Also, the recipes shared were not relevant to what my interests were. Nor did they look appetizing.

17. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Can’t log in with Facebook!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. Logged me out for no reason. I can’t log back in with Facebook. Fix it. It’s very frustrating!!!!!!!!!!!! Do you want people to use your app or not?

18. ★★★★★search fails to find what is needed

    Filters don't work. I was excited about this app at first. I have many restrictions and would love to find new recipes. I liked that they had filters for these dietary restrictions. Upon my first try, I put in gluten free, grain free, vegetarian and sugar free, my first results were sweet wheat pastries, wheat pasta and a bunch of meat filled meals. It basically showed me everything I couldn't eat.

19. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    What is the measuring unit?. What does 500 cauliflower, 1/2 pepper, 215 something else mean? Lbs, tbsp, tsp, sq inches?

20. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    LOL. Im just getting this app for diamonds on My Singing Monsters...lol

21. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Locks up on first screen. Does not respond upon loading and loads crossways. Does nothing!

22. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Eh. Terrible, for my taste

23. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Terrible search function. There are good recipes on the app, but when adding filters, instead of narrowing the thousands of results, it expands them. So, the app isn't great unless you know what recipe you want. Also, the suggestions are always complicated recipes with ingredients I don’t usually have in the house. I miss Budget Bytes. They had recipes I wanted to / could readily make and good suggestions.

24. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    No stars. Can't even get past first screen app doesn't fit screen on iPad Air rubbish

25. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    I was very excited to find this app, but it’s a massive let down.. I always struggle with what to cook for dinner so finally finding a recipe app that was enjoyable to navigate, listed calories, and had recipes laid out in an easy-to-follow manner was a huge win for me. Unfortunately, after spending hours perusing the app and saving/bookmarking recipes I wanted to try, I found out that half of them didn’t save correctly (even if there was a pop-up clearly stating SAVED) or disappeared from the lists I had saved them to. This was a big waste of time for me and shows that the developers clearly don’t value your time. I’ll be deleting the app once I finish this review, and won’t recommend it to anyone.

26. ★★★★★crashes, freezes and errors

    Buggy Experience. I enjoyed this app at first and was quite happy until I repeatedly ran into issues with saving recipes. I primarily wanted to use this app to save recipes I found online and make adjustments to them as I saw fit, often simply just to re-write the steps in my own words or adjust ingredients to make it a more seamless experience for myself. However, after spending a lot of time importing, writing and adjusting recipes, I found that certain recipes would eventually stop working. I would begin making edits or adjustments to a previously working recipe only to find that clicking “Done” to save my changes would do nothing. When this happens, I can’t do anything but discard the changes I have made and either leave the recipe sitting unfinished as it is, or delete it altogether. This was incredibly frustrating and ultimately led me to looking for other apps. I’m unsure how common this issue is for others, but personally I am done burning time on something that was meant to make things more convenient.

27. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Not adding to Walmart cart. I picked recipes, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get them to add to my Walmart cart. It kept saying try later even after I deleted the app and redownloaded

28. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Too many requests?. I was absolutely loving this app until I was editing a recipe and it crashed and said too many requests please try again later. I have waited over an hour and absolutely nothing. Then I try to go to the website and I can’t even login because I used my Apple ID and it won’t even let me change my password.

29. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Still giving this app a try.. Is this an exclusive Walmart app? FAQ gives “some” direction how to change your grocery store options but not seeing that when I’m using the app. Must have to upgrade the app, not sure. Also you can’t copy/paste or print recipe? Emailed support and got a generic response that included FAQ.

30. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    App closes while using—. The app keeps closing before I can completely read the recipe..