Every link on this page goes straight to the meal kit company. None of them pay us — meal kits aren’t sold through Amazon and we haven’t joined their referral programmes — so we earn nothing whichever one you pick, or if you pick none. See our methodology.
Meal kit intro offers are the loudest numbers in the category. EveryPlate advertises 57% off your first box. Factor advertises 50% off. Home Chef advertises 18 free meals. All three figures are real. All three are close to irrelevant to what a year of meal kits costs you.
The question worth asking before you sign up isn’t how big the discount is. It’s what the box costs in week six — because for all three of those companies, week six is when you start paying full price.
Every offer runs out after five boxes
Read the fine print on the three services whose terms are published, and they’ve converged on the same shape:
| Service | First box | Boxes 2–5 | Box 6 onward |
|---|---|---|---|
| EveryPlate | $2.99 a serving | 10% off | Full price |
| Home Chef | 30% off | 30% off (boxes 2–3), 45% off (boxes 4–5) | Full price |
| Factor | 50% off | 20% off | Full price |
Those are quoted from each company’s own site on 28 August 2026. The shared structure matters more than the differences: a weekly subscriber is at full price roughly five weeks after signing up. If you’re budgeting from the intro price, you’re budgeting for about 10% of your first year.
EveryPlate: 57% off is worth $32
EveryPlate’s regular price is $5.99 per serving and shipping is a flat $10.99 per box, both stated on its own site today. The first box drops the food to $2.99 a serving, and a 10% discount then applies to boxes 2–5.
Take the standard 2-person, 3-recipe box — six servings a week — and run the whole year:
| Box | Food | Shipping | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Box 1 | 6 × $2.99 = $17.94 | $10.99 | $28.93 |
| Boxes 2–5 | $35.94 less 10% = $32.35 | $10.99 | $43.34 each |
| Boxes 6–52 | 6 × $5.99 = $35.94 | $10.99 | $46.93 each |
Year one: $2,408.00. A steady year at full price: $2,440.36.
The entire intro offer is worth $32.36 — about 1.3% off your first year.
You can check that in one line: $18.00 saved on the first box, plus $3.59 on each of four boxes, is $32.36. The reason a 57% discount produces so little is that shipping isn’t discounted at all, and 57% of a cheap box is not much money.
That flat $10.99 is the same fee that decides whether EveryPlate is actually cheap at all — we work that threshold out in best budget meal kits under $8 a serving.
Home Chef: 30% off is worth $86
Home Chef publishes $7.99 per dinner serving on its pricing page, alongside $9.99 for lunch, $4.98 for breakfast, $4.98 for snacks and $3.98 for dessert. Its intro terms read: 30% off the regular price of the first 3 boxes, $30 maximum discount per box, then 45% off the next 2 boxes, $45 maximum per box.
Same six-serving box, so $47.94 of food a week:
- Boxes 1–3 at 30% off: $33.56 each — $14.38 saved per box
- Boxes 4–5 at 45% off: $26.37 each — $21.57 saved per box
- Total: $86.28
Against 52 weeks of food at $47.94, that’s 3.5% off year one — nearly triple what EveryPlate’s much louder offer delivers.
Home Chef’s shipping fee is the one figure we couldn’t get. Its pricing page says a fee applies to every delivery after the first box but doesn’t print the number, and its support site returns an error to us. The published minimum orders are $50.95 for the Home Chef plan and $82.91 for the family plan, both stated as including shipping. The arithmetic above is food only, so your real total is higher than $47.94 a week by whatever that fee is.
The “18 free meals” claim actually checks out
Worth saying plainly, because we normally find the opposite. Home Chef’s headline promises 18 free meals to customers ordering 10 or more meals a week for five weeks. Run it:
- 10 meals at $7.99 is $79.90 a box
- 30% of $79.90 is $23.97, under the $30 cap → $23.97 × 3 boxes = $71.91
- 45% of $79.90 is $35.96, under the $45 cap → $35.96 × 2 boxes = $71.92
- Total discount: $143.83, which at $7.99 a meal is exactly 18 meals
The claim is honest arithmetic. The thing it doesn’t tell you is the denominator: 10 meals a week for a year is $4,154.80 of food before shipping, and $143.83 is 3.5% of it. Same ratio as the smaller box, because percentages don’t care how big your order is.
Where the caps bite
Those “$30 max discount per box” clauses are the part nobody reads, and they’re aimed squarely at the families the offer is marketed to.
The $30 cap starts binding once a box holds more than about $100 of food — 13 dinner servings at Home Chef’s $7.99. So:
- 12 servings (4 people, 3 recipes): 30% is $28.76. Under the cap. You get the full 30%.
- 16 servings (4 people, 4 recipes): 30% is $38.35, capped at $30. You get 23.5%.
At the 45% tier the same 16-serving box would earn $57.53 and gets $45 — 35.2%. The bigger your order, the smaller the percentage you actually receive. That’s the reverse of how the offer reads.
EveryPlate’s discount expires on a date, not a box count
One more clause worth knowing. EveryPlate’s fine print says the 10% off boxes 2–5 expires 49 days after the voucher is attached — seven weeks.
If you take every weekly delivery, that’s fine: boxes 2–5 arrive inside five weeks. But meal kit subscribers skip weeks constantly, which is most of the point of the pause button. Skip three weeks in your first two months and some of those discounted boxes expire unused. The calendar runs even when your deliveries don’t.
What we couldn’t verify
HelloFresh and Blue Apron are missing from the tables above deliberately. HelloFresh puts all pricing behind a zip-code form, and Blue Apron’s site refuses automated requests, so we have no figure for either that came from the company charging it. We won’t print prices we can’t source — our HelloFresh vs Blue Apron comparison carries figures from an earlier check and should be treated as older than this page.
Dinnerly publishes a $5.99 per person starting price but no intro terms and no shipping figure, so we can’t run its year. Factor publishes its discount structure in full but no dollar amounts anywhere on its front page, which is why it appears in the terms table and not the arithmetic.
The verdict
The percentage is the least useful number on the page. Multiply the regular per-serving price by your servings, add shipping, multiply by 52. That number decides this. Every intro offer here lands somewhere between 1% and 4% off it.
If you want the biggest intro money, it’s Home Chef — $86 on a six-serving box, because five discounted boxes beats one steep one. But you’re then paying $7.99 a serving rather than EveryPlate’s $5.99, and that gap swamps the intro offer within a month.
If you want the cheapest year, it’s EveryPlate, at roughly $2,440 for six servings a week — and take the intro offer as a small bonus rather than a reason.
Don’t sign up because of the discount. Specifically, skip all of these if your budget only works at the intro price, if you’re planning to cancel at box five and haven’t set a reminder, or if the percentage is the thing that made the box look affordable. A subscription that costs $2,440 a year is a $2,440 decision; the $32 on the front of it should not be casting a vote.
And if you do sign up intending to leave before box six, put the cancellation date in your calendar the same day. The five-box ramp exists because most people don’t — it’s the same mechanism behind every subscription you forgot you were paying for.
Verified 28 August 2026. EveryPlate, Home Chef, Factor and Dinnerly prices and offer terms were read from those companies’ own websites on that date and are exact. Home Chef’s per-box shipping fee, HelloFresh’s pricing and Blue Apron’s pricing could not be obtained from the companies’ own pages and are not stated above. We analyse published pricing and terms; we don’t test meal kits.