Best Budget Meal Delivery Services Compared

EveryPlate calls itself America's lowest-priced home cooking box, and its published starting price backs that up: plans start at $5.99 a serving. You choose 3 to 5 meals a week for 2, 4 or 6 people, and most meals take about 30 minutes.

The recipes are simple, home-style American cooking: burgers, pasta, sheet pan chicken. Nothing needs special technique or hard-to-find ingredients, and the instructions are beginner friendly. If you like to cook and just want someone else to handle the planning and shopping, it delivers solid value.

Watch the shipping. It's a flat $10.99 a box, so it weighs most on small orders. At the $5.99 starting rate, 3 meals for 2 people is 6 servings, or $35.94. Add shipping and it's $46.93, about $7.82 a serving. Order 5 meals for 4 and the same fee spreads over 20 servings, about $6.54 each. The ingredients are standard, not organic or premium. You're paying for simplicity.

Best for: couples and small families who enjoy cooking and want the lowest cost per serving.

Dinnerly matches EveryPlate's starting price, $5.99 a person, and offers a much bigger menu: more than 100 recipes every week. Its menu filters cover dietary preferences, cook time, protein and cuisine, with tags like veggie, kid friendly, low carb and high protein, so it's easy to narrow a week down fast.

Credit where it is due: that range is the widest on this list, and it makes Dinnerly a reasonable choice if you're trying to eat less meat without committing to a full vegetarian plan. Listed cook times start at 10 to 15 minutes, though some recipes run an hour or more, so check before you pick. You can also add ready-to-heat meals, breakfasts and desserts from its Market to the weekly box.

Dinnerly runs on week-to-week automatic shipments. You can skip a week or cancel anytime, but with advance notice, and a late cancellation means paying for that box. Its terms say delivery charges are shown at checkout. We couldn't confirm a current fee on its site, so look at the box total before you order.

Best for: home cooks who want the most recipe choice at the lowest starting price.

HelloFresh is the best-known name in meal kits, and the menu shows why. Its FAQ lists 60+ chef-designed recipes a week, and the menu tags them by need: High Protein, Kid Friendly, Carb Conscious, Sodium Smart, Veggie and GLP-1 Support among them.

It sits above the pure budget kits on price. HelloFresh doesn't publish a per-serving price until you enter your zip code, so we aren't quoting one. Shipping is charged on every box after the first. Check the total for your area before you compare it with the others here.

For families, it works well because the kid-friendly tag makes it easy to find meals less adventurous eaters will actually eat. You can pause or cancel anytime, but do it before the weekly cutoff, five days before delivery, or you're charged for that box.

Best for: families who want a reliable, mainstream service with kid-friendly options.

Home Chef bridges meal kits and prepared meals. Alongside its regular kits, it sells oven-ready meals that cook completely in an oven-safe tin and Fast & Fresh meals for the microwave or oven. Instead of chopping and measuring, you mostly assemble and heat, and express recipes are ready in 30 minutes or less.

Its Customize It feature lets you swap the protein in a recipe, which helps when someone in your house doesn't eat a certain meat. Kits start at $8.99 a serving, and Home Chef says standard meals average $9.99. There's a weekly minimum of $50.95 including shipping ($82.91 on the Family Plan), and shipping is charged after the first box.

The trade-off is cost for convenience. If you enjoy the cooking itself, the simplified recipes may feel thin. If cooking feels like a chore and you want dinner fast, the oven-ready meals are real convenience. You can skip any week.

Best for: busy people who want a little cooking involvement but put speed first.

If you don't want to cook at all, Clean Eatz Kitchen is where we'd point you, and yes, it's us. Meals arrive cooked and flash-frozen and heat in a few minutes in the microwave. No chopping, no pans, no planning.

The prices: our Weight Loss Meal Plan is $89.95 for 10 meals (about $9.00 each) down to $226.75 for 30 (about $7.56 each). The Value Meal Plan is $84.95 for 10 meals, about $8.50 each. Shipping is free on every meal plan order to the contiguous 48 states, and if you'd rather choose every meal yourself, Build A Meal Plan prices meals from $8.99 to $13.99 each.

What sets us apart from the kits above is the order model. There's no subscription. You order when you want, as much as you want, with nothing to skip or cancel. That matters if your schedule is unpredictable or you travel. Plans fit different goals: the Weight Loss Meal Plan is portion-controlled and calorie-controlled, and the High Protein Meal Plan adds 2 extra ounces of meat to each meal, about 10g more protein, from $63.00 for 6 meals.

Because the meals are frozen, they keep up to 12 months, so there's no pressure to eat everything in a week. Our current menu has 32 meals from 250 to 630 calories, with every number on our Nutrition Info page.

The honest drawbacks: at about $7.56 a meal, we cost more per serving than the cheapest kits, and every meal is a single serving, so feeding a family of four adds up fast. We ship only to the contiguous 48 states. And if you need gluten-free food for celiac disease, we're not your pick: our meals are made on shared equipment.

For more on how meal prep supports healthy eating, see our Complete Meal Prep Guide.

Best for: singles, busy professionals and anyone who wants zero cooking with no commitment.