What a meal kit costs per portion once the discount ends

On a comparable six-portion week — three dinners for two people, or six single-serve meals — the cheapest meal kits are HelloFresh and Home Chef at $9.99 a portion for the food, and the dearest is Blue Apron at a typical $12.49. Add delivery and the order changes again, because only two of the five put a figure on shipping anywhere a prospective customer can read it: Marley Spoon at $10.99 a box, printed in its plan selector, and Factor at $9.99, carried in its plan data. That makes $13.82 a portion, on Marley Spoon’s own default plan, the highest delivered price any of them will show you up front. All prices checked 20 August 2026. None of the five has a free tier, and none of them raises the price at renewal. What ends is the discount, which is a different thing and costs you more.

The number every box hides

A meal kit is quoted at a per-serving price that applies to a specific plan size, before shipping, before the introductory discount and before anything you add. Four of those five words do work. Here is the same week — six portions — priced at each company, with shipping included wherever the company will state it.

Prices read 20 August 2026. Six portions means three recipes for two people at the meal-kit services, and six single-serve meals at Factor. HelloFresh’s figure is the one in its own pricing FAQ; Home Chef’s is its stated average for standard meals; Marley Spoon’s comes from its plan selector and Factor’s from the plan data behind its own plans page; Blue Apron’s is the most common per-serving price on its menu that day. “Delivered per portion” is our arithmetic on published figures, not a quoted price.

The gap between the cheapest and dearest food price is $2.50 a portion, or $15 on a six-portion week. That is the part everyone compares. The part nobody can compare is in the shipping column: for three of the five, the difference between what the company quotes and what it charges is a number you are not shown until you have entered a card.

Shipping: the fee three of them will not print

Nobody hides a shipping fee by denying it exists. They hide it by mentioning it and moving on.

HelloFresh states that a “shipping fee applies on all deliveries after the first box” and does not say what it is anywhere on the plans page; you see the amount once you have picked a plan and reached checkout. Home Chef says “shipping fee applies on deliveries after first box”, also without a figure, though it is the only service here that publishes an all-in floor: a minimum weekly order of $50.95 including shipping, and $82.91 on its Family Plan. Blue Apron publishes no fee at all; the clearest confirmation that one exists is that it sells a membership, Blue Apron+, on the promise of “unlimited $0 shipping fees”.

The two that do print it look better for it. Marley Spoon’s plan selector shows $11.99 a portion, $71.94 for the box, $10.99 shipping and $82.93 total, before you have typed anything. Factor’s plan data carries $9.99 shipping against every plan size.

A flat delivery fee is also a regressive little charge. Marley Spoon’s $10.99 costs a two-person household $1.83 a portion and a six-person one 30 cents. Buying more food is the only way to make the fee small, which is presumably the idea.

The discount is not a price, it is a countdown

This is the part the category is built on, and the terms are unusually specific about it.

Factor: 50% off the first box, then 20% off boxes two to five. Home Chef: 30% off the first three boxes, capped at $30 a box, then 45% off the next two, capped at $45 — and unused box discounts expire ten weeks after signup, so a run of skipped weeks quietly burns them. HelloFresh: the free-meals offer is “applied as discount on first box, new subscribers only”, with the headline figure calculated on a four-person, five-recipe plan you may not have chosen. Blue Apron: $25 off the first two orders with a code.

Read those as a schedule rather than a saving and the shape is clear. You are cheap for between one and five boxes, and then you are at the list price, forever, on a subscription that renews weekly. Home Chef’s own terms put it more bluntly than we would dare: charges “will increase or otherwise change upon termination of such promotional terms”.

The real cost is the week you forgot to skip

Every one of these is an auto-renewing weekly subscription with a cutoff, and the cutoff is early. Not “cancel before your renewal date” early. Nearly a week early.

Read from each company’s own terms and help pages on 20 August 2026. Marley Spoon’s terms also reserve the right to extend its cutoff by up to 48 hours.

Put a number on that. A single missed skip at Marley Spoon’s default plan is $82.93. Do it four times in a year — one holiday, one week away, two weeks of not opening the app — and it is $331.72 of food you did not plan to buy, most of it arriving while you are out. Four missed skips cost more than three months of choosing the dearest brand here over the cheapest ($298.87). Brand choice is the small lever. The calendar is the big one.

The defence is dull and it works: skip in bulk. All five let you skip weeks well ahead — set a month of skips the day you sign up, then unskip the weeks you actually want.

What a year of it looks like

Nobody in this category quotes an annual figure, because the annual figure is the argument against buying. At one box a week and no skipped weeks:

Our arithmetic on the prices above, at 52 deliveries, checked 20 August 2026. Every week you skip comes straight off it, which is the one lever in this table that is genuinely yours.

The honest reading is that the plan size does more for that number than the brand does. Marley Spoon’s default two-person plan is $13.82 a portion delivered; its six-meals-for-four plan is $9.45, and six-meals-for-six is $9.30 — the cheapest delivered per-portion price anyone here publishes, from the service with the highest headline price. HelloFresh puts its own floor at $7.99 a serving on larger plans, Home Chef prices dinners from $7.99, and Factor barely moves at all: $10.17 a meal at six meals, $10.03 at thirty-six.

One caveat we would rather state than bury. Factor’s plans page carried more than one live price set on the day we looked. The one it treats as default put six meals at $61.00 with $9.99 shipping; another put the same six meals at $83.94 with $10.99 shipping. We could not establish which a given customer sees, so check the figure on your own plan screen before you take ours.

The verdict

If you want the cheapest food price and you are buying a small box, Home Chef and HelloFresh are level at $9.99 a portion, and Home Chef edges it on transparency: it is the only one of the five that publishes what a delivered box has to come to, a $50.95 weekly minimum including shipping. If you want the cheapest delivered price and you are feeding four or more, Marley Spoon at $9.30 to $9.45 a portion wins outright, and it is also the only service that shows you portion price, box price, shipping and total before you hand over a card. Blue Apron is the most expensive typical portion here and the least predictable, because its prices sit on recipes rather than plans. Factor is the flattest: you pay about $10 a meal whatever you order, cooked.

But the ranking is worth less than the calendar. The spread across all five is about $1,200 a year on these numbers; four forgotten skips at any of them is $240 to $332. Pick on the delivered per-portion price, buy the biggest box you will genuinely eat, and put the cutoff in your calendar. Whether the food is any good is somebody else’s review to write. This one is about the bill.