How Much Cooking Takeaway Yourself Really Saves

This site exists because of a number. A family ordering twice a week from a delivery app in the UK, at the average basket size the apps themselves report, spends more on those two evenings across a year than on their annual energy bill. That is not a rhetorical flourish; it is two numbers that can be checked.

What makes it worse is that the headline menu price is not the price. A takeaway ordered through an app carries, in rough terms:

• a menu mark-up of 10 to 25 per cent over the in-store price, because the restaurant is passing on the app's commission,
• a delivery fee of £2 to £5, or a subscription that only pays off above a certain order frequency,
• a service fee of 5 to 15 per cent of the basket,
• and a small order fee below a threshold designed to push your basket up.

Add those together and a £22 order is a £30 order. The same four meals cooked at home, from the recipes on this site, land between £6 and £11 depending on what you make.

The honest part. Home cooking does not always win by much. A supermarket meal deal is genuinely hard to beat on cost. A single coffee is cheap to make at home and the saving is real but small in absolute terms until you count the year. And a recipe that takes three hours has a cost in your time that a cost table does not capture. The articles here say which is which rather than claiming a blanket victory.