Member Kitchens is the established product in this space and the more complete one. If you want a membership with meal plans, nutrition tracking and grocery integration, and you want somebody to hold your hand through the migration, buy theirs. This page is for the case where you do not.
Last checked against their published pricing on 5 August 2026.
| Choose Member Kitchens | You want a meal-planning membership, not a recipe app. You want nutrition data, grocery lists that reach a store, and a person to migrate you. You would rather have a demo call than work it out yourself. |
|---|---|
| Choose Textual Chef | You want your existing recipes readable and ad-free for your loyal readers, you want to know your bill in advance, and you would rather paste a URL than book a call. |
This is the difference that actually matters, because the two are priced on different things. Member Kitchens charges a plan fee plus a fee per active member. We charge a flat fee plus a percentage of what your readers pay you. Their bill grows with your audience whether or not that audience pays you. Ours grows only when you get paid.
| 500 readers paying you $4/month | Member Kitchens (Launch) | Textual Chef |
|---|---|---|
| Plan fee | $99 | $49 |
| Per member | 500 x $0.99 = $495 | none |
| Share of reader revenue | none | 5% of $2,000 = $100 |
| Monthly total | $594 | $149 |
Their tiers are Discover from $49, Launch $99 and Growth $199 a month, with per-active-user fees quoted on Launch at $0.99 for the first 500 members and $0.75 for the next 500, plus a fee for video above the included allotment. Payment processing is extra on both sides, as it is everywhere.
It should be said, because it is true. If you charge a high price to a large membership, a percentage becomes the expensive option. At 1,000 members paying $20 a month, 5% is $1,000 a month and a per-seat plan is cheaper. Somewhere around $15 to $20 a member the arithmetic flips.
Most food bloggers charge $3 to $6, which is well below that line, and that is who we built for. If you are charging $20 and have a thousand people paying it, you are not the case this was designed for and you should do the sum yourself before believing anybody's comparison page.
| Member Kitchens | Textual Chef | |
|---|---|---|
| Branded app on your own name | Yes | Yes |
| Import your existing recipes | Yes, via WP Recipe Maker bulk import, one-by-one URL, or manual entry | Yes, read from the schema markup your site already publishes |
| Time from starting to seeing your own content | A demo call, then a migration | About a minute, before you give an email address |
| Meal-plan builder | Yes | No |
| Nutrition tracking | Yes | No |
| Grocery checkout integration | Yes | No |
| Hands-on migration support | Yes | No. There is an email address and a person on the end of it |
| Per-member fees | Yes | No |
| Predictable bill | Depends on member count and video | $49 plus 5% of what you are paid |
| Sales call to find out the price | Yes | No |
Genuinely, yes, though there is little reason to. They solve the same job and you would be paying two bills to serve one audience. The more sensible pairing is either of these alongside your existing ad-funded blog, which keeps doing what it is good at. We wrote about why the blog should stay separately.
No. Member Kitchens imports best through WP Recipe Maker, which is a WordPress plugin. We read the schema.org recipe markup in the page itself, which nearly every recipe platform publishes for Google, so the blog can be on anything as long as that markup is there. The preview on this page tells you within a minute whether yours has it.
You export it and it is yours, on both. Ask any platform this before you start, including us, and do not accept an answer that is not a file you can download yourself.
It depends on how many readers pay you and how much they pay. The pricing page has a calculator with both schedules in it, and it says so plainly when their plan is the cheaper one, which above roughly $15 a member at scale it is.
No. The preview works today; the platform behind it is not built. Member Kitchens is a running business you can buy this afternoon. If you need something now, that is a real difference and it favours them.
Member Kitchens is a real, running business with real customers. Textual Chef for creators is a prototype: the preview below works, the rest is intent. We are not going to pretend otherwise to win a comparison. If you need something today, they have something today.
What we would like is your opinion, and the fastest way to give one is to look at your own blog through it.
