--- title: "Frequently asked questions — Tiny Plates" description: "Answers to the questions people ask most about Tiny Plates: price, limits, languages, allergens, AI agents and MCP, attribution and commercial use." url: "https://www.tinyplates.dev/faq" --- Tiny Plates / Questions # Questions Short answers about the recipe API, its limits and how the recipes may be used. ## The basics ### What is Tiny Plates? Tiny Plates is a recipe API and MCP server. It serves thousands of recipes from public recipe sites in one structured shape: ingredients split into quantity, unit and name, numbered steps, times, servings, nutrition, diets and allergen flags. ### Is the Tiny Plates recipe API free? There is a free plan, and it needs no credit card. For more requests, Personal is $5 a month and Business $20, with extra requests at $1 per 1,000\. Prices are before tax. See https://www.tinyplates.dev/pricing. ### How many requests can I make? On Free, 50 requests a day and 300 a week, shared by all of the account's keys. Personal includes 5,000 requests a month and Business 20,000\. If you need more than 20,000 a day, write to chris@pullpanda.io and say what you are building. ### Do I need an API key? Yes. Create a free account, make a key in the dashboard and send it as a bearer token in the Authorization header. ### What is the API base URL? https://api.tinyplates.dev. The full API is described in OpenAPI 3.1 at https://api.tinyplates.dev/openapi.json. ## The recipes ### Which languages are the recipes in? English, Spanish and Swedish. Every ingredient also gets a canonical English name, so the same ingredient matches across languages. ### Does the API flag allergens? Yes. Each recipe says true or false for the 14 allergens the EU regulates, plus the US definitions of wheat and tree nuts. The flags are worked out by software from the ingredient list, so treat them as information and check the source before relying on them for an allergy. ### How does recipe search work? By meaning as well as wording, so a search for "creamy pasta" also finds carbonara. You can filter by time, diet, allergens, nutrition, equipment and ingredients to include or leave out. ### Can it do more than return recipes? Yes. The API matches recipes to a pantry, scales servings, converts between metric and imperial, suggests substitutions and merges several recipes into one shopping list grouped by aisle. ### Where do the recipes come from? From the structured data public recipe pages already publish for search engines. Every recipe links back to its source and credits its author. ## AI agents ### Can AI agents use Tiny Plates? Yes. Tiny Plates runs an MCP server at https://api.tinyplates.dev/mcp over streamable HTTP. Agents such as Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and VS Code can connect to it and sign in with your Tiny Plates account, or send an API key. ### Can my AI app call the API at run time? Yes. Agents and LLM apps may call the API while they answer a user, the same as any other app, as long as they credit the recipe source. ### Can I train a model on the recipes? Not without asking first. To train a model on the recipes, or for bulk access to the dataset, write to chris@pullpanda.io. There is often a way to say yes. ## Using the recipes ### Can I use Tiny Plates in a commercial app? Yes, as long as you keep to the terms: credit the recipe source, link to it, and do not copy the index in bulk. ### How do I credit a recipe? Credit the source and link to the URL in the recipe’s source field wherever you show the recipe. ### Can I cache recipes? Yes, cache the recipes your users ask for and let the cache expire. Building your own copy of the index is not allowed. ### Is there an uptime guarantee? No. No plan comes with an uptime promise yet. The status page shows whether the API is answering right now. ### I publish recipes. How do I opt out? Write to chris@pullpanda.io and your site will be removed.