TheMealDB
Free crowd-sourced recipe database: search thousands of meals worldwide by name, ingredient, or cuisine, with photos and step-by-step instructions.
TheMealDB is an open, crowd-sourced database of recipes with full instructions, ingredient lists (up to 20 measured ingredients per meal), category/area/tag metadata, thumbnail images, and YouTube links. The JSON API lets you search by name or first letter, look up a meal by id, fetch a random meal, list all categories/areas/ingredients, and filter by ingredient, category, or area. Use the public test key '1' in the URL path for development and educational use. Ideal for building recipe-suggestion skills, meal planners, or 'what can I cook with X' automations.
Free tier
Free with public test key '1' for development and education (verified live in 2026). Becoming a Patreon supporter unlocks a production key plus v2-only endpoints (multi-ingredient filter, 10-random meals, latest meals); no fixed price is published. The site and core API remain free at the point of access.Rate limits
Not published; no documented per-key limit on the free test key. Be considerate with request volume and cache where possible.Auth
API keyBase URL
https://www.themealdb.com/api/json/v1/1What you'd build with it
- Recipe-suggestion or meal-planning Claude Skill
- 'What can I cook with these ingredients' automation via filter.php?i=
- Random recipe-of-the-day content generator
- Cuisine/category browsing UI seeded from list.php
Key endpoints
- GET
/search.php?s={name}Search meals by name (also ?f={letter} to list by first letter) - GET
/lookup.php?i={id}Full meal details by meal id - GET
/random.phpFetch a single random meal - GET
/categories.phpList all meal categories with descriptions and images - GET
/filter.php?i={ingredient}Filter meals by main ingredient (e.g. chicken_breast) - GET
/list.php?a=listList all areas/cuisines; also ?c=list and ?i=list
Members get the runnable recipe
Sign in free to copy the example request, see a sample response, and read the gotchas.