Found a recipe on a website, or a dish you want to make in an Instagram reel? Paste the link and Daily Simmer will pull the recipe out of it — ingredients, steps, times — and save it to your library as a proper structured recipe you can scale and cook from.

The two ways we read a link

Every link goes through one of two paths, and the difference matters because one is free and one is not.

Basic Import fetches the page once and reads the recipe out of it directly. Most recipe sites publish their recipes in a form built for exactly this, and Basic reads that. It is free, there is no limit on how often you use it beyond your overall recipe limit, and it handles the large majority of ordinary recipe sites.

Smart Import is the paid path for pages Basic cannot read: sites that need to be properly loaded before the recipe appears, or pages where the recipe only exists as prose in the middle of a story. It costs 10 credits per recipe. If you are on the free plan you get five Smart Imports for the lifetime of your account before that applies.

You are only ever charged for a recipe you actually got. An import that fails costs you neither a free trial nor credits.

You do not have to choose

The link field has a Smart Import fallback switch. Leave it on and a link Basic cannot read gets picked up by Smart automatically. The progress display tells you as it happens, and you are not asked to approve it a second time.

That handover is deliberately narrow. It only happens when a page could not be fetched or read at all, and at most once per link. An unsupported link, a temporary glitch, or a failure that happens after the recipe was already pulled out will not quietly spend a trial or your credits.

Recipes from Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube

Links from those four go through Smart Import.

We read them the way a signed-out visitor would, without logging in as anyone. That keeps the whole thing above board, and it has one consequence worth knowing: a post behind a login wall or an age gate cannot be read, and fails with a clear reason rather than being worked around. If you hit that, opening the post yourself and writing the recipe down is the way through.

Importing from a link in chat

Sharing a link with the assistant works too, and follows the same rules. If the link needs Smart Import, the assistant asks you to confirm rather than spending credits on your behalf.

When an import comes back without a recipe

You get told what happened, and offered the moves that can actually change the outcome: try it again, try a different link, open the page yourself, write the recipe by hand, or — where Smart could plausibly read what Basic could not — run the same link as a Smart Import.

The explanations are the same whether you started on the import page or in chat, so a failure means the same thing wherever you meet it.