YMove vs Spoonacular: Recipe API Comparison

Spoonacular ships ~365k recipes with deep search functionality, ingredient substitution suggestions, meal plan generation, and a wine-pairing extra. For recipe-only products, it is hard to beat on raw breadth and feature depth. The entry-level $5/mo plan is also lower than YMove's $19/mo, if you only need recipes.

Most teams that ship a recipe app also ship a calorie tracker, macro counter, or exercise component. With Spoonacular, you bolt on a separate nutrition api and a separate exercise api. The total stack often costs $34/mo or more.

YMove rolls all of that into one $19/mo plan with a single API key. Recipe search, per-ingredient USDA-mapped nutrition, food database, barcode lookup, AI food logging from text and photo, exercise videos, and workout generation are all reachable from the same auth.

Spoonacular computes per-ingredient nutrition by parsing the ingredient string and looking up matching foods. The matching is good but not perfect, and edge cases (ambiguous units, brand-only items) can drift. YMove maps each ingredient to a specific USDA FoodData Central row at recipe-write time, so per-ingredient calories and macros are consistent and reproducible across recipes.

# Spoonacular: complex recipe search
GET /recipes/complexSearch?query=chicken&diet=high-protein

# YMove: equivalent
GET /api/v2/recipes/search?query=chicken&diet=high_protein

# Spoonacular: recipe details
GET /recipes/{id}/information

# YMove: recipe details
GET /api/v2/recipes/{slug}

If you only need recipes (no nutrition tracker, no exercise content, no macro logging), Spoonacular at $5/mo is the cheaper entry point and has a larger recipe corpus. Pick Spoonacular for pure recipe products. Pick YMove if you also need food database, barcode lookup, AI food logging, or exercise content under one key.