The problem: recipe questions are endless, and answering them is unpaid
Food creators get a distinctive flood of DMs: "Mine came out dry — what did I do wrong?" "Can you help me plan a dinner party menu?" "What knife should I buy?" Each answer is teaching, and the good answers — the ones that diagnose what actually happened in someone's kitchen — take real back-and-forth. Recorded courses cannot do that, and cooking-class platforms take big cuts for group formats where nobody gets individual attention.
Meanwhile the truly premium product — you, live, in someone's corner while they cook — has had no clean way to exist. Scheduling apps, video links, and payment requests are three tools glued together, and a no-show wastes the exact hours you blocked around dinner time.
What to sell on Cheddify
Cheddify is one link in your TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube bio. Students pay as guests in the browser and connect over video; you take the call on your phone, propped up in your kitchen. Formats that fit cooking teachers:
- Live 1:1 cook-along. A booked, prepaid 60-minute session: they pick the dish, you send the shopping list ahead, and you cook it together — you watching their pan, catching mistakes before they happen. This is the flagship format; it is personal in a way no group class is.
- Live technique rescue, per minute. Toggle yourself available in the afternoon. Someone mid-recipe connects for 10 minutes: "my sauce broke, help." The per-minute meter makes short urgent calls worth taking.
- Menu and dinner-party consults — a booked 30-minute call to plan a menu, timeline, and prep list for their event.
- Paid DMs for the quick questions: substitutions, equipment, "what went wrong" photos. A price filters hundreds of free asks into a short queue of committed home cooks. See how paid DMs work.
What to charge
Cooking instruction prices like teaching, which on Cheddify commonly runs $1 to $4 per minute. For hour-long cook-alongs, $1 to $1.50 per minute keeps the total in reach of a home cook while paying you $60 to $90 an hour. Established creators with large followings typically hold $2, and chefs with professional credentials or a strong specialty — pastry, fermentation, regional cuisines — can charge $3 to $4, especially for short-format technique calls. As always, these are patterns, not promises: price the long sessions gently and the urgent short ones higher, and adjust as demand shows itself. More in how to charge for video calls as a creator.
The math on a real cook-along
Say you run a 60-minute cook-along at $1.25 per minute. The student pays $75, plus roughly 3 percent processing (about $2.25) on top. Cheddify takes 20 percent plus $2 per call: $15 + $2 = $17. You keep $58, paid out through Stripe. Two cook-alongs a week is over $460 a month — from teaching that is more personal than any course you could record. Full details on the pricing page.
The honest part
Cheddify brings you no students. There is no marketplace and no discovery — your link converts the audience you already have on TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube, and nobody else will find it. If you do not have a food audience yet, group-class platforms and local teaching will pay sooner while you build one. If your comments already ask "can you show me how?", Cheddify is free to claim, and the cook-along becomes a product instead of a wish. Here is how it works.