Meal Prep Cost Calculator

This calculator reduces meal prepping to its real economic comparison: what a single serving actually costs you to make, against what you'd pay to buy an equivalent meal out. It first sums your protein, vegetable, and grain costs for one cooking batch, then divides that batch cost by how many servings the batch yields to get a true per-serving price — the number that matters when you're deciding whether prepping is worth the time investment. Weekly prep cost multiplies that per-serving figure by how many prepped meals you actually plan to eat that week and adds your container costs on top, since reusable or disposable containers are a real recurring expense that a simple per-ingredient tally would miss.

Savings — weekly, monthly, and projected annually — come from comparing that total against what the same number of meals would cost at your entered average restaurant or takeout price, with monthly figures using the standard 4.33-weeks-per-month averaging (52 weeks divided by 12 months) rather than a flat 4-week assumption that would understate real monthly totals. The cumulative comparison chart projects both costs forward across twelve months, which makes the compounding effect of even a small per-meal savings visible in a way a single weekly number doesn't. The model assumes consistent habits — the same batch size, ingredient costs, and meal count every week — so a real month with grocery price swings, skipped prep days, or occasional takeout will land somewhere around this projection rather than exactly on it.