One link on this page can earn us money: if you start an Amazon Prime trial through it, Amazon pays us a fee. EveryPlate, Home Chef, Dinnerly, Instacart and Shipt pay us nothing, and every link to them goes straight to their own site. See our methodology.
The cheapest meal kit we can price in full costs $7.82 a plate. The USDA’s moderate-cost food plan puts a home-cooked meal for an adult at about $4.44. That’s the whole comparison in two numbers, and the gap is wide enough that delivery fees on the grocery side barely dent it.
The $7.82 is EveryPlate‘s six-serving box: $5.99 a serving plus a flat $10.99 shipping fee, both quoted on its own site on 25 October 2026. The $4.44 comes from the USDA’s Cost of Food at Home report for September 2026; the working is below.
The question that decides it is simple. Are you going to cook either way? If yes, a meal kit is a convenience you pay roughly $3 a plate for, not a saving.
What a home-cooked meal costs, per the USDA
The USDA publishes four food plans each month, from Thrifty to Liberal, priced at the national average. Each one covers a week of meals and snacks prepared at home. The figures are for people in a four-person household, and the USDA tells smaller households to add 10% for two people and 20% for one.
For two adults aged 19 to 50, here’s how that works out:
| USDA plan (Sept 2026) | Woman + man, weekly | +10% for 2 people | Per person per meal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thrifty | $58.60 + $73.60 | $145.42 | $3.46 |
| Low-cost | $63.80 + $73.30 | $150.81 | $3.59 |
| Moderate-cost | $77.60 + $91.90 | $186.45 | $4.44 |
| Liberal | $99.10 + $112.30 | $232.54 | $5.54 |
The last column divides the weekly figure by 42, which is two people times 21 meals. That’s a flat average, and it flatters dinner: breakfast usually costs less than the average meal and dinner more. So take $4.44 as the midpoint for a typical meal, not the price of tonight’s dinner.
Run it on your own spending instead if you can:
(weekly grocery bill ÷ people) ÷ 21 = your average cost per meal
What the meal kit costs, all in
From each company’s own site today:
| Service | Per serving | Shipping | Per plate, as you can price it |
|---|---|---|---|
| EveryPlate, 6 servings | $5.99 | $10.99 flat | $7.82 |
| EveryPlate, 4 servings | $5.99 | $10.99 flat | $8.74 |
| Dinnerly | from $5.99 | not published | $5.99 + shipping |
| Home Chef | from $7.99 | not published ($50.95 minimum order incl. shipping) | $7.99+ |
The EveryPlate rows are the only ones we can work out to the cent. Shipping alone adds $1.83 a plate on a six-serving box. On a four-serving box it’s $2.75.
Dinnerly advertises $5.99 a person and doesn’t state a delivery fee on that page, so its row is a floor. Home Chef’s own homepage gives two different starting prices: it lists dinner from $7.99 a serving and also says meal kits start at $8.99. Its FAQ puts standard meals at a $9.99 average and sets a minimum weekly order of $50.95 including shipping. Whichever figure you use, it lands above EveryPlate per plate.
What grocery delivery adds, and why it’s small
It’s tempting to treat grocery delivery fees as the same size as the kit’s shipping. They aren’t, because a grocery order spreads its fees across a whole week of food.
The membership side is published:
- Instacart+ costs $99 a year or $9.99 a month, with $0 delivery fees on orders of $10 or more. Service fees still apply.
- Shipt costs $99 a year or $10.99 a month, with $0 delivery fees on orders of $35 or more.
Neither company publishes the service fee itself. Instacart’s fee page says it varies with your location and what’s in your cart, and you see it at checkout. So we won’t invent one. Use the last fee on your own receipt.
To show the shape, suppose a weekly order’s service fee plus tip comes to $15. That’s an illustration, not a figure we verified. Add the membership at $99 ÷ 52 = $1.90 a week, and the total is $16.90 a week. Spread across 42 meals for two people, that’s about 40 cents a meal.
Compare that with the $1.83 a plate EveryPlate charges just to ship the box. Even with generous fees and a generous tip, delivered groceries stay well under the kit.
Moderate-plan meal ($4.44) + delivery share ($0.40) = about $4.84 a plate delivered, against $7.82 for the kit.
The swap, priced over a year
Most households wouldn’t replace all their groceries with a kit. The realistic question is three dinners a week for two, which is one six-serving box. Here’s the annual cost of those six plates both ways:
| Three dinners for two, weekly | Per week | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| EveryPlate, 6-serving box | $46.93 | $2,440 |
| Groceries at the Liberal plan average ($5.54) | $33.24 | $1,728 |
| Groceries at the Moderate plan average ($4.44) | $26.64 | $1,385 |
| Groceries at the Thrifty plan average ($3.46) | $20.76 | $1,080 |
Against the moderate plan, the kit costs $20.29 a week more, or about $1,055 a year, for the same three dinners. Against the liberal plan it’s still about $712 a year more.
There’s one more cost on the kit side that people miss. A meal kit doesn’t cancel your grocery order. You still need breakfasts, lunches, the other four dinners, coffee and milk, so the grocery membership and its weekly fees stay. The kit is a second delivery on top, not a replacement.
The break-even is easy to check. For the kit to match groceries at moderate-plan prices, your homemade dinner would need to cost $7.82 a plate, which is 1.76 times the average meal. A steak night might get there. An ordinary week won’t.
Where the kit genuinely wins
Arithmetic aside, the kit has three real arguments. None of them is price on paper.
Food waste. The USDA figure assumes you eat what you buy. If half a bag of spinach goes in the bin every week, your real cost per meal is higher than your receipt suggests, and pre-portioned ingredients close some of that gap.
It replaces takeout, not groceries. If the three nights you’d swap are currently delivery orders, the comparison flips completely. That’s a different article: our takeout arithmetic finds the kit wins easily.
Planning is the bottleneck. You’re paying about $3 a plate for someone else to choose recipes and portion them out. If that’s the bit you’d actually pay for, it’s a fair price. Just call it a service, not a saving.
The Amazon route
If you already pay for Prime, there’s a third option at a similar price to the two memberships above. Amazon sells a grocery delivery add-on to Prime members at about $10 a month, covering Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods Market and some local stores. Amazon Prime itself runs about $140 a year.
Both figures are approximate: Amazon requires exact prices to come from its API, and we couldn’t confirm either at source. The catch is the store list: Amazon delivers Amazon’s groceries, not your Kroger or Publix. Our Prime breakdown has the fuller accounting.
The verdict
Grocery delivery wins on cost for anyone who will cook either way. About $4.84 a plate delivered at the moderate plan, against $7.82 for the cheapest kit we can price in full. That’s roughly $1,055 a year on three dinners a week.
Choose a meal kit if the nights you’d swap are currently takeout, or if you throw away enough groceries that your real per-meal cost is well above your receipts. Order six servings or more so the $10.99 shipping is spread thin. Price it at the standing rate, not EveryPlate’s $2.99 first box, and read what happens when the intro offer ends before you sign up.
Don’t buy a meal kit to save money if you already have groceries delivered and cook from them. You’ll pay more, and you’ll keep paying the grocery membership too. This is the group the kit companies would rather didn’t run the numbers.
And don’t buy a grocery membership you won’t use. Instacart says that “if you order just twice a month, the membership can pay for itself.” That only holds if the delivery fees you’d otherwise pay add up to more than $99 a year. Divide $99 by the delivery fee you see at checkout as a non-member, and that’s the number of orders a year you need to break even. Shipt vs Instacart+ works through which one fits your basket size. Is Instacart+ worth it covers the Peacock subscription bundled inside it.
Verified 25 October 2026. EveryPlate, Home Chef and Dinnerly prices are exact, read from everyplate.com, homechef.com and dinnerly.com today; Dinnerly’s shipping fee isn’t published there and we haven’t confirmed it. Instacart+ and Shipt prices are exact, from instacart.com/instacart-plus and shipt.com/membership today. Neither publishes service-fee amounts, so the $15 weekly fee-and-tip figure is an illustration. Grocery baselines are the USDA Official Food Plans, U.S. Average, September 2026. Amazon figures are approximate and unconfirmed at source. We analyse published pricing and terms; we don’t test services hands-on.