Everything needed to ship against DietlyAPI: runnable quickstarts, AI-client integrations, straight comparisons with the other nutrition APIs, and hard-won notes on what makes food data difficult.
Working code you can paste and run against the live API.
Search the catalog in ten lines, then add a client class, error handling, retries and rate-limit safety.
A working tracker with food search, a daily log and local persistence, with complete runnable code.
Connect a Custom GPT to live data with an OpenAPI action, grounded instructions and safety checks.
Wrap DietlyAPI as an MCP server so Claude, Cursor and other AI clients use real data instead of guessing.
Price, rate limits, data coverage and features, measured rather than marketed.
Seven providers side by side: Open Food Facts, USDA FoodData Central, FatSecret, Edamam, Spoonacular, Nutritionix and DietlyAPI.
How the two compare on price, rate limits, data and features for food search and nutrition lookup.
Food search and barcodes versus recipe tooling, and where each one is actually the right pick.
Pricing model, data and features for food search, barcodes and natural-language logging.
How DietlyAPI and FatSecret's Platform API compare on price, rate limits, data and features.
The problems every nutrition app hits once real users show up.
Typos, brands, duplicates and sparse records, and how confidence-aware ranking changes the result list.
Normalize GTINs safely, validate scanner input, rank duplicate records and design a useful no-match flow.
Model nullable nutrients, distinguish zero from unknown, and design honest fallbacks for incomplete records.
Frozen response contracts, nullability tests, representative fixtures and production probes over messy data.
Attribution, produced works, derivative databases and image rights when using ODbL data commercially.
Operational guides for an integration that is already live.
Real response bodies for 401, 403, 404, 422 and 429, the shape change that breaks parsers, and a retry policy that honours Retry-After.
TTLs per data type, negative caching, key normalisation, and the arithmetic that decides which plan you need.
One key per service, read scope by default, per-key rate caps, and a rotation you have practised before you need it.
Free tier, no credit card. 4.2M foods, barcode lookup and ~40ms search.
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