Help with Otto

Otto is free to download and use, carries no advertising, and does not sell your information. Otto Club, our membership, adds the heavier features for $4.99 a month or $34.99 a year, and begins with a 5-day free trial. It adds to what Otto does — it never takes away what already works.

Always. An Otto Club membership buys the heavier features — never access to your own cookbook. Your recipes stay readable and yours regardless of what you subscribe to.

You can request a full copy of everything in your account at any time by emailing us, and we commit to giving notice well ahead of any change that would affect access. One-tap export from inside the app is on the roadmap.

Not to look around. Browsing and searching work straight away with no sign-in. An account is asked for the first time you save something, because that is the first moment there is anything to keep safe. You can sign in with Apple, Google or Facebook.

Otto installs and runs on iPad, but it is designed for the iPhone and will look like a large phone app rather than a proper tablet one. An iPad layout hasn’t been built.

Mostly not, at the moment. Your recipes live in your account, so Otto needs a connection to fetch them. An offline cookbook is on the roadmap. Timers and the steps of a recipe you already have open keep working if the signal drops mid-cook.

Otto reads recipe links from food blogs and recipe sites, TikTok and Instagram posts, and plain text you paste in. From a blog it usually gets the whole recipe. From a social post it works from the caption — so if the recipe was only spoken aloud in the video and never written down, Otto will tell you rather than invent it.

Every import opens for you to check before it saves, with everything Otto found already filled in. Fix a quantity, delete a line, add the step that was buried in the blog post. If Otto can’t read a page at all, he says so and hands you the manual editor with whatever he did manage to capture, so you finish rather than start again.

Yes, and it isn’t optional. An imported recipe carries the site or creator it came from and a live link back to the original. That credit can’t be deleted, and it travels with the recipe if you share it on.

Yes. Change the number of servings and the quantities move with it, snapped to amounts a kitchen can actually measure rather than to three decimal places.

It is an estimate, worked out from public USDA food data and the quantities written in the recipe. Treat it as a rough guide. It doesn’t know your exact brand of yoghurt or how much oil stayed in the pan, and it is not medical or dietary advice. If you are managing a condition, use a tool built for that.

Never on its own. If your plan no longer matches your list, a small banner asks whether to update it. Items you have already ticked off and things you added yourself survive the refresh.

Yes. From your shopping list, tap the people icon to start a shared list and send the invite link. Everyone who joins adds to and ticks off the same list, and each line shows who put it there or picked it up.

Your recipes, your weekly plan and your cooking journal live in your account. Your shopping list and your food preferences stay on your phone and are never uploaded. Otto contains no advertising, no analytics tools and no cross-app tracking, and nothing is sold or shared for marketing.

Only someone holding the link. Share links are long random strings nobody can guess at, and the pages they open are read-only. A shared shopping list is a snapshot of that moment — it does not keep updating after you send it.

Profile, then delete account. It removes your recipes, plan and journal properly rather than hiding them. There is no retention period and no persuasion screen on the way out.

Email juandiego@ottosapp.com with what you were doing, what you expected and what happened instead. A screenshot helps more than anything else. A person reads every message.