Mealie
Open-source app to host yourself to manage recipes and plan meals: recipe import from compatible sites, from an HTML or JSON fragment or by hand, editor with Markdown, meal plan on a calendar (breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks), shopping lists from ingredients, accounts and sharing per household, full backups, webhooks and REST API, migration from Paprika, Tandoor, Recipe Keeper and Copy Me That. SQLite by default (about 20 users), PostgreSQL recommended beyond that. Community translations on Crowdin; a hosted offer from the same creator exists (Recipinned).
A recipe database with ingredients, quantities, portion scaling and a shopping list is a classic data model, and Mealie is a very clean version of it. For a professional kitchen, most of what a recipe card needs is missing: ingredient cost, margin, regulatory allergens and yield. Mealie suits a team recipe book; for recipe cards with costs, a custom tool linked to your purchase prices is more suitable.
What you lose
- Recipe import from thousands of sites.
- The automatic meal plan and shopping list.
- Full backups and the API.
- The interface translated by the community.
Existing alternatives to Mealie
- Tandoor RecipesOpen source
Open-source recipe manager with meal planning, shopping lists and import from many sites, self-hosted.
What a home-built tool costs once it exists
- Hosting and database: a server cost, and automatic backups you actually test.
- Security and GDPR: dependency updates, an HTTPS certificate, protection of your customers’ data.
- Upkeep time: who fixes the tool on a Saturday night in the middle of service if the server goes down?
The prompt to build it yourself
Build a database of kitchen recipe cards, replacing a recipe notebook. Context: a 40-seat restaurant, 60 dishes, a head chef and 2 cooks. To do: - Ingredients with unit, purchase price per kilo or piece, yield (loss when peeling) and allergens (the 14 regulatory ones). - Recipe cards: ingredients, weights for 10 portions, steps, photo. - Automatic calculation of ingredient cost per portion, margin and recommended selling price from a coefficient. - Scaling of quantities for any number of covers. - A card's allergens deduced from its ingredients, and a one-page print. - A CSV export of all cards with their cost. Out of scope: import from websites, meal planning, shopping. Stack: web app, SQLite. README: how to run, backup, and a reminder that allergens must be rechecked each time a product changes.
Frequently asked questions
- How much does Mealie cost, and what do you really pay for?
- Listed price: free. What the subscription covers and is hard to maintain yourself: Recipe import from thousands of sites.; The automatic meal plan and shopping list.; Full backups and the API.; The interface translated by the community..
- What free or open-source alternatives to Mealie exist?
- Tandoor Recipes (open source). Options to compare before committing to a custom build.
- Where do you start to build an equivalent of Mealie?
- Copy this page’s prompt into Claude, Codex or Cursor to get a first prototype. Then plan for hosting, data backups and GDPR compliance: that is what costs the most to maintain over time.
How are our verdicts established? Read our detailed methodology ↗
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