Recipe APIs compared

• Spoonacular. The broadest food API: recipes, grocery products, menu items and meal plans. Paid plans from $29 a month. Cached data must be deleted after an hour. Tiny Plates vs Spoonacular
• Edamam. Over 2 million web recipes. Plans from $9 a month and no free plan. Web recipes link out for the cooking steps. Tiny Plates vs Edamam
• TheMealDB. A community recipe database with 793 meals. Free to develop against, $10 once to release publicly. Ingredients and measures are plain text. Tiny Plates vs TheMealDB
• Tasty. Tasty’s recipes through a third-party listing on RapidAPI. Plans and quotas are set there. Tiny Plates vs Tasty

Older lists still recommend these. Do not plan a product around them.

• Yummly. Closed. The API shut in September 2019 and the app and website went offline in December 2024. What replaces the Yummly API

Tiny Plates is the smallest and newest API on this page. It is for apps and agents that need to compute with a recipe, not only show it. It is not the one to pick for grocery products or high volume.

• Free. No credit card and no paid plan yet.
• 50 requests a day and 300 a week per account, raised on request.
• Thousands, gathered from public recipe pages.
• Quantity, unit, name and preparation in separate fields, with canonical ingredient ids shared across languages.
• True or false for each of the EU’s 14 regulated allergens, plus the US definitions of wheat and tree nuts. Informational only.
• Pantry matching, shopping lists grouped by aisle, serving scaling, metric and imperial conversion, and substitutions.
• Recipes in English, Spanish and Swedish.
• An MCP server for agents, signed in to with your account.
• No uptime promise.

Create a free account or read the documentation.

Prices, limits and terms were read from each API’s own pages in September 2026. If something has changed, write to chris@pullpanda.io and we will correct it.