Mealie

Mealie addresses the frustration of recipe management in the modern kitchen where valuable recipes scatter across bookmarked websites that eventually disappear, handwritten cards that get lost or damaged, and multiple apps that fragment collections across incompatible platforms. By providing a centralized self-hosted repository that imports recipes from any website with a single click, Mealie ensures favorite recipes remain permanently accessible regardless of what happens to original sources, while the meal planning and shopping list features transform static recipe collections into active tools that simplify weekly food preparation and grocery shopping.

Common Use Cases

Home cooks consolidate recipes from food blogs, cooking websites, and family traditions into a single searchable collection, using the automatic import feature to extract recipes from URLs without manually copying ingredients and instructions from ad-heavy websites that make reading recipes frustrating. The permanent local storage ensures recipes remain available even when original websites change, remove content, or go offline entirely. Families plan weekly meals using the calendar interface, dragging favorite recipes to specific days and automatically generating shopping lists that combine ingredients across all planned meals, eliminating the duplicate purchases and forgotten items that occur when shopping from memory or incomplete lists. Parents assign cooking responsibilities by sharing meal plans with household members who can view scheduled recipes and preparation requirements from their own devices. Meal preppers organize batch cooking sessions by planning multiple recipes that share common ingredients, using the combined shopping list to purchase efficiently and the scaled serving sizes to prepare appropriate quantities for the week ahead. The nutritional information helps track macros and calories across planned meals without manual calculation. Budget-conscious households reduce food waste by planning meals around ingredients already on hand, using the pantry tracking features to identify what needs using before expiration and searching recipes by available ingredients rather than shopping for entirely new meals each week. Health-focused families organize recipes by dietary requirements using custom tags for low-carb, vegetarian, gluten-free, or allergen-free meals, quickly filtering large collections to find appropriate options when planning meals for family members with different dietary needs or restrictions.

Key Features

• One-click recipe import from URLs
• Automatic ingredient and instruction extraction
• Meal planning calendar with drag-and-drop
• Automated shopping list generation
• Recipe scaling for different serving sizes
• Nutritional information display
• Multi-user household support
• Recipe categorization with tags
• Full-text search across recipes
• Mobile-friendly cooking mode
• Recipe sharing via links
• Backup and restore functionality
• API for integrations
• Dark mode support
• Multiple language support
• Cookbook organization

Why deploy Mealie on Hostinger VPS

Deploying Mealie on Hostinger VPS provides families with complete ownership of recipe collections that represent years of culinary exploration, family traditions, and personal modifications that commercial recipe apps could lose through service discontinuation, data breaches, or policy changes that restrict access to previously saved content. Unlike commercial meal planning services that charge monthly subscription fees for premium features like unlimited recipes, advanced meal planning, or shopping list integrations, self-hosted Mealie provides all features without ongoing costs beyond VPS hosting. The VPS deployment ensures recipe data remains private, preventing the advertising networks and data brokers that monetize commercial recipe apps from analyzing cooking habits, dietary preferences, and shopping patterns to build consumer profiles. Self-hosting enables unlimited recipe storage without the collection caps that free tiers of commercial services impose, allowing comprehensive preservation of every recipe worth saving rather than curating collections to fit arbitrary limits. For families with members in different locations, VPS deployment provides a central recipe repository accessible from anywhere, enabling shared meal planning between households, recipe contributions from extended family, and preservation of family culinary traditions in a single accessible location. The dedicated resources ensure responsive performance when browsing large recipe collections, importing multiple recipes, or generating shopping lists for complex meal plans, avoiding the slowdowns that affect shared cloud services during peak usage periods.