Yummly is gone. Here's what to use instead

If you've typed yummly.com into your browser lately, you'll have noticed it's not there anymore. Yummly is gone. Here's what happened, and where to go now.

Whirlpool, the appliance company, bought Yummly in May 2017. Developers lost out first: the Yummly API closed on 30 September 2019. Then in December 2024, Whirlpool took the app and the website offline too. The site now points to KitchenAid.

That hurt, because a lot of people really used it. You could type in what was in your fridge and get recipes back. You could plan your week. And you could save recipes into your own collections, sometimes for years. From what users reported, there was no way to export those collections in bulk. So many people lost their saved recipes along with the app.

This post is for two groups. Home cooks who want a new place to find and keep recipes. And developers who built on the Yummly API and still need something to call. Pick your section.

If you cooked with Yummly

There's no single app that does everything Yummly did. But there are good ones for each part of it.

Supercook, for "what can I make with this?" This was the Yummly feature people missed most. Supercook is free, on the web and as an app for iOS and Android. You tick off what you have from a long ingredient list, and it shows recipes you can make with it. It also shows recipes where you're only missing a few things. You can narrow things down by meal type, cuisine and diet. The recipes come from lots of other recipe sites, so you click through to cook.

Samsung Food, for saving and planning. This used to be called Whisk. Samsung Food lets you save recipes from any website, plan your week and turn the plan into a shopping list you can share with your household. The basics are free. Some features, like tracking your pantry, are in the paid Food+ plan. Your recipes live in a Samsung account, which is fine for most people but worth knowing.

Paprika, for keeping your recipes yourself. If losing your Yummly collection stung, Paprika is worth a look. It saves recipes from any web page, has a meal planner, and builds a grocery list sorted by aisle. You pay once instead of every month, but each platform is sold separately (phone, Mac, Windows). Your recipes are stored on your device and synced, so you're not depending on one company's servers. Check the current price in your app store.

Plan to Eat, for serious meal planners. Plan to Eat is built around importing recipes from anywhere and dragging them onto a calendar. It makes a shopping list from the plan. It's a paid subscription with a free trial, and no card is needed to try it. See their site for the current price.

Our honest advice: if you mostly searched by ingredient, start with Supercook. If you mostly saved and planned, try Samsung Food for free, or Paprika if you'd rather own your collection. And whatever you pick, check how you'd get your recipes out again. Yummly taught us that one.

Oh, and Tiny Plates is not one of these. We're an API for developers, not an app. So if you're a cook, you can stop here. Happy cooking!

If you built on the Yummly API

The Yummly API has been dark since 2019, so there's nothing to migrate. No data to export, no endpoints to map one to one. You just need a new recipe API and some rewiring. Here are the main options.

Tiny Plates. That's us, so take this with a pinch of salt. Tiny Plates is a free recipe API with thousands of recipes in English, Spanish and Swedish. You get 50 requests a day and 300 a week per account, with no credit card, and we raise that on request. Every recipe comes back whole: ingredients split into quantity, unit and name, plus numbered steps and a link to the source. Search works by meaning, so "quick vegetarian dinner" does what you'd hope. And the Yummly favourite, recipes by ingredients, is one call:

curl 'https://api.tinyplates.dev/pantry?ingredients=chicken,rice,onion&maxMissing=1' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer rd_your_api_key'

You get recipes back with what you have and what you're missing, best match first. We assume you have salt, pepper and oil. There's also an MCP server if you're building with an AI agent. What we don't have: a huge catalogue, a paid plan, or an uptime promise. If you need those today, look further down this list.

Spoonacular. The broadest food API around. Besides recipes, it has grocery products, restaurant menu items and meal planning, and it has its own find-by-ingredients endpoint. The free plan gives you 50 points a day and needs a backlink. Paid plans start at $29 a month, and those come with an uptime promise. Watch the caching rules: you can only keep most data for an hour. If you need products or menus, it's the better pick. We compared the two in detail on Tiny Plates vs Spoonacular, and there's a whole post on Spoonacular alternatives.

Edamam. Edamam's Recipe Search API indexes over 2 million recipes. That's the closest thing to Yummly's size. There's no free plan; plans start at $9 a month, and some have a 10-day trial. The catch is that web recipes come without cooking steps. You link out to the source for those. If you mostly need to find recipes and send people to them, that's a fine fit.

TheMealDB. A small community database with a free test key and no sign-up. It's great for learning and quick demos. You need to become a paying supporter before you release an app publicly, and filtering on several ingredients at once is a supporter feature too. Ingredients come as plain text, so scaling or shopping lists are up to you.

Here's the short version side by side:

	Free option	Recipes by ingredients	Cooking steps in the response
Tiny Plates	Free, 50 requests a day	Yes, /pantry	Yes
Spoonacular	50 points a day, backlink needed	Yes	Yes
Edamam	No free plan, some 10-day trials	Keyword search, no pantry matching we could find	Not for web recipes
TheMealDB	Free test key for development	Several at once for supporters	Yes, as one block of text

So which one? If you need millions of recipes, go with Edamam. If you need grocery products, menus or a paid plan with an uptime promise, go with Spoonacular. If you're learning or building a weekend demo, TheMealDB is the easiest start. If you want the full recipe as data, for free, with ingredient matching built in, try us.

If you want the longer version, we wrote a roundup of the best recipe APIs, and there's a Yummly API replacement page with the facts in one place.

Here's the recipes-by-ingredients idea running for real on Tiny Plates. Type in what's in your fridge and spin:

That's a little React app we built called Fridge Roulette. It uses two endpoints, /pantry and /substitutions, and the Fridge Roulette guide walks through every line. If your Yummly app also did meal planning, the weekly meal planner guide and one shopping list for a week of recipes cover that side.

Yummly was a good one, and it's a shame it's gone. If you're rebuilding what it did for your users, grab a free key and see if Tiny Plates fits.