Cookpad
👤 Akimitsu Sano (Sano still owns 63.57% of Cookpad's voting rights (2026 filing) — control no board or investor can override.)🌐 site
Give away 6M+ user recipes; charge monthly for the one thing UGC can't promise: which recipe actually works.
Will it work? · our read
Durable but fading. The subscription still earns profit on a tiny staff, but the recipe library that feeds it is aging and premium members leave every quarter. Great model, shrinking base.
01How the money moves
100M+ users browse 6M+ free recipes
→
Free search buries the good ones in the pile
→
Members pay monthly for premium recipe search
02The numbers
¥5.3B ($35M)FiledFY2025 sales (TSE-filed)
FY2025 (Dec)source:
5,336M yen (FY2025)
Reach and library are Cookpad's own first-party figures; sales are TSE-filed. About 100 staff serve 100M+ users — but the paying premium base is shrinking. Cookpad company page
Sales have halved since a 2021 peak, but the core stays profitable and debt-free.
🔒
You have the verdict. Members get the work behind it.
- The CENTS scorecard — where it's strong, where it's soft
- The founder's key move, and the counter-move
- How it could die — the evidence, and how sure we are
- The case against our own call
- A 🚀 launchpad prompt — the case, as a plan for your business
We rate our own confidence — and argue against ourselves. Nobody else in this category does.
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See a full teardown, free → ImportYetiSourcesSources last checked 8 October 2026
Cookpad Q1 FY2026 results (TSE 2193 filing) — sales 1,267M yen, down 7.7%, blamed on falling premium membership.Cookpad Q1 FY2026 presentation — 94 staff (Mar 2026); FY2025 quarterly sales 1,372/1,350/1,317/1,295M yen.Cookpad FY2025 Annual Securities Report (TSE 2193 filing) — states sales revenue of 5,336 million yen (down 9.2% YoY), cash and cash equivalents of 5,885 million yen at FY2025 year-end, and founder Akimitsu Sano holding 63.57% of voting rights.Cookpad company page — first-party scale: 100m+ monthly users, 6M+ recipes, 70+ regions.Wikipedia: Cookpad — founded as Coin Ltd. in 1997 by Akimitsu Sano; service launched 1998; TSE IPO July 2009.
Revenue is FILED: Cookpad's FY2025 Annual Securities Report (opened directly, not just searched) states 'Sales revenue for FY2025 was 5,336 million yen (down 9.2% year on year)' verbatim — that filing is the sourceUrl, not a third-party relay. About $35M at roughly 152 yen/$. The same filing states cash and cash equivalents of 5,885 million yen at FY2025 year-end, supporting diesCounter's 'about 5.9B yen in cash,' and states founder Akimitsu Sano holds 63.57% of voting rights, supporting founder.note's ownership claim. The separate Q1 FY2026 tanshin (also opened directly) confirms the 10,004M-to-5,336M-yen multi-year decline and blames it on 'a decline in the number of premium membership.' Scale numbers (100m+ monthly users, 6M+ recipes, 70+ regions) are first-party STATED from Cookpad's own site: marketing headline figures, not audited. Staff count is from StockAnalysis (101, end 2025; the Q1 2026 filing shows 94). The monetization mechanism — paywalling popularity-ranked recipe search — is [our read] of a well-known product decision; the filing confirms only that premium membership drives revenue, not the exact feature or price, so no yen price is asserted. No founder-drama or proxy-battle is claimed; with majority voting control, Sano faces none anyway. We never score you.