Mela is a simple, elegant and modern recipe manager that syncs with iCloud.
SYNC
Sync your recipes with iCloud, either privately (default) or by sharing a recipe library with other iCloud users.
IN-APP BROWSER WITH LIVE PREVIEW
Quickly save a recipe while browsing: If Mela detects a recipe on the currently viewed page, it will be displayed in Mela's native recipe viewer*, on the same screen on the iPad and a swipe-left away on the iPhone. Want to add or view a recipe from outside of Mela? No problem, just use Mela's sharing extension.
FEEDS
Subscribe to your favorite recipe blogs to view all the recipes in Mela's native recipe viewer*.
COOK MODE
The cook mode makes it easy to follow all steps while cooking, displayed using a larger font to make sure everything stays readable even when you're not right in front of your device. You can add multiple recipes to the cook mode, easily letting you switch between them.
TIMERS
No need to switch to another app for setting up a timer. When in cooking mode, Mela let's you easily create and manage timers.
Timers come with support for Live Activities (iOS 16.1+).
SCANNER
Scan a recipe from a book: With the help of text recognition, you can just add it to your personal collection and view it in Mela's native recipe viewer, as any other recipe.
GROCERIES
Mela uses the Reminders.app to manage your grocery list. This has the advantage that you’re always able to access your grocery list on all your devices even if Mela is not installed on a specific device.
CALENDAR
Do your meal planning by using Mela's built-in calendar. It's managed by Calendar.app which also has the advantage that you're always able to access it on all your devices. There's also a widget, showing you the next planned meal from your calendar.
ORGANIZING
Recipes can be organized in categories, marked as “Favorite” or as “Want to Cook”.
PRINTING
Of course, Mela supports printing in case there’s a recipe you want to have on paper or save as PDF.
Please note:
If iCloud Sync is enabled (default), Mela will sync these items with iCloud:
- Recipes
- Browser bookmarks
- Subscription list (feeds)
Not synced:
- Feed recipe entries
- Browser history
Groceries are always stored in Reminders.app
Mela is free to download but will require a one-time purchase to unlock all features.
* Extracting recipes only works for websites that support this, most of them do.
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Mela FAQ
Is Mela free?
Yes, Mela is completely free and it doesn't have any in-app purchases or subscriptions.
Is Mela legit?
🤔 The Mela app's quality is mixed. Some users are satisfied, while others report issues. Consider reading individual reviews for more context.
This is a great bit of software. Intuitive and useful. Love that it doesn’t track you or charge you a monthly fee but is very useful for handling my recipe collection. Great job! Great programming! Useful and worth the money. Does exactly what I want it to and has features I didn’t even know that I wanted. Love links to other recipes, dimming out the ingredients as you work, importing recipes, even a timer while you cook. Wow. Haven’t found any down side yet.
My favorite app of the year
Serious props to the creator of this app. Super seamless, insanely useful. And the pricing model (one time purchase-NOT a subscription) completely won me over.
Recipes at your fingertips
I never pay for apps and I paid for this one. Totally worth it - I have over 2K recipes saved. I can decide what I want to eat when I am leaving work since I can just scroll and find what I want to cook. And a big bonus is being able to adjust the recipe size. The two small issues I have is that I can’t mark if I have already cooked something. And I can’t search recipes by ingredient.
Loving it so far besides one thing
Absolutely obsessed with the app my only gripe is that it’s always stuck on All recipes and it
Makes the app feel cluttered.
Would love to be able to have all my categories shown at first then I could select through them. But seems there isn’t a way to do that with out using the drop downs so whenever I entered the app it’s just all my recipes.
Would love that extra layer of organization
Everything I want
This is literally everything I have wanted in a recipe app. Cuts out all the stupid chatter of blog recipes. Can double, triple, or even half a recipe for you. Easily adds items from the recipe to a grocery list for you. It’s perfect. I love it. The photo/scan recipe is the only maybe flaw. That’s would be a hard system to code for so it gets a pass. It still works and I don’t get my recipes from magazines as much anyway. Everything else is just wonderful. Highly recommend.
Best so far by landslide
Works great. Can we get a grid view of recipes and feeds?
Great app with potential
The scanning, search, and ease of use are phenomenal. This is my favorite recipe manager I’ve tried, and I’d highly recommend it.
Unfortunately, the feature to have a shared cookbook with family members or a partner is not working. This was the core feature I was looking for in a recipe app.
Some other wishlist items:
- the ability to click on the photos to focus/enlarge. I save the full recipes as a photo, just in case, but it is rather useless
- the ability to “group by” such as by source (like cookbooks)
Also, the app frequently crashes, so I’ve learned to save early and often. If I’m creating a recipe from a scan, there are high odds it’ll crash after the text is imported and I’m trying to add a photo.
Great BUT….
I read the reviews and the app seemed to be very functional.
One big downside:
I plan my weekly meals and the shopping list is not “sortable” which means you need to scroll the entire list to see how many of each item you need to buy.
Making the grocery list “sortable” would allow you to buy “3 lemons” easily.
I sent 3 emails over 2 weeks and never got 1 response.
Idk. Seems sketchy to me now.
I want to like it. But no customer interaction seems off to me.
Mela - you can do better than that!!
Amazing app!
Mela really is my go-to recipe app. I love how easy it is to import recipes from all over without needing to think about it. For so long I’d have to click through 3-5 websites if i was making a larger dish that needed multiple items.
One item I’d really enjoy is having an option to convert the units in the ingredients, many of the recipes i find are in pounds, ounces, etc. It’d be cook if i could quickly convert that to grams as needed.
Needs to be more social
I love this app and I’ve gotten my entire family hooked on it! The biggest issue that I have is that I can’t easily share or sync recipes with other people. Also if I could make one small feature request it would be that I want to be able to tag recipes with multiple tags at a time. Doing it one by one is quite cumbersome.
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