# Tiny Plates

> Tiny Plates is a recipe API and MCP server for apps and AI agents, with a free plan. It serves thousands of recipes from across the web in one structured model: parsed ingredients with quantities and units, numbered steps, times, servings, nutrition, diets and allergen flags, in English, Spanish and Swedish.

- REST API base URL: https://api.tinyplates.dev, authenticated with an API key sent as a bearer token. Free accounts get 50 requests a day and 300 a week. Paid plans start at $5 a month: https://www.tinyplates.dev/pricing
- OpenAPI 3.1 description: https://api.tinyplates.dev/openapi.json
- MCP server (streamable HTTP, OAuth sign-in or API key): https://api.tinyplates.dev/mcp
- Sign up for a key: https://www.tinyplates.dev/sign-up
- Recipes belong to their publishers. Credit the source and link to the `source.url` a recipe carries. AI agents and LLM apps may call the API at run time; for training on the recipes or bulk access, contact us first.
- Every page on https://www.tinyplates.dev has a Markdown copy at its address plus ".md" (the landing page is /index.md). https://www.tinyplates.dev/llms-full.txt has the documentation in one file.

## Getting started

- [Introduction](https://www.tinyplates.dev/docs.md): A read API for thousands of recipes from across the web, in one model: structured ingredients, numbered steps, times in seconds, nutrition and media.
- [Quickstart](https://www.tinyplates.dev/docs/quickstart.md): Make your first request to the Tiny Plates recipe API in curl, JavaScript or Python, then read the recipes, ingredients and steps it sends back.
- [Authentication](https://www.tinyplates.dev/docs/authentication.md): How API keys work: creating one in the dashboard, sending it as a bearer token, and what the API answers when a key is missing or revoked.
- [Use from your agent](https://www.tinyplates.dev/docs/mcp.md): Connect Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, VS Code, Gemini CLI or any MCP client to Tiny Plates, sign in with your account, and let your agent search recipes.

## Core concepts

- [The recipe object](https://www.tinyplates.dev/docs/recipe-object.md): The recipe object the API returns, field by field: ingredients, instructions, times, servings, nutrition, dietary flags, allergen evidence and media.
- [Filtering and vocabularies](https://www.tinyplates.dev/docs/filtering.md): Filter recipes by cuisine, course, category, diet, ingredient, language and total time, and the closed vocabularies each filter accepts.
- [Pagination](https://www.tinyplates.dev/docs/pagination.md): How to page through recipe lists with limit and offset, what the pagination object in each response holds, and where the page size caps are.
- [Errors](https://www.tinyplates.dev/docs/errors.md): Every error the Tiny Plates API can return, the JSON envelope they all share, the status codes they use, and what to do about each one.
- [Rate limits](https://www.tinyplates.dev/docs/rate-limits.md): How requests count against each plan's daily and weekly limits, what a 429 looks like, when it resets and how to stay under.

## Search

- [Search recipes](https://www.tinyplates.dev/docs/api/search-recipes.md): Search recipes by meaning as well as wording, across names, ingredients and descriptions, and return only the fields you need.

## Recipes

- [Popular recipes](https://www.tinyplates.dev/docs/api/popular-recipes.md): The best-loved recipes in the database, ranked by rating and by how many people rated them, so one five-star review cannot beat a long-loved favourite.
- [Get a recipe](https://www.tinyplates.dev/docs/api/get-recipe.md): Fetch a single recipe by its id, with structured ingredients, numbered steps, times, nutrition and media, scaled to the number of servings you ask for.
- [Cook from your pantry](https://www.tinyplates.dev/docs/api/pantry-recipes.md): Rank recipes by how much of them your pantry already covers, with the missing ingredients listed, so you can see what you can cook right now.
- [Build a shopping list](https://www.tinyplates.dev/docs/api/shopping-list.md): Turn several recipes and their serving counts into one shopping list, grouped by aisle, with the amounts of shared ingredients added together.
- [List recipes](https://www.tinyplates.dev/docs/api/list-recipes.md): Business plan only. Page through the whole database, newest first, filtered by cuisine, course, category, diet, ingredient, language or total time.

## Reference

- [Ingredient substitutions](https://www.tinyplates.dev/docs/api/substitutions.md): What to use instead of an ingredient, in what amount and how to handle it, and when the swap does not work. An ingredient with no known swap gets no guess.
- [List ingredients](https://www.tinyplates.dev/docs/api/list-ingredients.md): The canonical ingredient vocabulary, most used first, with every spelling seen per language, so "tomat", "Tomate" and "tomato" resolve to one id.
- [Vocabularies](https://www.tinyplates.dev/docs/api/vocabularies.md): The closed lists recipes are classified with: cuisines, courses, diets, EU and US regulated allergen features, and units. Fetch them once and cache them.

## About Tiny Plates

- [Tiny Plates facts](https://www.tinyplates.dev/facts.md): Tiny Plates in plain facts: what the recipe API serves, what it costs, its limits, how to sign in, how the recipes may be used and how to reach us.
- [Frequently asked questions](https://www.tinyplates.dev/faq.md): Answers to the questions people ask most about Tiny Plates: price, limits, languages, allergens, AI agents and MCP, attribution and commercial use.
- [About Tiny Plates and its recipe API](https://www.tinyplates.dev/about.md): Tiny Plates turns recipes from across the web into structured, consistent data — a free recipe API to build apps and agents on.
- [Terms of service](https://www.tinyplates.dev/terms.md): The terms for using the Tiny Plates API: one account, keys you keep to yourself, 50 requests a day and 300 a week, and attribution for the recipes you serve on.
- [Changelog](https://www.tinyplates.dev/changelog.md): What has changed in the Tiny Plates recipe API, MCP server and documentation, newest first.
- [Status](https://www.tinyplates.dev/status.md): Whether the Tiny Plates recipe API and MCP server are answering right now, and how quickly.

## Compare recipe APIs

- [Best recipe APIs compared](https://www.tinyplates.dev/compare.md): Recipe APIs side by side: price, limits, data and terms.
- [Tiny Plates vs Spoonacular: a Spoonacular alternative](https://www.tinyplates.dev/compare/spoonacular.md): 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 Edamam: an Edamam recipe API alternative](https://www.tinyplates.dev/compare/edamam.md): 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 TheMealDB: a TheMealDB alternative](https://www.tinyplates.dev/compare/themealdb.md): 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 the Tasty API: a Tasty API alternative](https://www.tinyplates.dev/compare/tasty.md): Tasty’s recipes through a third-party listing on RapidAPI. Plans and quotas are set there.
- [Yummly API replacement](https://www.tinyplates.dev/compare/yummly.md): Closed. The API shut in September 2019 and the app and website went offline in December 2024.

## Examples

- [Fridge Roulette](https://www.tinyplates.dev/examples/fridge-roulette.md): Type in what's in your fridge, hit Spin and land on a recipe you can cook tonight, with swaps for anything you're missing.
- [Meal Planner](https://www.tinyplates.dev/examples/meal-planner.md): Plan a week of lunches and dinners in one go: quick lunches, easy weeknights and a bigger cook at the weekend. Tick a diet, then swap anything you do not fancy.
- [Shopping list builder](https://www.tinyplates.dev/examples/shopping-list.md): Pick recipes and watch one shopping list assemble itself, grouped by aisle, with shared ingredients added together by the API.

## Blog

- [Free food APIs for developers: the complete list](https://www.tinyplates.dev/blog/free-food-apis.md): Every free food API worth knowing in 2026, with the real free limits, the license, and one request you can paste into a terminal.
- [Yummly is gone. Here's what to use instead](https://www.tinyplates.dev/blog/yummly-alternatives.md): The Yummly API closed in 2019 and the app went offline in December 2024. Here are honest Yummly alternatives for cooks (Supercook, Samsung Food, Paprika, Plan to Eat) and for developers (Tiny Plates, Spoonacular, Edamam, TheMealDB).
- [Spoonacular alternatives: what to use instead, and what it costs](https://www.tinyplates.dev/blog/spoonacular-alternatives.md): Points, a small free plan and a one-hour caching rule send a lot of developers looking. Here's what Spoonacular does well, the alternatives worth a look, and a field-by-field migration guide.
- [The best recipe APIs in 2026, free and paid, compared](https://www.tinyplates.dev/blog/best-recipe-apis.md): An honest look at the recipe APIs still around in 2026: free tiers, prices, caching rules and data quality. Plus which one to pick for a hobby project, a production app or an AI agent.
- [Build a weekly meal planner with React and the Tiny Plates API](https://www.tinyplates.dev/blog/build-a-weekly-meal-planner-with-react.md): A step-by-step guide to building a weekly meal planner with Vite and React. It fills a week of lunches and dinners from the Tiny Plates /search endpoint, keeps to your diets and lets you swap any meal.
- [Build Fridge Roulette: a what-can-I-cook app with React](https://www.tinyplates.dev/blog/build-a-fridge-roulette-app-with-react.md): A step-by-step guide to building a small Vite and React app that spins up a recipe from whatever is in your fridge, using the Tiny Plates /pantry and /substitutions endpoints.
- [Give your agent a recipe database](https://www.tinyplates.dev/blog/tiny-plates-mcp-server.md): Connect Tiny Plates over MCP and your agent can search real recipes, scale them, cook from the fridge and build shopping lists.
- [One shopping list for a week of recipes](https://www.tinyplates.dev/blog/one-shopping-list-for-a-week-of-recipes.md): Send up to 20 recipes and get back one shopping list, added up and sorted by aisle. Plus: scaling, unit conversion and cooking from your fridge.
- [Allergen data for every recipe](https://www.tinyplates.dev/blog/allergen-data-for-every-recipe.md): Every recipe tells you which of 16 allergens it contains. Here's how we work it out, how to filter on it, and what you can build with it.
- [Ingredient lines that read in the recipe's own language](https://www.tinyplates.dev/blog/ingredient-lines-in-the-recipes-language.md): Ingredient lines now come back in the recipe's own language, with clean English data underneath. Plus: recipes keep their sections.

## Optional

- [Kitchen glossary](https://www.tinyplates.dev/glossary.md): Cooking terms explained, each with recipes from the API that use it.
- [Glossary: Dry-heat cooking](https://www.tinyplates.dev/glossary/category/dry-heat-cooking.md): Cooking with hot air, fat or direct heat: roasting, searing, grilling, frying and the rest.
- [Glossary: Moist-heat cooking](https://www.tinyplates.dev/glossary/category/moist-heat-cooking.md): Cooking in water, steam, stock or fat at a gentle heat: boiling, poaching, braising and stewing.
- [Glossary: Knife skills and preparation](https://www.tinyplates.dev/glossary/category/knife-skills.md): The cuts, from brunoise to chiffonade, and the ways to prepare meat, fish and vegetables before they are cooked.
- [Glossary: Baking and dough](https://www.tinyplates.dev/glossary/category/baking-and-dough.md): Mixing, kneading, proofing and the pastries, creams and doughs that baking recipes take for granted.
- [Glossary: Sauces and stocks](https://www.tinyplates.dev/glossary/category/sauces-and-stocks.md): The mother sauces, stocks, butters and flavor bases that so many recipes start from.
- [Glossary: Doneness and temperature](https://www.tinyplates.dev/glossary/category/doneness-and-temperature.md): How to tell when food is cooked: doneness for meat, sugar stages and the tests recipes ask for.
- [Glossary: Kitchen science](https://www.tinyplates.dev/glossary/category/kitchen-science.md): What happens to food when you cook it, and why browning, brining and resting work.
- [Glossary: Measurements](https://www.tinyplates.dev/glossary/category/measurements.md): Cups, spoons, grams, Swedish deciliters and the vague amounts such as a knob or a pinch.
- [Glossary: Recipe phrases](https://www.tinyplates.dev/glossary/category/recipe-phrases.md): The phrases recipes use without explaining them, from “until fragrant” to “coat the back of a spoon”.
- [Glossary: Regional names](https://www.tinyplates.dev/glossary/category/regional-names.md): Ingredients with a different name in the US, the UK and Australia, so you buy the right thing.
- [Glossary: Pantry ingredients](https://www.tinyplates.dev/glossary/category/pantry-ingredients.md): Sauces, spices, vinegars and other pantry ingredients that recipes from around the world call for.
- [Glossary: Nordic ingredients](https://www.tinyplates.dev/glossary/category/nordic-ingredients.md): Swedish and Nordic ingredients, what they are, and what to use outside Scandinavia.
- [Glossary: Dishes](https://www.tinyplates.dev/glossary/category/dishes.md): Kinds of dishes, from bisque to terrine, and what a recipe means when it names one.
- [Glossary: Equipment](https://www.tinyplates.dev/glossary/category/equipment.md): Pots, pans, knives and tools, what each is for, and what to use if you do not have it.
- [Glossary: Diets and allergens](https://www.tinyplates.dev/glossary/category/diets-and-allergens.md): Diets and the major food allergens, with the EU and US definitions side by side.
- [Glossary: Food safety and storage](https://www.tinyplates.dev/glossary/category/food-safety.md): Storing, cooling, freezing, thawing and preserving food safely.
- [Glossary: Kitchen workflow](https://www.tinyplates.dev/glossary/category/kitchen-workflow.md): How a kitchen is run: mise en place, tasting as you go and plating.