Yummly is gone. Here's where to go.
On December 20, 2024, Yummly shut down. Whirlpool had laid off the team eight months earlier. There was no bulk export — users could only download recipes one at a time, and many people lost years of saved meals. Seventeen months later, the diaspora is still looking for a home. Here's a practical guide to the options, and a step-by-step for migrating to Braisery.
What happened, briefly
Yummly launched in 2009 and grew into one of the largest recipe aggregation platforms on the web — a "save once, find later" bookmark service backed by a recommendation engine. Whirlpool acquired it in 2017. In April 2024, the team was laid off. On December 20, 2024, the website and apps went dark.
The shutdown was announced with limited notice. The official export tool let users download recipes one at a time, in a format that didn't import cleanly into most other apps. People with hundreds or thousands of saved recipes were given a few weeks to manually copy each one. A lot of recipes were simply lost.
What you're actually trying to do
If you're reading this in 2026 and still looking, you're in one of three buckets:
- You saved the original URLs. You have a browser bookmark folder, a Notes app list, or a Google Doc full of links to recipes on cooking blogs you actually want. This is the easy case — any modern recipe app can re-import those URLs.
- You exported one-by-one before the shutdown. You have a folder of individual Yummly export files (HTML or PDF). The recipes are intact but in a format most apps don't read directly; you'll need to either find the source URL on each one and re-import, or paste the text into a new recipe.
- You lost everything. You didn't make it to the export tool in time. Most of what's gone is gone — but you almost certainly remember the dozen or two recipes you actually cooked, and the blogs you got them from are still up. Start there.
The candidates in 2026
The four apps that come up most often in Reddit threads about Yummly replacements are Paprika, Mela, Crouton, and Pestle. Each has trade-offs:
| App | Mac version | Pricing model | Notable strength |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paprika | Yes (native) | ~$35 to cover the Apple ecosystem (per-platform) | Mature import; large user base; also runs on Windows and Android |
| Mela | Yes | Freemium | Beautiful design; iCloud sync |
| Crouton | Yes | Subscription for AI/Mac | Strong on-device AI for parsing handwritten and photo recipes |
| Pestle | iPad app only (no native Mac) | One-time + IAP | iOS-first; well-regarded SwiftUI app |
| Braisery | Yes | $19.99 once, universal | Native multiplatform SwiftUI; on-device Apple Foundation Models |
We'll be straightforward: we built Braisery, so we're going to explain it in the most detail. But if Paprika's per-platform pricing or Mela's freemium model works better for your situation, those are both real apps with real users — go install one. The point is that there's a home for your recipes.
Migrating to Braisery
The Yummly migration path in Braisery has three steps, and the only manual work is on you, not the app.
Step 1 — collect your URLs
Open Notes (or any text file) and make a list of the original blog URLs for the recipes you want back. If you saved bookmarks in Safari or Chrome, those will be your starting point. If you have old Yummly export files, open them and copy the source URL out of each — it's usually at the top of the file under "Source."
Don't worry about being exhaustive. Most people find that out of hundreds of "saved" recipes, the actual list of "recipes I'd cook again" is twenty or thirty. Start with that.
Step 2 — paste them into Braisery
In Braisery, tap Import from URL and paste a link. The app parses schema.org/Recipe, the open structured-data format that most cooking blogs already publish. When the JSON-LD isn't there or is incomplete, on-device Apple Foundation Models fill in the gaps — title, ingredients, instructions, timing, yield. Nothing leaves your device.
If you're on a Mac, you can drag a list of URLs onto the Braisery window to import them in a batch. On iOS, the share extension does the same thing from any browser — long-press a recipe link, share to Braisery, and it lands in your Library.
Step 3 — organize and back up
Group the recipes into Cookbooks — "Weeknight Dinners," "Holiday Favorites," whatever fits how you actually cook. Heart the ones you love so they're easy to find from the Library hero. Turn on iCloud sync in Settings if you want them on every device.
Then back up. Settings → Export library → Generate
produces a single .braiseryarchive file — a bundle
containing every recipe, cookbook, tag, and photo on the device,
ready to stash in your cloud-drive of choice or restore on a new
Mac. We never want you to be in the situation Yummly users were in
last year: Braisery's data leaves Braisery cleanly, any time you
want it.
What if I can't find the original URL?
A few options:
- Search the recipe title. Paste the recipe name into Google with the original blog name (if you remember it). Most cooking blogs still have the post up; URLs only break when sites migrate, and SEO-friendly slugs usually stick.
- Try the Wayback Machine. If a blog has gone offline, web.archive.org often has the recipe page archived. Paste the Wayback URL into Braisery — it parses the archived markup the same way.
- Type it in. For recipes that exist only in your Yummly export, use Braisery's recipe editor to enter the title, ingredients, and steps. It takes about five minutes per recipe; for the two or three recipes you actually cook regularly, that's a fair trade.
A note on what comes next
Yummly was free, ad-supported, and ultimately disposable to the company that owned it. The recipes you cook from for years shouldn't depend on whether a parent company is having a good quarter.
Whatever app you migrate to, look for two things: a clean export path so your data can leave on your terms, and a business model where the app is the product. A paid-once indie app — Paprika, or Braisery, or one of the others — won't quietly disappear because the ad rev dried up. A subscription app at least has a recurring revenue line; an ad-supported app at scale is only viable while it's at scale.
Whichever one you pick, get your recipes out of a service that doesn't owe you anything, and into a library that does.
Try Braisery for your Yummly recipes.
$19.99 once. iPhone, iPad & Mac. URL import with on-device AI fallback.
Get Braisery on the App Store See the tour