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WeeklyMealPlans
Plan my week

Meal prep services

Who should actually prep your meals

There are three answers: a meal kit sends ingredients and a recipe card, a prepared-meal service sends food that's already cooked, and a planner tells you what to buy so you cook it yourself. They cost wildly different amounts. Here's which one fits.

  • 2 adults
  • $90 / week
  • ≤ 30 min

Pre-set for this plan. Change anything on the right.

Who's eating
Adults
2
Kids
0
Dinners this week
Dinner budget for the week
$90≈ $9 / serving
Max time per dinner
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Updated · WeeklyMealPlans kitchen

The three things people mean by "meal prep service"

Meal kits — pre-portioned raw ingredients plus a recipe card. You still cook, but you don't shop or decide. Roughly $9–12 per serving. HelloFresh is the biggest; EveryPlate is the cheaper version with simpler recipes.

Prepared meals — fully cooked food that needs two minutes in a microwave. No cooking at all. Roughly $11–15 per serving. Factor is the main one in this category.

Planning plus groceries — you decide nothing and cook everything. Roughly $4–7 per serving depending on where you shop. That's what this site does, free, and you can push the grocery list straight to Instacart or Walmart if you don't want to go to the shop.

What each one actually removes

The useful question isn't price, it's which chore you're paying to delete:

| | Decides | Shops | Preps | Cooks | |---|---|---|---|---| | Meal kit | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | you | | Prepared meals | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | | Planner + groceries | ✅ | you | you | you |

A meal kit costs roughly double a planned grocery shop and removes shopping and portioning. A prepared-meal service costs roughly triple and removes cooking entirely. Neither is a rip-off — they're just priced by how much labour they take off you.

When a kit genuinely wins

  • You're cooking for one or two and food waste is eating your budget anyway
  • You've stopped cooking entirely and need the friction gone for a few weeks
  • Your schedule is genuinely unpredictable and a planned shop keeps rotting

If you're feeding four, kits get expensive fast — that's the point where planning and shopping normally wins on cost by a wide margin.

When prepared meals win

When the honest answer is that you are not going to cook. Shift work, new baby, recovering from surgery, caring for someone. Paying $13 to not cook is a fair trade in those weeks, and pretending otherwise just means takeaway instead.

What we do, and don't do

We don't deliver food. We build the week and the grocery list, free, and we'll tell you when one of the services above is the better answer for your situation — including when it's cheaper than what we just suggested.

The links above are plain links to those companies. If they're ever replaced with tracked partner links, we'll say so on the page.

Questions people ask

What is a meal prep service?

The term covers three different things: meal kits that send pre-portioned raw ingredients, prepared-meal services that send fully cooked food, and meal planners that tell you what to buy so you cook it yourself. They cost roughly $9–12, $11–15 and $4–7 per serving respectively.

Are meal prep services worth it?

It depends which chore you're paying to remove. Meal kits remove shopping and portioning at roughly double grocery cost. Prepared meals remove cooking entirely at roughly triple. For families of four, planning and shopping normally wins on cost by a wide margin.

What's the cheapest meal prep service?

Among kits, EveryPlate is generally the cheapest per serving. Cheaper still is planning the week and shopping for it yourself, which is what this site does for free.

Do you deliver meals?

No. We build the weekly plan and the grocery list. When a meal kit or prepared-meal service is the better answer for your week, we say so and link to them.

Which service is best for a family of four?

Usually none of them. Kit pricing scales per serving, so four people makes kits expensive quickly. A planned grocery shop is typically half the cost or less.

Other ways to plan the week