Host Mealie without installing anything
The household recipe binder: paste an address and the recipe walks in, plan the week, and the shopping list follows from it.
Starting at €8.99/month
Introduction
Mealie installed, updated and backed up by us, on a machine in France. You install nothing and configure no server: the application is online a few minutes after you order, under your own name.
The plan that suits it is App Confort at €8.99/month incl. VAT — 4 GB of memory. Mealie does more than store text: for every imported recipe it fetches the page, extracts the structured data, splits each ingredient line into quantity, unit and food — parsing work that runs inside the application — then builds the photo thumbnails. 1 GB keeps it running; the 4 GB absorb the import of a whole recipe collection in one evening.
If your recipes already live somewhere else, Mealie can take them over: Paprika, Nextcloud Cookbook, Tandoor, Copy Me That and Chowdown each have their own import path, images and tags included. In the other direction everything comes out as JSON with the photos, which makes a backup readable without the application. The interface installs as an app on a phone, and Home Assistant can show the day's meal on a dashboard.
What Mealie does
A recipe arrives through its address
You paste the link, Mealie reads the structured data most cooking sites publish and fills in the ingredients, the steps, the times and the picture by itself. No copy-paste to reassemble.
A meal plan, not only a list
The calendar accepts rules — fish on Friday, two vegetarian dishes a week — and can draw at random from a category when inspiration is missing.
The shopping list comes out of the plan
It adds up the quantities of the same ingredient appearing in several recipes and sorts by aisle label. Two people can tick the same list at once, each on their own phone.
It knows where you are coming from
Import paths for Paprika, Nextcloud Cookbook, Tandoor, Copy Me That and Chowdown. Export is JSON alongside the photos: your collection stays readable even without Mealie.
Who uses it, and what for
A family deciding on Sunday evening
Seven dinners placed on the calendar, the shopping list built straight after, and Tuesday's question settled before it comes up.
A shared flat splitting the shopping
Everyone adds their recipes, the list is common, and whatever is bought disappears live from the others' screens while they are still in the shop.
A guesthouse or a community kitchen
The cards are written for four and served to twenty-four: quantities recalculate, and the shopping list follows without late-night arithmetic.
A household with an allergy or a special diet
Tags and ingredient search rule out everything containing the forbidden food in one go, instead of rereading every card.
A home with automation
Home Assistant can query Mealie: the planned meal and the shopping list appear on the hallway dashboard, without opening the application.
Hosted in France
In our own infrastructure in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, which we operate ourselves. A recipe book is passed down; it should not vanish with a service that shuts.
Frequently asked questions
On those publishing structured Recipe data — the same data that makes cooking times appear in search results. That covers the great majority of cooking sites, and the import is then faithful: ingredients, steps, times, servings, photo. When that data is missing, Mealie attempts a rough extraction that needs proofreading. A blog that publishes its recipe as an image will yield nothing.
Mealie has a dedicated import path for Paprika, Nextcloud Cookbook, Tandoor, Copy Me That and Chowdown. You upload the export archive from the original service and the recipes are recreated with their images, tags and categories. Personal notes and ratings follow when the source format carries them.
That is its main purpose. It is built from the meal plan, groups the quantities of the same food coming from several recipes, and sorts by aisle label to avoid walking back. The interface installs as an app on a phone and works with one thumb, the other hand on the trolley.
App Confort, at €8.99/month incl. VAT. It provides 4 GB of memory where the application asks for 1 GB at minimum: the headroom serves the system, not the decor. You can change plan later without reinstalling.
Yes, they are part of the service. A self-hosted application left un-updated is a security risk, not a saving.