Kitchen Stories Review 2026: Is Plus Worth 80 Euros a Year?

Kitchen Stories is a chef-tested recipe app: around 7,500 recipes, each shot with step photos and a short video, all held to one editorial standard. It is made by AJNS New Media, sits at 4.8 out of 5 from roughly 23,000 App Store ratings, and gets updated every few weeks. Browsing the library is free. The paid tier, Plus, costs 7.99 euros a month or 79.99 a year after a seven day trial, and adds searching by ingredient, saving recipes from the web, saving favourite ingredients and a personalised feed. Whether it is worth it depends almost entirely on how you cook, and specifically on whether you start from a recipe or from an ingredient.

What does Kitchen Stories do better than everyone else?

Two things, and both are about trust.

First, every recipe has been through the same kitchen. When an editorial team tests everything, the failure rate drops. You can open a recipe you have never heard of and reasonably expect it to work, which is not true of a user-submitted library like Cookpad, where the range between best and worst is enormous.

Second, the step-by-step visuals are genuinely useful rather than decorative. A photo of what the onions should look like at the point you move on is worth three sentences of description, and Kitchen Stories has that for essentially every step. For a beginner that is the single most valuable feature in any cooking app.

What does Kitchen Stories Plus cost and what do you get?

Plus is 7.99 euros a month or 79.99 euros a year, with a seven day free trial. The annual price works out at about 6.67 a month, so paying yearly saves roughly sixteen percent.

What Plus adds:

• Search recipes by ingredient
• Save favourite ingredients so the app leans on them
• Save recipes from the web into the app
• A personalised feed based on your preferences

What stays free: the recipe library itself, all 7,500 or so, with the step photos and videos intact. That is a fair free tier by the standards of this category, and considerably more generous than apps that lock the recipes themselves.

Is putting ingredient search behind the paywall a problem?

It is the one decision worth arguing with, and it is worth being precise about why.

Most people do not open a cooking app because they want a recipe. They open it because there is something in the fridge that needs using and they do not know what to do with it. That is an ingredient-first problem. Kitchen Stories has put exactly that motion behind 80 euros a year, and left the browse-a-beautiful-library motion free.

If you are a browse-first cook who likes picking something lovely and shopping for it, the free tier is excellent and you should not pay. If you are an ingredient-first cook, the free tier does not do the thing you came for, and Plus is not optional, it is the product. Know which one you are before the trial ends.

Kitchen Stories or a recipe organiser like Paprika?

Different jobs again. Kitchen Stories gives you a curated library it wrote itself. An organiser like Paprika gives you almost no content and a very good system for keeping the recipes you found elsewhere. If you already have recipes scattered across screenshots, bookmarks and a parent's handwriting, an organiser is what you need. If you have no recipes and want good ones, Kitchen Stories is the better buy.

Plenty of people end up with both, which is a fine outcome but two subscriptions. Our wider look at that category is in the recipe organiser roundup.

Who should actually pay for Plus?

1. Ingredient-first cooks, because for them the free tier is missing its main function.
2. People who collect recipes from the web and want them in the same place as the tested ones.
3. Anyone cooking with a fixed set of staples who wants the app to lean toward them.

Who should stay free: beginners working through technique, anyone who cooks from a plan made at the weekend, and anyone who already pays for a different recipe app and would be buying the same capability twice.

Is Kitchen Stories worth it in 2026?

As a free app, easily. The library is well made, the step visuals teach, and 7,500 tested recipes for nothing is a good deal. As a paid app it is narrower than the price suggests, because what you are buying is search and personalisation rather than more or better food.

Install it either way. Cook from it for a week before the trial ends and you will know which of the two cooks you are, which is more useful than any review.