Saving recipes
Your recipe box has an expiration date
Recipe apps and sites shut down, and your notes can go with them. A short history of vanished recipe boxes, and a five-minute plan to keep your recipes yours.
The email arrives on an ordinary Tuesday. Your recipe app, the one holding six years of weeknight dinners, birthday cakes and a chili you've tweaked into something your brother-in-law asks about, is shutting down next month.
Your first thought is the chili. Your second is: wait, where did I write down the changes?
The day the app goes away
It's an odd kind of loss. Nothing burned down. The recipes still exist, mostly, somewhere on the internet. But the place where you kept them, in your order, with your stars and your scribbled substitutions, is about to stop working.
And it tends to come with a deadline. A few weeks, maybe a couple of months, to work out what you have, what can be saved and how to get it out. If you've been through it, you know the scramble: screenshots at midnight, emailing recipes to yourself one at a time, trying to remember which version of the pie crust you settled on.
This isn't a reason to panic about whatever you use now. Most services run for years. It's a reason to spend five minutes, once, making sure that if yours goes, your recipes don't go with it.
A short history of vanished recipe boxes
Recipe apps and recipe features disappear more often than you'd guess. A few recent examples, told as plainly as possible:
Mealime. The meal-planning app announced it would be discontinued on October 21, 2026. Its closing notice said that "All personal data will be deleted when the Mealime application is shut down." The notice also said Mealime's recipes would carry on in a feature called Meals Hub, inside Albertsons Companies' grocery store apps, made "100% free," and "supported by the same core team responsible for developing Mealime recipes and experiences." So the recipe catalog lived on in a new home. What the notice said would be deleted was each user's personal data.
Yummly. The recipe site and app, owned by Whirlpool since 2017, was taken offline in December 2024, with the website now pointing to KitchenAid's US site. Earlier that year, as Wikipedia notes citing trade press, the entire Yummly team had been let go. People who had saved years of recipes there had to find somewhere new to keep them.
The Allrecipes app. Allrecipes stopped offering its phone app in March 2023. This one is a gentler story: the website carried on, and according to a support reply reported at the time, recipes people had saved were still in their profiles on the site. The app was gone, but the saves weren't.
Three closings, three different outcomes. That's the point. When a service winds down, what happens to your stuff depends entirely on choices someone else makes, on their timeline.
What you actually lose
Here's the twist: the recipes themselves are usually the easy part to replace.
Most popular recipes exist in more than one place. The original blog is still up. The cookbook is still in print. You can find another good chili.
What you can't find anywhere else is the layer you added:
- Your notes. "Use half the salt." "Needs 10 more minutes in our oven." "Sub Greek yogurt for sour cream, nobody noticed."
- Your tweaks. The version of the recipe you actually make, which may have drifted a long way from the original.
- Your history. Which ones you've made, which ones you loved, which ones were a disaster you swore never to repeat.
- Your family recipes. Anything you typed in yourself from a card, a phone call or memory exists nowhere else. If you haven't captured those yet, there's a whole method for interviewing family about their recipes.
- Your organization. The tags, folders and meal plans that turned a pile of recipes into a system.
That's the irreplaceable part, and it's exactly the part that tends to live only inside the app.
Why it keeps happening
There's no villain in most of these stories. Recipe apps are businesses, and businesses change.
Some get acquired, and the new owner decides to fold the product into something else or stop running it. Yummly was bought by an appliance company. Mealime's recipes moved into a grocery company's apps. Others are small teams who can't keep going, or free products that never found a way to pay for themselves. Phones and operating systems change too, and keeping an app working takes ongoing work.
None of that is sinister. It's just the normal life cycle of software. The practical lesson is simple: any single service, however good, is a place you're visiting. It's worth keeping a copy of your recipes somewhere you control.
The five-minute backup
You can do this tonight for whatever you use now: an app, a website account, a notes app, a spreadsheet.
- Look for an export. Check the settings, account or help pages for "export," "download your data" or "backup." Many services have one, sometimes tucked away. If you can't find it, search the help pages or ask support directly, and note what they say.
- Prefer text formats. If you get a choice, pick something readable: plain text, a spreadsheet file, a web page file or a PDF. A file you can open with ordinary software today is one you can probably open in ten years. A proprietary format may only open in the app that made it.
- Keep the source link. For every recipe that came from somewhere else, make sure the original link travels with it. That's how you find the creator again, check for updates and give credit.
- Rescue your notes first. If the export leaves out your notes, or there is no export, start with the recipes you've changed the most. Copy the notes by hand if you have to. Those are the ones you can't get back.
- Keep a second copy you control. Put the export somewhere that isn't the app: your computer, a cloud drive you already pay for, or a USB stick in a drawer. A data-backup guide on the website of CISA, the US government's cybersecurity agency, recommends the "3-2-1 rule": three copies of anything important, on two different types of storage, with one kept somewhere else. For recipes, two copies in two places is already a huge step up.
- Test-open it. Open the file you just saved. Can you read it? Are the amounts there? Are your notes? A backup you've never opened is a hope, not a backup.
The first time might take fifteen minutes. After that, a quick export every few months is plenty.
What to look for next time
If you're choosing where to keep recipes, whether that's a new app, a notebook or a spreadsheet, a few questions help:
- Can I get everything out? Look for a full export of all recipes at once, not one at a time.
- In what format? Something you can open without that app, ideally text or a common file type.
- Do my notes come with it? Your annotations, ratings and tags should travel with the recipe.
- Does it keep the source? Each saved recipe should hold onto where it came from.
- Does it store text, not just links? A saved link points to a page that can change or vanish. A saved recipe in words is yours. The same is true of anything you've bookmarked on social media, which is why your TikTok saves aren't really saved.
No tool lasts forever. The ones worth trusting are the ones that make leaving easy.
Tonight: back up one thing
Pick the place where most of your recipes live and find its export option. If there is one, run it and open the file. If there isn't, pick the five recipes you've changed the most and copy them, notes and all, into a document you save on your own computer.
Then make the chili. You'll know exactly where the changes are written down. And if your saves are more pile than collection, sorting out the recipe graveyard is a good next project.
Details about other apps were checked against their own published pages on 2026-10-04. Products change — if you spot something out of date, tell us and we will fix it.