What Spoonacular is
Spoonacular is the widest food API you can sign up for. One key covers recipe search, grocery products, restaurant menu items, meal plans and shopping lists. It charges in points rather than requests, and its terms limit how long you may keep what you fetch.
At a glance
| Feature | Tiny Plates | Spoonacular |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Tiny Plates: Free. No credit card and no paid plan yet. | Spoonacular: Free plan, then $29, $79 and $149 a month. Enterprise from $300. |
| Free allowance | Tiny Plates: 50 requests a day and 300 a week per account, raised on request. | Spoonacular: 50 points a day, with a backlink to Spoonacular required. |
| Recipes | Tiny Plates: Thousands, gathered from public recipe pages. | Spoonacular: Its site lists 5,000+ recipes, 600K+ products and 115K+ menu items. |
| Allergens | Tiny Plates: True or false for each of the EU’s 14 regulated allergens, plus the US definitions of wheat and tree nuts. Informational only. | Spoonacular: Detects common allergens such as wheat, dairy, eggs, soy and nuts. |
| Ingredients | Tiny Plates: Quantity, unit, name and preparation in separate fields, with canonical ingredient ids shared across languages. | Spoonacular: Ingredient data, substitutions and unit conversion. |
| Beyond recipes | Tiny Plates: Pantry matching, shopping lists grouped by aisle, serving scaling, metric and imperial conversion, and substitutions. | Spoonacular: Meal planning, shopping lists, products and menu items. |
| Caching | Tiny Plates: Cache the recipes your users ask for. Copying the index in bulk is not allowed. | Spoonacular: One hour at most, with written permission. Only the recipe id, title and image URL may be kept longer. |
| Attribution | Tiny Plates: Credit the source and link to the recipe’s source URL. | Spoonacular: Credit the original source with a link. |
| Uptime promise | Tiny Plates: No uptime promise. | Spoonacular: 99% on the $29 and $79 plans, 99.9% from $149. |
| MCP server | Tiny Plates: An MCP server for agents, signed in to with your account. | Spoonacular: Yes. |
What is different
Points or requests
Spoonacular counts points. A recipe search costs 1 point plus 0.01 for each result, and some options add more. The free plan has 50 points a day. Tiny Plates counts requests: one call is one request, whatever it returns.
How long you can keep a recipe
Spoonacular’s terms let you cache data for at most an hour, with written permission, and ask you to delete everything if you stop using the API. Only the recipe id, title and image URL can stay. Tiny Plates lets you cache the recipes your users ask for. What it does not allow is copying the index in bulk.
Allergens
Spoonacular detects common allergens and has an intolerances filter. Tiny Plates answers true or false for each of the EU’s 14 regulated allergens and the US definitions of wheat and tree nuts, and the “without” parameter leaves out recipes that contain any you list.
Products and menus
Spoonacular also lists 600K+ grocery products and 115K+ menu items from US restaurant chains. Tiny Plates has neither. It does recipes only.
Moving from Spoonacular
The same tasks as requests to each API. The documentation has every parameter.
| Task | Spoonacular | Tiny Plates |
|---|---|---|
| Search recipes | Spoonacular: GET /recipes/complexSearch?query=pasta | Tiny Plates: GET /search?query=pasta |
| Leave out an allergen | Spoonacular: GET /recipes/complexSearch?query=pasta&intolerances=dairy | Tiny Plates: GET /search?query=pasta&without=milk |
| Filter by cuisine and diet | Spoonacular: GET /recipes/complexSearch?cuisine=italian&diet=vegetarian | Tiny Plates: GET /recipes?cuisine=italian&diet=vegetarian |
| Cook from what you have | Spoonacular: GET /recipes/findByIngredients?ingredients=chicken,rice | Tiny Plates: GET /pantry?ingredients=chicken,rice |
| Get one recipe | Spoonacular: GET /recipes/{id}/information | Tiny Plates: GET /recipes/{id} |
Pick Spoonacular when
- You need grocery products or restaurant menu items from the same API.
- You need meal planning built in.
- You need paid volume and an uptime promise today.
Pick Tiny Plates when
- You want ingredient ids that mean the same thing in English, Spanish and Swedish recipes.
- You filter on the EU’s 14 allergens, not only the common ones.
- You want to cache the recipes your users open without a one-hour limit.
- You want a free account without a backlink requirement for the API itself.
Questions
Is there a free alternative to Spoonacular?
Tiny Plates is free, with 50 requests a day and 300 a week. Spoonacular has a free plan too, with 50 points a day and a required backlink.
Can I cache Spoonacular data?
For at most one hour, and with written permission. The recipe id, title and image URL may be kept longer.
Can I use both?
Yes. They cover different ground: Tiny Plates for the recipe itself, Spoonacular for grocery products and restaurant menus.
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.