How much to charge for a meal plan membership, with the maths

What meal plan memberships charge today

These are prices from each service’s own website, checked in October 2026, in US dollars.

Membership	Monthly	Annual	Annual discount
BudgetBytes+	US$4.99	US$49.99	16%
The $5 Meal Plan	US$5	about US$4 a month	about 20%
Plan to Eat	US$5.95	US$49	31%
Kelsey Nixon’s Recipe Club	US$9.99	US$89.99	25%
Workweek Lunch Pro	US$12	US$119	17%
Cook Smarts	US$14.99	US$8.33 a month, billed yearly	44%

The annual discount column is our arithmetic: twelve monthly payments compared with the annual price.

Three things stand out.

The cheapest are tools or very large brands. Plan to Eat is a recipe organiser, and Budget Bytes has one of the largest budget-cooking audiences online. They can charge US$5 because volume carries them.

Creator-led memberships sit higher. Kelsey Nixon’s Recipe Club and Workweek Lunch are built around one person’s recipes and approach. People pay for that taste and that trust, and US$10 to US$12 a month is normal.

The top of the range adds planning work. Cook Smarts at US$14.99 and Workweek Lunch Pro at US$12 both sell custom meal planners and prep guidance, not just recipes. The more of the weekly thinking you do for members, the more you can charge.

Where your price should start

For an established food creator with a weekly meal plan, shopping lists and a recipe library, US$9 to US$12 a month is a reasonable place to start. Move up if:

• Your recipes serve a specific diet or need (gluten free, plant based, postpartum, diabetes friendly). Specialist plans replace research members would otherwise do themselves.
• You include prep guides, batch-cooking schedules or substitutions for every recipe.
• Your audience is mostly in higher-income markets and already buys your paid products.

Move down, or keep a cheaper tier, if your brand is built on budget cooking. A US$12 membership that promises to save money on groceries is a hard sell.

It’s easier to raise a price than to lower it. Members who joined at a lower price can keep it while new members pay more.

Monthly or annual

Offer both. Monthly is the easier first yes; annual brings cash up front, fewer card fees and fewer chances to cancel.

The question is how big the annual discount should be. Here is the maths, with the churn rates marked as assumptions.

A member on US$10 a month who stays with a monthly churn of 5% pays, on average, for about 9.2 of the next 12 months. That’s roughly US$92 in their first year.

An annual member at US$90 (a 25% discount) pays US$90 on day one.

So at 5% monthly churn, a 25% annual discount costs you almost nothing in year one, and you have the money up front. If your monthly churn is lower, say 3%, the average monthly member pays about US$102 in year one, and the annual discount costs you roughly US$12 per member.

Card fees tilt it further towards annual. Stripe’s standard US rate is 2.9% plus 30 cents per card payment.

	Monthly at US$10	Annual at US$90
Payments a year	12	1
Stripe fee per payment	US$0.59	US$2.91
Stripe fees a year	US$7.08	US$2.91

A discount of 15% to 25% is the common range among the memberships above. Going to 44%, as Cook Smarts does, makes the monthly price mostly a signpost for the annual one.

Tiers: one at launch, two later

Launch with one paid tier and an annual option. Every extra choice slows people down at checkout, and you don’t yet know which parts members value.

Once you have a few hundred members and can see what they use, a two-tier structure often works:

• Recipes: the full library and new recipes. For example, US$7 a month.
• Recipes and meal plans: everything, plus weekly plans, shopping lists and prep guides. For example, US$14 a month.

The cheaper tier catches people who would otherwise leave on price, and the gap between the two makes the higher one look like the obvious choice for anyone who wants the weekly plan.

Workweek Lunch takes a different route to the same goal: one paid plan, Pro, sold by length of commitment (US$12 a month, US$31.99 for three months, US$65 for six or US$119 a year, on its pricing page in October 2026). Price-sensitive buyers get a cheaper monthly rate by committing for longer, without a second tier to explain.

Sell one-off products beside the membership, not instead of it. An e-book at US$15 to US$25 gives people who won’t subscribe something to buy, and many of them join later.

Founding-member pricing

A founding price is a lower price for people who join in a set window, kept for as long as they stay. It gives launch week a deadline and rewards the people who backed you first.

A worked example: a standard price of US$12 a month with a founding price of US$8. If 200 people join as founders, you give up US$4 each, or US$800 a month, compared with the full price. That’s the cost. The question is whether the deadline brings in more than 200 people who would otherwise have waited, and in a launch to an existing audience, it usually does.

Three rules keep it honest:

1. Set the end date before you launch and stick to it.
2. Make the founding price at least 25% below standard, or it won’t feel like a reason to act.
3. Keep the promise. If founders lose their price when you raise prices later, every future offer is worth less.

Worked revenue examples

Here is what a creator with 100,000 followers might earn at US$10 a month. The conversion rates are estimates, not benchmarks: social followers convert far less than email subscribers. For comparison, Substack’s own guidance is that 5 to 10% of free newsletter subscribers convert to paid, and those are readers who already chose to subscribe.

Followers who join	Members	Monthly revenue before fees
0.25%	250	US$2,500
0.5%	500	US$5,000
1%	1,000	US$10,000

Then subtract the members who leave. Recurly’s churn benchmarks (July 2026 data) put total churn for subscriptions priced at US$10 to US$25 a month at about 4.3%. At that rate, a 1,000-member membership loses about 43 members a month and needs 43 new ones just to stand still.

That’s why your email list matters more than your follower count, and why the size of your launch matters less than what you do in the months after it. Run your own numbers, including churn, in the membership revenue calculator.

What comes off the top

Take the 1,000-member example: US$10,000 a month in sales. What you keep depends on how you sell.

Card fees. At Stripe’s US rate of 2.9% plus 30 cents, each US$10 payment costs US$0.59, or US$590 a month. In New Zealand, Stripe charges 2.65% plus NZ$0.30 for domestic cards. The fixed part hurts cheap memberships most: on a US$5 price, card fees take 8.9%; on US$15, about 4.9%.

Platform fees. These vary by model. According to their own websites:

• Substack keeps 10% of subscriptions: US$1,000 a month on this example, plus card fees.
• MemberPress’s Launch plan takes 4.9% of each payment (US$490 a month) plus US$399 a year after the first year; its Growth plan has no transaction fee but costs US$699 a year after the first.
• Kajabi charges US$179 to US$499 a month with no share of sales.
• Member Kitchens charges US$49 to US$199 a month plus a fee for each active member.

A flat monthly fee is cheapest once you’re large, and a share of sales is cheapest while you’re small. We compare the two models in detail in revenue share vs monthly fee.

App store commission. If members subscribe inside an iPhone app, Apple takes a commission: 15% for developers in its Small Business Program, which covers those earning up to US$1 million a year. On the example, that’s US$1,500 a month. Many creators avoid it by taking payment on their website and letting members sign in to the app. More in app store fees vs web checkout.

Tax. Sales taxes such as GST, VAT or US sales tax may apply depending on where your members live. Check with an accountant before you set prices, because it changes whether your price should include tax or add it at checkout.

A short checklist for setting your price

1. List five memberships your audience might also pay for, and note their monthly and annual prices.
2. Pick a monthly price in that range that matches how much weekly work you do for members.
3. Set the annual price at a 15% to 25% discount.
4. Set a founding price at least 25% below standard, with an end date.
5. Work out what you keep per member after card fees and platform fees.
6. Estimate members from your email list first, followers second, and check the result against churn.

Pricing with a partner

With Launch with Voyage, there’s no monthly fee and no setup fee for your website and membership. Voyage, a product and growth agency in New Zealand, takes a share of sales, from 10%, set with you before launch, and Stripe’s card fees apply as they would anywhere. Members pay into your own Stripe account, so the pricing above is yours to set and change. See how Voyage pricing works.