Healthy Food Recipe Apps Free: What Each Free Tier Shows

Healthy food recipe apps free to use rarely give you nutrition numbers and a full feature set in the same tier. In October 2026, Samsung Food and Well Stockd show nutrition on recipes without payment. Cronometer and MyFitnessPal track it free, and Eat This Much plans one day free.

This page sorts free recipe apps by what the free tier actually shows about nutrition and eating style. It doesn't decide which food is healthy. That call belongs to you and, if you need one, a dietitian.

How did we compare healthy food recipe apps free to use?

We read each app's own pricing, help and feature pages in October 2026 and wrote down three things: what you can do without paying, what nutrition numbers appear, and whether you can filter or plan by an eating style. Where an app's pages didn't say, we say that instead of guessing.

We left out apps that don't have a free tier you can use for real. We also left out Yummly. Whirlpool shut the Yummly app and website down in December 2024 (The Spoon reported the layoffs in April 2024, and a support page for the legacy platform records the discontinuation). Our Yummly alternatives guide covers where its users went.

Two terms need defining. "Free" here means the app keeps working without a subscription, even if some features are locked. "Healthy" means the app shows numbers or tags that help you judge a recipe yourself: calories, macros, diet labels. Nothing more.

Healthy food recipe apps free: the comparison table

Sources for every cell are linked in the sections below. Prices appear only where an app's own page states them, dated October 2026.

What does Samsung Food show for free?

Samsung Food is the closest of these to a free all-in-one recipe app with nutrition. Its free meal planner page says the meal planning service is free for all users and lists weekly and daily plans, web recipes added to the plan, shared plans and shopping lists. It also describes a nutritional breakdown and Health Score for recipes.

Its help article on nutrition explains how the numbers work. Samsung Food converts ingredient quantities to grams and multiplies them by stored nutrition values per 100 grams. The Health Score is a proprietary 1 to 10 rating that Samsung Food calculates itself, so treat it as the company's opinion, not a standard.

The paid side is Samsung Food+, which its own page prices at $6.99 a month or $59.99 a year as of October 2026. Plus adds tailored 7-day plans, AI recipe personalization, a pantry list and nutrition goal tracking, and the goal tracker is listed as mobile-only. We couldn't tell from its pages exactly which nutrition views sit behind Plus apart from goal tracking, so check the app before you rely on it.

Who it suits: people who want to save recipes from anywhere, drop them into a plan and see a nutrition summary without paying. If you want a deeper comparison, see our Samsung Food alternative guide.

What does Cronometer Basic show for free?

Cronometer isn't a recipe app in the usual sense. It's a nutrition tracker, and an unusually generous free one. Its free account page lists calories and up to 95 nutrients, a database of over a million entries, and custom meals and recipes with detailed nutrition information.

Its subscription page puts the Recipe Importer under Gold. So on Basic you build a recipe by hand from foods in the database and Cronometer adds up the nutrients. That works well if you cook from your own recipes and want exact numbers. It's slow if you want to browse for ideas, because the free list doesn't mention a recipe library or a planner.

Who it suits: people who already know what they cook and want precise nutrient data for it.

What does MyFitnessPal show for free?

MyFitnessPal's free plan is a logging tool. Per its plan comparison, Free covers food and exercise logging, creating foods, meals and recipes, viewing macros and customizing calorie and macro goals by percentage. Recipe discovery is a Premium feature. The meal planner, meal prep mode, diet preference and grocery lists need Premium+.

Its Premium page listed annual prices of $79.99 for Premium and $99.99 for Premium+ as of October 2026. A 7-day trial was offered to new users.

If your aim is a healthy food recipe app free of charge, MyFitnessPal's free tier answers "what did this meal contain" better than "what should I cook tonight". That's a fair trade if tracking is the job.

What does Eat This Much show for free?

Eat This Much is built around generating a plan from your targets. Its pricing page says Free Forever includes generating daily meal plans, tracking what you eat, adding foods from barcodes and creating custom foods and recipes. A week of planning at a time, the automatic grocery list and grocery delivery integration sit on the paid plan.

The paid plan is $5 a month with annual billing, or $14.99 month to month, as of October 2026. A free 14-day trial is offered.

It's the strongest of these on eating styles. Its home page lists Mediterranean, keto, paleo, vegan and vegetarian, and its Mediterranean planner page says the diet type can be changed at any time. The catch for a free user is that you get one day at a time, so a full week means paying or repeating the process daily.

Who it suits: people with calorie or macro targets who want a plan built to hit them.

What does Well Stockd show for free?

Well Stockd is a kitchen app first. You record what's in your fridge, freezer and pantry, and it shows which recipes you can cook right now. So it's a recipe app built around a different question: what can I cook from what I have, not what should I eat.

What the free tier shows about nutrition and eating style, from the app itself:

• A library of more than 3,800 recipes, mostly two-serving dinners.
• Per-serving calories, protein, carbs, fat and fiber on almost every one. Treat them as estimates, not lab values.
• Filters for cuisine, protein, meal and time, plus a calorie cap (an "up to" kcal limit) and a fewest-calories sort.
• A food preference setting for vegetarian, vegan or pescatarian, plus a list of ingredients to exclude. A matching ingredient blocks the recipe. The app says plainly that it can't certify allergy safety, so you read labels yourself.
• Your own recipes, imported from a public recipe link, pasted text, a Paprika or Recipe Keeper export, or a photo. In the recipe editor, an estimate of nutrition can be pulled from USDA FoodData Central.

What it doesn't do: it has no food diary, no daily calorie or macro goals and no keto, paleo or gluten-free tags. It isn't a nutrition tracker. If you need Cronometer or MyFitnessPal for tracking, Well Stockd works next to them, not in place of them.

Free plans the current week by hand; planning up to eight weeks ahead, auto-planning and creating a shared household are Pro features. You can join someone else's household free with their invite code.

Who it suits: people whose real problem is food going bad and dinner decisions, who want a calorie cap and a vegetarian setting as guardrails and not a tracking regime. For the broader free-tier picture across app types, see our free recipe app guide and the guide to choosing a recipe app.

What do you see when you filter recipes by calories in Well Stockd?

Here's the working flow, since a table can't show it.

1. Open the recipe library and tap Filter.
2. Pick a meal (say, Dinner), then an "up to" calorie cap. The number of matching recipes updates before you apply.
3. Add a cuisine or a protein if you want to narrow further. Sort by fewest kcal if you'd like the lightest first.
4. Each recipe card shows time, servings and kcal per serving. Open one and the nutrition card lists calories, protein, carbs, fat and fiber per serving.
5. Add what's in your kitchen and the same list tells you which of those recipes you can make now and what you're missing for the rest.

That last step is where it differs from the other apps in the table. The others start from your goals. Well Stockd starts from your fridge, then lets you narrow by the numbers.

How should you choose among healthy food recipe apps free to start?

Match the app to the job:

You can mix two. One pairing that works is a tracker for the numbers and a kitchen app for the cooking, because the tracker doesn't know what's in your fridge and the kitchen app doesn't keep a diary.

Try it with three foods

Add three foods from your fridge and see what you can cook, then set a calorie cap and a food preference and watch the list narrow. Try it free. The features page lists everything the free tier includes, and our cook-with-what-you-have guide shows the method behind it.

FAQ

Are healthy food recipe apps free really free?

Mostly, with limits. Every app above has a free tier that keeps working, but each locks something: weekly planning, grocery lists, recipe importing or goal tracking. Read the "where free stops" column before you build a routine around one.

Which free recipe app shows calories and macros?

Samsung Food describes a nutrition breakdown on saved recipes, Cronometer and MyFitnessPal show calories and macros for foods and recipes you log, and Well Stockd shows per-serving calories, protein, carbs, fat and fiber on its library recipes. Eat This Much shows them for the plan it generates.

Can a recipe app tell me whether a recipe is healthy?

Not reliably. Samsung Food gives a Health Score that it calculates itself, and the other apps give numbers only. Nutrition figures from apps are estimates and vary by product and preparation. For medical or allergy needs, talk to a qualified professional and check labels yourself.