There are always free apps for the same job, but there are some kinds of apps I would strongly advise investing in, or at least don’t be too put off from buying. One such job is recipe keeping. It sounds like a simple job; just keep the text files on cloud, and text editors are freely available on almost all the platforms. But much like music and ebook library, you can only get so far with bare metal approach.

Paprika Recipe Manager is a paid app, $29.99 for Mac and $4.99 for iOS, also available on Android and Windows. The app comes with the free sync feature between the devices. In theory, you can plan ahead for a dish on a computer, then take the phone with you to measure out the ingredients. It automatically formats online recipes, so it’s always possible to go back to the source and see what other recommendations recipe author has.

Personally, I started looking for a “smart” recipe app to keep track of ingredients. Scaling the ingredients was one thing, — that’s a simple arithmetic — but I prefer to use one electric scale to weigh all the ingredient, unless the volume in question is in spoons. Keeping track of all the changes I make to a recipe was some work on its own, but Paprika actually does it automatically: volume to volume, weight to weight. I don’t need to later cups to ml, or lb to grams.

The other fun tidbit I found myself doing was being able to write down notes. With index card systems, if you had them before, at some point keeping track of all the notes becomes more demanding task than maintaining the actual recipes. Needless to say, on apps, there is practically no limit on how much notes you can leave, and share your favorite recipes with friends and families as many times you like.