About RecipeTimer

I'm Martyn. I love cooking — properly love it. Sourdough that takes days. Low-and-slow lamb shoulder. Batch baking cookies with my daughter on a Sunday morning. I grow up with a love of cooking, and somewhere along the way I worked out that food is one of the easiest ways to make people feel good. That's why I do it.

And for years, the one part of cooking that quietly drove me mad was timers.

Not the cooking itself. The timers.

I tried everything. Smart home devices mishear you, ignore you, or helpfully set a timer in a room you're not in — and when the beeping eventually stops, you have no idea whether you dismissed it or it just gave up. Hardware timers beep, but they don't tell you which of the three things on the hob needs attention. And picking up your phone to set a timer means unlocking it, opening the app, and — four minutes later — realising you've been reading something completely unrelated and then you have to make a guess as to exactly how long you've been standing there looking at Instagram.

The worst part? Not knowing how long a timer has been going off. Five minutes late for pasta is mushy. Five minutes late for a cake is a disaster. There's a big difference, and every timer I owned treated them the same.

What eventually pushed me to build something was noticing a gap that seemed obvious once I saw it. Almost every recipe I cooked came from a web page. Every timer I needed was right there in the instructions. But not a single recipe site offered a way to start a timer without leaving the page — without opening another app, typing the time yourself, and hoping you didn't get distracted on the way.

I'm a software developer. I know how phones work. The tools to fix this have existed for years. So I built RecipeTimer — one tap in the recipe, a named timer on your phone, an alert that fires even when the screen is locked. And when it goes off, you know exactly what's done.

It started as a fix for my own kitchen. It turned out a lot of other people needed the same fix.

RecipeTimer lets recipe authors embed one-tap timer links directly in their recipes. Readers tap a link — a named timer starts on their phone, no app switching, no typing. The timer runs in the background, fires even when the screen is locked, and the notification tells them exactly what's done.

The part that makes it different: the context loop. When a recipe author adds a timer link, they can attach their recipe URL — and a specific anchor pointing to the exact step the timer belongs to. When the alert fires, the reader taps it and lands back on the recipe, at the right paragraph, not the top of the page. No scrolling to find their place. No losing the thread mid-cook.

A reader who burns something because a timer didn't work blames the recipe. A reader whose food turns out right gives five stars and comes back. That's the difference RecipeTimer makes.