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Yes, comfortably — and not for the reason the meal kit companies advertise. A six-serving EveryPlate box costs $46.93 all in, which is $7.82 a plate and $15.64 for a dinner for two. That $46.93 is three components you can check: $5.99 a serving and a flat $10.99 shipping fee, both quoted on EveryPlate’s own site on 16 September 2026.
Now look at your last delivery receipt. If a dinner for two came to more than $15.64 after fees, tax and tip, the meal kit was cheaper. Almost every delivery order clears that bar, which makes the headline answer boring.
The interesting question is the one underneath: a meal kit only saves you money if it replaces takeout. If it replaces grocery shopping, it costs you money. Most people who cancel in month three got that substitution wrong.
The meal kit side, priced exactly
These figures come from each company’s own site today, not from a listicle:
| Service | Per serving | Shipping | 6 servings, all in | Per plate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EveryPlate | $5.99 | $10.99 flat | $46.93 | $7.82 |
| Dinnerly | $5.99 | not published | at least $35.94 | $5.99+ |
| Home Chef meal kits | from $7.99 | not published | at least $47.94 | $7.99+ |
| Home Chef standard meals | $9.99 average | not published | at least $59.94 | $9.99+ |
EveryPlate is the only one of the three that publishes its shipping fee where we can read it, so it’s the only row where the “all in” column is complete. Dinnerly advertises “$5.99 per person” on its homepage and doesn’t state a delivery fee there; Home Chef says a shipping fee applies after the first box without naming the amount. Both of those per-plate figures are floors, not prices. Shipping on a six-serving box adds roughly $1.83 a plate at EveryPlate’s rate, so assume something in that region until you see checkout.
The mid-range kits — HelloFresh and Blue Apron — sit higher again, and neither published a price we could read at source today. We compared the two when their figures were readable; treat the numbers there as dated rather than current.
The takeout side, which nobody publishes
Here is the honest problem with every “meal kits vs takeout” article you’ll read, including the ones quoting a confident national average: the delivery apps do not publish their fees. DoorDash states that DashPass members get “$0 delivery fees and reduced service fees” on eligible orders over a minimum, but nowhere states what the delivery fee or service fee is when you aren’t a member. It varies by restaurant, distance and time of day, and you see it at checkout. Restaurant menu prices are equally local — a chain’s own ordering site won’t quote you a burrito price until you pick a store.
So we won’t invent one. Use your own receipt instead, which is more accurate anyway:
(menu subtotal + delivery fee + service fee + tax + tip) ÷ people fed = your real cost per plate
Run it on the last order you placed, not the one you think is typical. Two things usually surprise people. The fees and the tip together commonly add half again to the food, and the menu prices on a delivery app are often higher than the same restaurant charges in person — a markup that never appears as a line item on your receipt.
The swap that actually saves money
Say your delivery dinner for two lands at $45 all in. That’s an illustration, not a figure we verified — substitute yours — but it makes the shape of the saving visible:
| Three dinners a week, for two | Per week | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| Delivery at $45 an order, three nights | $135.00 | $7,020 |
| EveryPlate, one 6-serving box, three nights | $46.93 | $2,440 |
| Two kit nights (4-serving box) + one delivery | $79.95 | $4,157 |
Swapping two delivery nights a week for a four-serving box saves about $27.50 a night, or roughly $2,860 a year at a $45 order size. Swapping all three saves about $4,580.
The third row uses a four-serving box at $34.95, because two dinners for two is four servings — and a small box wears the $10.99 shipping fee badly, at $8.74 a plate against $7.82. The saving survives that anyway.
The middle row is the realistic one. Nobody replaces every takeout night, and an article that models you doing so is selling you something.
Note what happens to the fixed costs when your delivery habit shrinks. If you pay $96 a year for DashPass — $9.99 a month, or $96 annually, from DoorDash’s own help pages on 16 September 2026 — that membership is priced for someone ordering often. Drop from three deliveries a week to one and you should re-run whether DashPass still pays for itself, because it very likely doesn’t.
The direction of travel favours the kit, too. Over the twelve months to August 2026, the Bureau of Labor Statistics put the food-away-from-home index up 3.4% against 2.2% for food at home. Restaurant prices have been rising faster than grocery prices, and a meal kit is priced off groceries.
Where the comparison quietly breaks
Three failure modes, each of which turns the saving into a loss:
You’re comparing against groceries, not takeout. A supermarket shop beats $7.82 a plate without much effort. If your default is cooking from what’s in the fridge, a kit is a convenience purchase, and the honest framing is that you’re paying about $2–3 a plate for someone else to plan and portion your dinner.
You order delivery to avoid cooking, not to eat a specific meal. An EveryPlate box is 30 to 40 minutes of actual cooking, with knives and a pan and washing up. If the thing you’re buying on a Tuesday night is not cooking, a meal kit doesn’t substitute for it, and the boxes will rot in the fridge. Pickup from the restaurant is the better saving there — it strips the delivery fee, the service fee and the tip in one move while keeping the part you actually wanted.
You’re on an intro rate and comparing that. EveryPlate’s first box runs at $2.99 a meal with 10% off boxes two to five, which puts a six-serving box near $4.82 a plate including shipping. That’s not the price. It becomes $7.82 when the discount lapses, a 62% rise on a delivery that has become routine by then. Judge the decision at the standing rate, and read what happens when the intro offer ends before you sign up.
The verdict
Worth it if you currently order delivery two or more times a week. At $15.64 a dinner for two against a receipt that’s likely double or triple that, the saving is large, immediate and doesn’t depend on any assumption we’ve made. Order six servings or more so the flat shipping fee is spread thin — the budget kit maths gets unforgiving on four.
Worth it if you want the middle option. Home Chef’s standard meals at around $9.99 a serving cost more than EveryPlate but ask less of you, and they’re still below almost any delivery order.
Don’t buy a meal kit if you already cook from groceries. You will spend more, not less. This is the biggest group of people who read articles like this one, and the meal kit companies would rather the comparison stayed on takeout.
Don’t buy one if what you’re really buying is not cooking. A kit is a cooking subscription with the shopping removed. If you’d skip the cooking too, you want pickup, or a prepared-meal service, not this.
And don’t sign up for a weekly box if you cook twice a month. The cadence is the product. Skipping weeks is admin you will eventually forget to do, and an unskipped box is the most expensive food in this article.
Verified 16 September 2026. EveryPlate’s $5.99 per serving, $10.99 flat shipping and $2.99 intro rate are exact, read from everyplate.com today, as are Dinnerly’s $5.99 per person from dinnerly.com and Home Chef’s $7.99 and $9.99 figures from homechef.com. Dinnerly and Home Chef do not publish their shipping fees on those pages and we have not confirmed them. DashPass pricing comes from help.doordash.com; DoorDash does not publish its delivery or service fee amounts anywhere, so we quote none. The food-price percentages are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI release for August 2026. HelloFresh, Blue Apron and prepared-meal prices could not be read at source today — hellofresh.com and factor75.com gate pricing behind a zip-code form and blueapron.com returns an error to us. The $45 delivery order is a stated illustration, not a measured price. We analyse published pricing and terms; we do not test services hands-on.