Edamam Pricing

Edamam pricing is three products with three bills. On 1 October 2026 the Food Database API starts at $14 a month for 100,000 calls. The Nutrition Analysis API starts at $29 a month and charges a license for every new recipe you analyze, then keeps charging for those recipes in later months. The Recipe Search API starts at $9 a month for 10,000 calls. Teams that say “Edamam is $14” have priced one of the three.

The food database, which is the one that looks like us

This is search, UPC, autocomplete, and NLP on a food string. Edamam’s comparison table:

Attribution is required on every column. Caching on the paid food plans is not “store the response.” Basic may cache a food id and a label. Higher food plans add protein, net carbs, total fat, and calories, and only inside the end user’s own account. Full nutrient panels are meant to be fetched again, not copied into your database. Their terms also ban automated harvesting. A background job that walks the catalog is how accounts get shut off.

Basic is a lot of calls for $14. On a pure request-price comparison with our Basic plan ($15 for 20,000 non-commercial calls), Edamam’s food database wins the spreadsheet. Take it if you accept the cache limits, the attribution, and the separate bills below.

The nutrition analysis bill that grows after you stop shipping recipes

Recipe analysis is not included in the $14. Edamam’s nutrition docs describe the meter in a way most pricing pages never do: once you submit a recipe, you pay a monthly licensing fee for that recipe, and resubmitting it the naive way counts as a new recipe. They use ETags so a refresh need not count again. Their own example:

• Month 1, 100 new recipes. You license 100.
• Month 2, 50 new recipes. You license 150.
• Month 3, 1 new recipe. You license 151.
• Month 4, you add nothing. You still license 151.

The same pattern applies to ingredient text lines. The published analysis plans on 1 October 2026 are Enterprise Basic Multilingual at $29 a month (2,500 recipes and 10,000 text lines) and Enterprise Core at $299 a month (50,000 recipes and 100,000 lines). Basic analysis is marked not for commercial use. Caching of the four macros starts on Core, not Basic.

That is a different company from a food-search API. It is the right buy when the product ingests recipes and you want Edamam to return the label. It is a painful buy when a developer “just tests” a few hundred recipes in staging and the license count does not reset.

Calorie API does not sell that endpoint. You resolve each ingredient with search, then multiply per-100g macros by the grams in the recipe. More code. No accumulating recipe license. The food ids you store are yours to cache within the plan: the commercial license allows Plus customers up to 30 days, which is a different rule from Edamam’s four-macro cap and from Spoonacular’s one-hour cap.

Vision and recipe search are extra columns

Vision on the food database is included in small amounts on Basic (500 a month, 50 a day) and billed at $0.015 a call on Core. Image-to-calorie on our side is Enterprise only, not a line on Basic. If a photo of a plate is the feature, compare Vision’s per-call price with an Enterprise conversation here, and do not assume either one is in the cheap tier.

Recipe Search at $9 / $99 / $399 is a content catalog (images, ingredients, diet filters), closer to Spoonacular than to a logging API. Commercial use and attribution rules differ by API. Price the API you will call, not the brand.

A startup bill you can actually add up

Say the product logs foods and barcodes, and once a week someone pastes a recipe.

The $14 plan is real, and for a non-commercial prototype that only searches foods it can be the lower invoice. The moment the app charges users, our Free, Basic, and Core plans are the wrong SKU even if the dollar figure is smaller. Plus at $150 is the commercial food-search number to put next to Edamam’s food database plus analysis.

When Edamam is the better product: you want their NLP to pull quantity out of a sentence, their 70 diet and allergen filters, or a maintained recipe-analysis license and you have read the accumulation example. The feature comparison, without repeating this price sheet, is the Edamam alternative page.