ForkScore Pro is live: $4.99 to keep every recipe you've ever saved

On April 25, we flipped on Stripe. ForkScore now has a paid tier. If you've been using the free product, nothing breaks — you keep everything you've saved. But you have a choice to make about whether to stay on the free plan or move up, and we owe you a clear answer about what changes either way.

This post is the answer. No marketing. Just the numbers we used to set the price and the tradeoffs we made along the way.

What you get on each tier

Free — $0/month. 15 recipe saves per month. 3 AI-generated photos. Full access to the ForkScore algorithm, the feed, search, and your personal book. No ads. No watermark. The free tier is a real product, not a bait-and-switch trial.

Pro — $4.99/month.Unlimited saves. Unlimited AI photos. Unlimited recipe generation from any cooking video on YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram. The $4.99 isn't a discount — it's the actual price.

Family — $8.99/month.Everything in Pro, shared across up to five people. One book the whole household contributes to. We use it ourselves — recipes from a partner's phone, a teenager's TikTok feed, and a parent's Sunday cooking show all land in one place.

Why $4.99 and not $9.99

The honest answer: we did the AI math in public. Each recipe save runs an ingredient parser, a quality-score calculation, and (optionally) an image generation. The marginal cost per save is around $0.008. AI photos cost about $0.003 each. A heavy Pro user who saves 200 recipes a month and generates 50 photos is roughly $1.75 in compute.

That leaves room for infrastructure, payment processing, the creator referral program (more on that below), and some margin. It does notleave room for the 70% gross margin a typical SaaS pricing consultant would tell us to target. We chose the lower price because we'd rather build a habit at scale than extract maximum revenue per user. That's a deliberate bet, and we'll either be right or wrong about it in public.

Regional pricing, because $4.99 isn't $4.99 everywhere

$4.99 in the US is roughly 30 minutes of minimum-wage labor. In several countries we serve, the same dollar amount is closer to two or three hours. We adjust prices regionally based on local purchasing power. If you're in Brazil, India, the Philippines, Mexico, or one of a dozen other markets, you'll see a lower local price at checkout. It's not a discount — it's the right price for that market.

We use Stripe's detected location, not your account language. If you're traveling and see a price you didn't expect, that's why.

What changed for free users

Nothing got worse. Free was always 15 saves a month — that didn't change at launch. We didn't reach into existing users' libraries and lock features retroactively. If you saved 200 recipes during beta, you still have 200 recipes. You just can't add more than 15 a month going forward without upgrading.

That decision cost us some short-term conversion. It also means we don't have to apologize to anyone, which mattered more.

The creator program is now live alongside Pro

Every account auto-generates a referral code in the format FS-XXXXXX. Anyone who upgrades to Pro through your link pays you $1/month for as long as they stay subscribed.That's roughly 20% of the Pro subscription, recurring, no expiration, no quota.

We'd rather hand that 20% to creators than to Meta's ad auction. The full breakdown of the program is in our creator post — read it if you have a cooking audience anywhere in the four-figure follower range or above.

What we're still figuring out

A few things are deliberately not solved yet, and we'd rather you know upfront than discover them later:

• Annual pricing.Coming, but we wanted to ship monthly cleanly first. If you want annual now, email us — we'll honor a 12-month rate ($49/year for Pro, ~17% off) by hand until the dashboard supports it.
• Lifetime / one-time purchase.Considered, decided against. The AI cost per recipe is real and recurring, so the price has to be too. We won't pretend otherwise to land a launch-week conversion spike.
• Mobile native checkout. The first iOS build ships with Apple-managed subscription billing once we clear App Store review. Until then, mobile users upgrade through the web.

What to do this week

1. If you've been on the fence, the Pro upgrade button is on the pricing page. Three taps, no contract, cancel any time.
2. If you have a cooking audience, grab your referral link from your home screen. Drop it in the place you have the most attention — TikTok bio, newsletter footer, X pinned post.
3. If you want annual or have a use case we haven't covered, reply to your welcome email or hit us at adkinslabs.com. We answer.

Two days in, the early signal is good — Pro conversion on day-one users is higher than we modeled, Family is converting better than expected from group chats, and the referral codes are already moving. We'll publish the real numbers in 30 days. The point of writing this post now is so the math is on the record before we do.