What Edamam is
Edamam sells several food APIs separately. This page is about its Recipe Search API, which indexes over 2 million recipes from around the web. Edamam does not hold a licence to most of them, so the API links out to the source for the cooking steps.
At a glance
| Feature | Tiny Plates | Edamam |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Tiny Plates: Free. No credit card and no paid plan yet. | Edamam: $9 a month for 10,000 calls, $99 for 500,000, $399 for 1 million, then custom. No free plan; some plans have a 10-day trial. |
| Allowance | Tiny Plates: 50 requests a day and 300 a week per account, raised on request. | Edamam: 10,000 calls a month on the smallest plan. |
| Recipes | Tiny Plates: Thousands, gathered from public recipe pages. | Edamam: Over 2 million web recipes. The $399 plan serves 20,000 Edamam-owned recipes instead. |
| Cooking instructions | Tiny Plates: Numbered steps in the response. | Edamam: Web recipes link out to the source. Instructions come only with the Edamam-owned recipes on the $399 plan. |
| Caching | Tiny Plates: Cache the recipes your users ask for. Copying the index in bulk is not allowed. | Edamam: Recipe id and name only. From $99 a month, also calories, protein, fat and net carbs. |
| Attribution | Tiny Plates: Credit the source and link to the recipe’s source URL. | Edamam: Required on every plan. |
What is different
Where the cooking steps are
On the $9 and $99 plans, Edamam returns web recipes without cooking instructions and links to the source. Instructions come with the 20,000 Edamam-owned recipes on the $399 plan. Tiny Plates returns numbered steps with every recipe.
What you may store
Edamam lets you cache the recipe id and name, and from the $99 plan four figures: calories, protein, fat and net carbs. Tiny Plates lets you cache the recipes your users ask for, ingredients and steps included. What it does not allow is copying the index in bulk.
Free plan or trial
The Recipe Search API has no free plan. Some plans have a 10-day trial. Tiny Plates accounts are free, with no trial period.
Size
Edamam’s index is far larger: over 2 million recipes against our thousands. If finding every dish matters most, that decides it.
Moving from Edamam
The same tasks as requests to each API. The documentation has every parameter.
| Task | Edamam | Tiny Plates |
|---|---|---|
| Search recipes | Edamam: GET /api/recipes/v2?type=public&q=pasta | Tiny Plates: GET /search?query=pasta |
| Filter by cuisine and diet | Edamam: GET /api/recipes/v2?type=public&q=pasta&cuisineType=Italian&health=vegetarian | Tiny Plates: GET /recipes?cuisine=italian&diet=vegetarian |
| Limit the cooking time | Edamam: GET /api/recipes/v2?type=public&q=pasta&time=30 | Tiny Plates: GET /recipes?maxTotalMinutes=30 |
| Authenticate | Edamam: app_id and app_key query parameters | Tiny Plates: Authorization: Bearer header |
Pick Edamam when
- You need a corpus of millions of recipes.
- You need hundreds of thousands of calls a month today.
Pick Tiny Plates when
- You want the cooking steps in the response without a $399 plan.
- You want parsed ingredients with canonical ids, scaling and unit conversion.
- You want to start free, without a trial that runs out.
Questions
Does the Edamam Recipe Search API return cooking instructions?
Only for the 20,000 Edamam-owned recipes on the $399 plan. For web recipes it links to the source.
Does Edamam have a free plan?
Not for Recipe Search. Plans start at $9 a month, and some have a 10-day trial.
Can I cache Edamam recipes?
Only the recipe id and name, plus calories, protein, fat and net carbs from the $99 plan.
Do I need an API key for Tiny Plates?
Yes. Create a free account, make a key in the dashboard and send it as a bearer token.
Try it
Create a free account and follow the quickstart to get a response in a couple of minutes. The terms say what you may cache and how to credit a recipe, and the overview lists the other recipe APIs.