TheMealDB
Recipe database API — 300+ meals with ingredients, instructions, images, and category/area filters. The classic API for food app tutorials and hackathon projects.
🟢 Online · 42 ms
100%
Free test key for development; supporter key for production
No key required
Free alternatives (live ranking)
- TheCocktailDB — 🟢 Online · Free test key for development; supporter key for production
- Spoonacular — 🟢 Online · Free key, 150 points/day (roughly 50 recipe searches)
- Open Food Facts — 🟢 Online · No key, fair-use limits, requires an identifying User-Agent
Compare TheMealDB with…
- TheMealDB vs TheCocktailDB — Free test key for development; supporter key for production
- TheMealDB vs Spoonacular — Free key, 150 points/day (roughly 50 recipe searches)
- TheMealDB vs Open Food Facts — No key, fair-use limits, requires an identifying User-Agent
Paid alternatives
- Spoonacular — free 150/day, paid from $29/mo
- Edamam — free tier, paid from $69/mo
Frequently Asked Questions
Does TheMealDB require an API key?
No, TheMealDB is freely accessible without registration or an API key.
What is TheMealDB's free tier?
Free test key for development; supporter key for production
Is TheMealDB currently online?
We check TheMealDB every hour. The current status is shown at the top of this page. You can also see the 30-day uptime history in the chart above.
Implementation notes
When to use TheMealDB
TheMealDB is the classic recipe API for tutorials, hackathons, and food-app prototypes — 300+ meals with ingredients, step-by-step instructions, category/cuisine filters, and good food photography. The development key ('1' in the URL path) works without any signup, which is why it appears in so many YouTube tutorials. Production use asks for a supporter key via Patreon — one of the most honest 'free for learning, cheap for production' models in the catalog.
Common pitfalls
- The free test key '1' is officially for development and education only. It also caps some endpoints: `latest.php` and multi-ingredient filtering are supporter-key features. Your tutorial project works fine; your launched app should upgrade (it's a small one-time Patreon tier).
- Search is exact-ish matching on meal names — there's no fuzzy matching or typo tolerance. 'chiken' returns nothing. Add your own fuzzy layer or search by first letter (`search.php?f=c`) and filter client-side.
- Ingredients come as twenty numbered fields (`strIngredient1`...`strIngredient20`, `strMeasure1`...`strMeasure20`) rather than an array. Every integration writes the same normalization loop — do it once at the fetch boundary and never look at the raw shape again.
- The database is community-maintained and skews toward British and international home cooking. Coverage of specific dietary categories (keto, halal filtering) is thin — filter fields exist but aren't comprehensively populated.
Quick start (bash)
curl "https://www.themealdb.com/api/json/v1/1/filter.php?c=Seafood"Embed this badge
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Markdown
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