365days
Pickles
Oil, salt and sun. Made in one season, eaten all year.
Android build · pre-launch · Hyderabad first
The pickle that keeps a year, made three streets away.
CraveLink is a neighbourhood marketplace for homemade Indian food — pickles, podis, papads, namkeen, sweets. Every jar carries its net weight, its shelf life and its allergens. Every kitchen carries an FSSAI number. You collect it from the kitchen itself.
- 365daysa pickle's shelf life
- 9categories on the shelf
- 10%flat, only when you sell
FSSAI number on filefor every kitchen
Best within 21 daysprinted on the label
Nearest kitchen firstreal GPS distance
Pickles/365 daysPodis/180 daysMasalas/180 daysPapads/180 daysPreserves/270 daysReady to cook/30 daysSnacks/21 daysSweets/15 daysBakes/3 days
The shelf
Nine things a home kitchen has always made in quantity.
These are the categories in the app, with the shelf life the app fills in for the maker before they ever touch the field. A maker can override it per jar — but nobody starts from a blank box and a guess.
180days
Podis
Dry-roasted and stone-ground. No water, so nothing spoils.
180days
Masalas
Whole spices, roasted and milled to a house ratio.
180days
Papads
Rolled thin and sun-dried on the terrace, in batches.
270days
Preserves
Fruit and sugar cooked down until it keeps itself.
30days
Ready to cook
The long prep already done. Ten minutes on your stove.
21days
Snacks
Namkeen fried in small lots, packed the day it is made.
15days
Sweets
Mysore pak, laddu, burfi. Short window, worth it.
3days
Bakes
The original category. Same-day, and deliberately kept.
Why it changed
A cake lasts three days. A jar of avakaya lasts a year.
This started as a home-bakery app. Cakes are same-day, perishable and local-only — a small business on a short clock. Pickles and podis keep for months, survive a journey, and are made in every second household in India. Same app, much bigger shelf. Bakes stayed on as one category so the kitchens already onboard were never orphaned.
Bakes3 days
Snacks21 days
Podis180 days
Pickles365 days
Shelf life runs from 3 days for a bake to 365 days for a pickle.days a jar of pickle keeps
— against three for a cake
How it works
Three screens, and the jar is yours.
These are screenshots of the real Android build — not a mockup of one. The kitchens shown are the sample kitchens the app ships with for testing.
01 / Find
Find the kitchens nearest you
Set your area — type it, or use your location — and the feed re-sorts by real GPS distance. Pickles from 1.1 km away sit above pickles from six.
- Nearest-first, always
- Search across every kitchen and jar
- Heart a kitchen to keep it
02 / Read
Read the label before you buy
Every product carries net weight, shelf life, storage, veg mark, ingredients and allergens. Every kitchen carries an FSSAI registration number. Not a badge — the number.
- Photos from the kitchen itself
- The maker's own story and tags
- Reviews that only a buyer can leave
03 / Pay
Pay once, then watch it happen
Razorpay checkout, signature-verified on our own server before an order is created. Then the status moves as the kitchen moves it, and your phone buzzes each time.
- Placed → Accepted → Making → Ready
- Push at every step
- A real PDF receipt to keep
On the label
The boring panel nobody puts on a food app.
Selling packaged food in India needs at least an FSSAI Basic Registration, and the number has to appear on the pack. So the app asks the maker for the number, not for a tick box — and asks for net quantity, shelf life, storage, the veg mark, ingredients and allergens on every product before it can be published.
The form pre-fills the shelf life from the category so a first-time maker is not guessing, and they can override it jar by jar. Verifying those numbers against the FSSAI register, and moderating the photos, is the next piece of work — it is not done yet, and the page below says so.
- Net weight
- 300 g box
- Shelf life
- Best within 21 days
- Storage
- Airtight, away from sunlight
- Veg mark
- Vegetarian
- Ingredients
- Rice flour, gram flour, sesame, curry leaf, salt
- Allergens
- Contains sesame · fried in groundnut oil
- FSSAI
- Registration number, on every kitchen
The order, both ways
One state machine. Two people watching it.
The kitchen moves the order along from their studio. Every move writes to the same document your phone is listening to, so your receipt changes while you are looking at it — and a push arrives either way.
Placed
Payment verified on our server before the order exists.
Accepted
The kitchen takes it. Decline sends the money back.
Making
Your jar is being filled. You watch it change, live.
Ready
“Ready — come and collect.” Address, directions, phone.
Collected
Receipt as a PDF, and the kitchen is yours to rate.
For home cooks
You already make it for the family. Make forty jars instead.
CraveLink was built for homemakers first — the people who have made the same avakaya every May for twenty years and have never had anywhere to sell it that was not a WhatsApp group.
A kitchen, in four minutes
Name it, write one line about yourself, drop a pin, add your FSSAI number. That is the whole of onboarding.
You set the price
Per kg, box of twelve, per piece — your unit, your number. We never mark it up and never discount it for you.
10% flat, written on the order
Every order stores its own subtotal, our commission and your payout. The ledger is on the order, not in a statement you have to trust.
The order reaches you
A push the moment it lands, an inbox with a “new” badge, and one button per state. No WhatsApp thread to lose.
What you keep
Drag the order value. These are the three fields the server writes onto the order document itself, the moment it is created.
₹674
itemSubtotal₹749
commission · 10%− ₹75
makerPayout₹674
Settlement is a weekly manual transfer today — the ledger exists, the payout dashboard does not. That is on the list below, not in this paragraph.
What's actually built
An honest list, because the app is not in the store yet.
Everything in the first column runs today against live Firebase. Everything in the other two does not. No landing page should need this section — this one does, because CraveLink has not launched and pretending otherwise would be the first broken promise.
Working now14
- Phone OTP sign-in, session persists
- Live Firestore catalogue — no demo data
- Kitchen onboarding with map pin + FSSAI
- Multi-photo products with full food labelling
- GPS distances, nearest-first, change your area
- Live search across products and kitchens
- One-kitchen cart, checkout, saved address
- Razorpay orders created + verified server-side
- Order state machine, live on both sides
- Push notifications at every status change
- A4 PDF receipts with the payment id
- Ratings and reviews, averaged by a function
- Favourites, and a favourites rail on Home
- Pickup panel: address, directions, call kitchen
Being built4
- FSSAI verification badge + photo moderation
- Radius filter on the feed
- Custom-order request and accept flow
- Referrals
Before launch5
- App icon and splash
- Play Console: internal → closed beta → production
- Analytics and crash reporting
- Web console for disputes, payouts, moderation
- iOS build
Parked, not abandoned
Courier delivery via Borzo — built, tested end to end, and switched off behind a flag until their production access comes through. CraveLink is pickup-only until then, deliberately.
Flutter Android firstFirebase Auth Phone OTPCloud Firestore Live catalogueCloud Functions Money + pushRazorpay Server-verifiedCloudinary Kitchen photosFCM Order pushes
Questions
The ones worth asking first.
Is CraveLink live? Can I order today?
Not yet. The Android app is built and running on live Firebase — sign-in, catalogue, orders, payments, receipts and reviews all work — but it has not gone through Play Console review, so there is nothing to download. Hyderabad is the first city.
Why pickup only, and not delivery?
Courier delivery through Borzo is built and was verified end to end: live quotes at checkout, a real booking when the kitchen marks an order ready, webhook tracking, the lot. Their production access never arrived, and charging for a delivery no real rider will make is not something we will ship. So it sits behind a feature flag, and you collect from the kitchen.
How do I know the food is safe?
Selling packaged food in India needs at least an FSSAI Basic Registration, and the number has to appear on the label. So we collect the number from the kitchen rather than showing a vague tick, and every product carries net weight, shelf life, storage, veg mark, ingredients and allergens. Verification of those numbers and photo moderation are the next things being built — they are not done yet.
What does it cost a home cook?
Nothing to list. 10% of the item subtotal on an order that actually happens. Each order stores its own subtotal, commission and payout, and settlement is a weekly manual transfer — there is no payout dashboard yet, and pretending otherwise would be a lie.
Where does my money go at checkout?
To Razorpay. The order is created by a Cloud Function on our server, not by the app, and the payment signature is verified with HMAC-SHA256 before the order is trusted. Keys live in Google Secret Manager and never touch the repository.
Was this not a bakery app?
It was — BakerNest, for home bakers. Cakes are same-day, perishable and local-only. Pickles and podis keep for months, travel well, and are made in every second household in India. Same app, much bigger shelf. Bakes stayed on as one category so the kitchens already onboard were not orphaned.
Hyderabad first
There is a kitchen on your street that is better than a factory.
The app is not in the Play Store yet. If you cook and want to be one of the first kitchens on it when it lands, say so now — the first batch gets onboarded by hand.