Meal Kit Picks

Meal Kit Services Compared: Price per Serving, Menu Size, and Pause Policy

2026.08.05

Every few months someone emails asking me to just list the numbers — price per serving, how many recipes actually show up on a given week's menu, and how many days before delivery you have to hit pause before you're stuck eating a box nobody wanted. Fair ask. I've paid for six of these since spring 2023, so I have opinions, but a comparison table doesn't need my opinions — it needs the numbers to actually be true, which turns out to be a lower bar than it should be.

Case in point: the Blue Apron Wednesday where the chicken thighs came up short by one, and I ended up splitting a single thigh between both kids while they argued over who got more. Small thing. But it's the same instinct that sent me back through this table line by line this month, pulling every figure straight off each company's own pricing, menu, or help-center page instead of trusting whatever number some other roundup happened to print last year.

On this page

Comparison of ten meal-kit services, sorted cheapest to priciest, showing each one's price per serving (colour-coded by budget, mid-range or premium tier), weekly menu size, and skip/pause deadline. Budget kits start around $6 a serving: EveryPlate at $5.99+ (as low as $2.99 on a first box) and Dinnerly at $5.99+. Mid-range kits run about $9 to $13: Blue Apron, Marley Spoon, Home Chef, Sunbasket, HelloFresh ($10.99–$12.49) and Purple Carrot ($11–$13.25). Premium kits are around $12 and up: Factor ($11–$15 per meal) and Green Chef ($11.99–$13.99). Weekly menus range from about 16 recipes (Purple Carrot) to 100+ (HelloFresh, Blue Apron, Dinnerly, Marley Spoon, Factor). Skip/pause deadlines vary from about 5 days before delivery to a full week ahead. Prices exclude shipping. This is a numbers reference only, not nutrition or allergy advice: if someone in your home has a food allergy, check that week's ingredient list and consult a pediatrician, allergist or dietitian.
Ten meal kits compared by price per serving, menu size and skip deadline — infographic by Meal Kit Picks, embed with credit (CC BY 4.0). Prices exclude shipping and drift; verified 2026-08-08. Numbers only, not nutrition or allergy advice.

Meal Kit Service Comparison Table

What's below is ten meal kits, three numbers each: what a serving actually costs, how much menu you get to pick from in a normal week, and the deadline for skipping before the charge locks in. None of these include shipping, which is its own separate line item most people forget about until checkout. A couple of rows don't have a clean number to give — Sunbasket won't publish a fixed weekly recipe count anywhere I could find, and Blue Apron doesn't really run on a weekly schedule anymore since its 2025 relaunch — so I've noted that instead of making something up to fill the cell.

Service Price per Serving (Range) Weekly Menu Size Skip/Pause Deadline
HelloFresh $10.99 – $12.49 (Source) 100+ weekly menu and market items (Source) 11:59 PM PST, 5 days before delivery (Source)
Blue Apron $7 – $15 per serving, most meals $10–$13 (Source) 100+ meals per week (Source) No fixed weekly cutoff — subscription-free a la carte shopping since its 2025 rebrand (Source); individual orders can still be skipped up to 5 weeks ahead (Source)
EveryPlate $5.99+ per serving (as low as $2.99 on a first box) (Source) 35+ recipes per week (Source) 11:59 PM CT, at least 5 days before delivery (Source)
Dinnerly $5.99+ per serving (Source) 100+ recipes per week (Source) 6–7 days before delivery, depending on region (Source)
Home Chef $9.99+ per serving (Source) 35+ meals plus 18 Extras per week (Source) 12 PM CST, Friday before the delivery week (Source)
Sunbasket $9.99+ per serving (Source) Not published as a single figure — see note below Wednesdays, 12 PM PT / 3 PM ET (Source)
Green Chef $11.99 – $13.99 per serving (Source) 80+ options per week (Source) Midnight PT, 5 days before delivery (Source)
Marley Spoon $9 – $13 per serving, plus $11.99 shipping (Source) 100+ recipes per week (Source) Billed 5–6 days before delivery; changes lock the day before billing (varies by region) (Source)
Purple Carrot $11 – $13.25 per serving (Source) ~16 options per week (third-party estimate; not published by Purple Carrot itself) (Source) 11:59 PM ET / 8:59 PM PT, Tuesday, one week before shipment (Source)
Factor $11 – $15 per meal (Source) 100+ meals and add-ons per week (Source) Locks Wednesday 11:59 PM CT the week prior (Monday/Tuesday instead if your delivery ships Tuesday/Wednesday) (Source)

Understanding Subscription Policies

Price per Serving
What one plate actually costs you — not the "starting at" number in the ad, which usually assumes you're ordering the biggest box every single week. Most of these kits use a sliding scale: order more meals per box, and the per-serving price drops.
Weekly Menu Size
How many different recipes you can pick from in a given week, not the company's all-time recipe archive. A few of these totals include add-ons and heat-and-eat prepared meals alongside the standard cook-it-yourself kits, which is worth knowing before you assume every option involves a knife.
Skip/Pause Deadline
The point of no return — miss it, and the box ships (and gets charged) whether you wanted it or not. This is the number that actually matters when soccer practice runs late or the week falls apart, more than anything in the marketing photos.

A note on how this table gets built: every figure above is pulled directly off each company's own pricing, menu, or help-center page — or, when a company blocks automated checks (most of them do), the most recent archived copy of that same page. Where a company doesn't publish a clean number, like Sunbasket's total weekly recipe count, I left the cell noted instead of estimating one. Where a company's own numbers looked internally inconsistent or possibly out of date, like Purple Carrot's pricing after a price update I couldn't independently confirm, that's flagged in the source notes too. Every number links to the exact page it came from, so you can go check it yourself instead of taking my word for it.

Quick honesty check before you switch anything based on this page: it's one family's meal-kit rotation and a lot of hours re-reading fine print, not professional advice. If anyone in your house has a real food allergy, don't treat a kit's allergen filter as the last word — recipes rotate weekly and cross-contact happens in these kitchens same as anywhere else, so check the actual ingredient list for that specific week's box, and talk to your pediatrician or allergist before handing a new kit to a kid with a serious allergy.

Last verified: 2026-08-23

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