Allrecipes pulled its app, then came back three years later: a publishing group with no paid acquisition charted in the top 20 of the US Food & Drink grossing chart

MyRecipes is a recipe collection app from People Inc., the largest magazine and website group in the US (formerly Dotdash Meredith, which owns Allrecipes, Food & Wine, Serious Eats and BHG). It reached about 120k installs in two months and held steady at #15 to #18 on the Google Play US Food & Drink top grossing chart. What drove it wasn't the product. It was its own website's 80M monthly visitors, a base of old users who had waited three years, and a line at the end of every recipe video saying "Download the app." Independent developers can't get any of that. What's worth learning is where it puts the paywall, and the gaps it leaves behind.

The ending of a video with 430k views

In 2026 November 5, Allrecipes' TikTok account posted a video of someone making Buc-ee's "Beaver Nuggets" at home: butter and caramel coating on puffed corn. The caption ends with:

Download the @myrecipes app to keep your recipe inspiration organized.

By 11-06 the video had 430k views. The same account posted two more that day, ending with "Want recipes like this? Save them in the @myrecipes app" and "You won't want to lose this one, save it to @myrecipes." Since September, several @allrecipes videos carrying that line have hit between 200k and 780k views, and @foodandwine, @realsimple and @better.homes.and.gardens are posting it too.

That's MyRecipes' acquisition: not bought traffic, its own traffic.

What it is and how it charges

A recipe-saving app. The free version lets you search, save and build collections across the group's 100k-plus recipes, save recipes from "thousands of" other food sites, and includes a screen-on cooking mode. The store page's first line reads "75M recipes saved," and most of that figure likely came from the web version (inference).

The paid MyRecipes+ is $6.99/month or $39.99/year, with a 7-day free trial. What you get: no ads, more recommendations, discounts from partner kitchenware brands, and the key feature, saving recipes from Instagram and TikTok, turning a video into a recipe with ingredients and steps (MyRecipes member page, 2026-09-23). The launch sponsor is the US supermarket chain Kroger, and the group's next plan is ordering ingredients directly from recipes (Axios 2025-11-26).

How much it grew

Listed on Play Aug 21, on App Store Aug 27, but the official press release didn't go out until Sep 23. The curve is flat, around 1,000 to 2,000 installs a day (estimated). No spike on press release days, but early and mid-September each jumped by a few thousand, which lines up with Serious Eats publishing an article introducing the app on Sep 3, plus in-site pushes and emails (inference; the exact push dates are unverified). Only charted in the US.

Where users came from: all in-house

The save button on recipe pages. Every Allrecipes recipe page has a save button that takes you to MyRecipes sign-up. The executive in charge told Press Gazette plainly: it relied on on-site messaging, email, banners and push, and did no paid marketing (2025-12-03). The group's food and lifestyle sites draw about 80M unique visitors a month (Axios).

Old users who waited three years. The original Allrecipes app was pulled 2023 years ago, and there was no official mobile app after that. Reddit kept asking "where did the Allrecipes app go?" Logging in with an Allrecipes account brings your old favorites over automatically. A four-star App Store review from 10-20 opens with: "So glad Allrecipes has an app again."

Some people were pushed in too. 9-27 One iPad user wrote: "My favorites are gone from the website and I can't save any more there, so is this the only option now?" That's one user's account, but if true, it suggests the web favorites feature is being funneled into the app (inference).

Its own social accounts and media. The TikTok videos from the opening, plus articles about the app that Serious Eats and Allrecipes published themselves.

Paid ads. No MyRecipes ads turned up in the Meta Ad Library. (Not finding them doesn't mean none were run. Apple and Google search ads aren't visible.)

Why the parent company had to do this

On its Q3 2026 earnings call, People Inc. said Google referral traffic had dropped about 70% over the past few years, and AI summaries now appear in over 90% of searches. Readers stopped clicking through, so ads stopped selling. It has to turn readers into registered and subscribed users, and a 15-person dedicated team runs MyRecipes with on-site resources tilted toward it.

This is the real story behind the app: not someone discovering a new need, but a publisher whose traffic AI search took, moving the readers it still has into its own app.

What users are complaining about

The App Store rating is 188 reviews averaging 4.0 stars, but the one-star reviews cluster around the same complaints:

"Allrecipes was fine before. Keeps pushing subscriptions, doesn't fit the iPad, and I lost all my Allrecipes favorites." (9-23, one star)

"It's just a place to save recipes. Does it really need two-step verification?" (9-17, two stars)

"Can't find the halve-the-recipe button. I have to find the dish in the app, then go back to the website to search." (9-11, one star)

"You can't see recipe comments in the app. Other people's tips often make a dish much better, and I have to scroll to the bottom and tap 'view on web.'" (9-25, three stars)

Summing up the complaints: login errors (403, repeated verification-code prompts), incomplete migration of old favorites, no iPad support, no scaling of recipes by serving size, no view of user comments under recipes, and a subscription pitch the moment you open it. Also a 9-08 one-star review saying "saved from Instagram 4 times and it never worked." The most valuable feature behind the paywall doesn't work reliably every time.

Some people are happy, though. 8-31 A five-star review says: "What really sets it apart is the recipe library, deeper than anyone else's."

Who it's competing with

This niche is already packed. On the Google Play US Food & Drink top grossing chart on 11-06, MyRecipes sits behind a crowd of rivals:

What MyRecipes uniquely has is the 100k recipes tested in its own kitchen, under big brand names. But feature-wise it's weaker than ReciMe-style apps, and users list the gaps themselves in reviews.

If it were you

The verdict: You can't play this one, but it's worth studying. It got where it is on 80M monthly visitors, 5M registered users and the recipe licenses for 100k dishes, none of which followers can get. The recipe-saving niche is already crowded with ReciMe and a batch of 2026-year-old apps bought through TikTok creators.

Three things worth learning:

1. Charge at the point of greatest pain. Saving recipes from the website is free. Saving from TikTok/IG videos is what costs money. "Can't save the recipe from a video I saw" is a problem users hit every day. Putting the paywall there converts better than putting it on the content itself (NYT Cooking's approach). The idea transfers to other categories: fitness videos, outfit videos, travel guides. Anywhere people see something, want to save it, and can't, is a place to charge.
2. People left behind when a big brand kills its app. The Allrecipes app has been gone for three years, and people keep searching for "Allrecipes app" and "MyRecipes alternative." Rivals (recipeone, drizzlelemons) already publish alternative pages to catch that search traffic. Whenever a big brand has just shut an app, or shipped one users hate, a ready-made group is looking for a replacement.
3. Its one-star reviews are a feature request list. iPad support, scaling by servings, user comments under recipes, no forced two-step verification, and reliable saving from social videos. From the reviews, these users are mostly Americans who've cooked for years, subscribed to magazines for decades, and read recipes on iPads (inference). They resent People Inc. and are price-sensitive ("I can't afford it, but I'd sit through ads").

Who it suits: small teams already building recipe tools or "turn-videos-into-structured-content" tools, using that list of complaints as a roadmap, or people doing SEO who can write "X alternative" pages.

Not for: anyone trying to build a general recipe-saving app from scratch to go head-to-head with MyRecipes or ReciMe. Without paid acquisition and hoping for organic store traffic, new apps in this niche are all buying TikTok creators.

How to get users: don't compete on traffic, go after the people it spills over: write pages like "MyRecipes / Allrecipes App alternatives" and "how to export your Allrecipes saves"; on Reddit r/Cooking and cooking Facebook groups, answer "what app do you use for recipes on iPad?"

When is the window: Thanksgiving to Christmas (late November to end of December) is when Americans look up the most recipes, and MyRecipes will most likely push hardest on-site then (inferred). To catch the spillover users, ride this wave.

Signs you're wrong: ① MyRecipes adds iPad support, serving scaling, and recipe reviews within a version or two, the one-star complaints disappear, and the spillover users go with them; ② it starts large-scale Meta or TikTok ads, meaning its own traffic isn't enough and the ceiling is lower than it looks; ③ conversely, if 2027 early in the year it drops out of the US top-30 Top Grossing, it means a publisher's own traffic can't carry a subscription app either, and a standalone recipe-saving tool still does it better.

Data and sources

• Store data: Google Play US chart and App Store US ratings and reviews (as of 2026-11-06); Play install counts are third-party estimates.
• TikTok: @allrecipes profile videos (checked 11-06).
• Parent company: PR Newswire press release (2026-09-23), Axios (2025-11-26), Press Gazette (2025-12-03), Citi TMT conference notes (2026-09-08), Q3 2026 earnings call (Motley Fool transcript, AdExchanger, Subscription Insider, 2026-11-03/04).
• Product and pricing: MyRecipes membership page (2026-09-23), Serious Eats (2026-09-03), Allrecipes "Meet MyRecipes" (2025-03-31).
• Allrecipes app shutdown: Reddit r/Cooking, recipeone.app blog.
• Where it says "estimated" or "inference", those are estimates and inferences.