Zap Cooking: Tip the Chef in Sats
Who's Zap Cooking?
Zap Cooking was founded by Seth Sager. For Seth, finding a recipe was a nightmare. Recipe sites had filled up with ads, pop-ups and long stories, with everything except the actual recipe you came for. So he stripped it down: here are the ingredients, here are the instructions. Then he kept going. What if recipes were social, creators owned their identity and content, and people could support each other directly with bitcoin?
Zap Cooking launched in 2023 as Nostr Cooking and became Zap Cooking in 2024. Built on Nostr, it holds around 600 recipes submitted by real people and draws more than 30,000 unique visitors a month across 160 countries. Seth wanted a way for those visitors to reward each other effortlessly, without anyone needing to learn how bitcoin works first.
The Challenge
Sending sats on Zap Cooking depended on users arriving with a bitcoin wallet and knowing how to connect it, which only works for experienced bitcoiners. For everyone else, "go download a bitcoin wallet" was an obstacle few would overcome to thank the cook behind a great recipe.
Doing nothing meant restricting Seth's great idea to bitcoin users. The mainstream would have to learn another app and understand wallets, channels and liquidity just to send a few sats or, more likely, never get into social cooking. Replacing friction in the UI with friction in the UX is not really an improvement.
The Solution
Zap Cooking integrated the Breez SDK directly into the Zap Cooking experience as a payments engine operating invisibly between the author of the recipe and the hungry user eager to try it at home.
For users:
- Speed: Users can instantly thank their fellow cooks for great meal ideas and tasty treats to try.
- Convenience: Users can get started without ever having used a wallet. Sending and receiving sats right on the site becomes as natural as an heirloom tomato salad.
- Ownership: Users who do already have external wallets can use them too because Zap Cooking runs on Nostr, which, like the Breez SDK, is free and open source. Walled gardens are not cool whether they hold payments technology or fresh herbs.
"What surprised us most was how quickly Bitcoin could disappear into the experience. We expected an embedded wallet to add another layer of complexity, but Breez gave us the opposite."
Seth Sager, Founder, Zap Cooking
For developers:
One developer built it. Daniel Modell became a winner of Breez's time2build challenge in late 2025 by integrating the Breez SDK into Primal's web app. In December he took what he'd learned to Zap Cooking, and the first version went live on New Year's Eve. Instead of designing the product around how bitcoin works, the team designed it around how they wanted bitcoin to work for their users. There is no wallet infrastructure to run, and no channels, nodes or liquidity to manage.
For growth:
Bitcoin is no longer required reading for visitors before they can get started. Every one of the 30,000+ people who visit each month can now discover it, earn it, and send it on their first visit, from 160 countries, with nothing to install.
On Zap Cooking, inventing great new recipes can be a side hustle as well as a passion.
Ready to Get Started?
Join Zap Cooking and the world's best builders adding instant bitcoin and stablecoins with the Breez SDK.
