Work out what a year of takeaway orders costs

Where each of those default numbers comes from

The figures the calculator starts with are not invented. The 15 per cent menu mark-up is the middle of the range restaurants typically apply to app menus to offset commission - The same burger is simply priced higher in the app than on the board in the shop. The delivery fee is a common UK figure outside a subscription. The 10 per cent service fee is within the standard band the major apps charge on the basket.

The point of separating them is that the mark-up is invisible. Most people know they are paying a delivery fee. Far fewer know that the menu itself is a different menu.

Where cooking at home genuinely does not win

This site would be less useful if it pretended the answer was always the same. Three honest cases:

• A single coffee. Making it at home saves real money over a year but the per-cup difference is small in absolute terms, and if the walk to the shop is the point of the walk, the arithmetic is not the whole story.
• One person, one meal, once. Buying a whole jar of something to use two tablespoons of it is a bad trade unless you will use the rest. Our cost figures price the amount used, and the recipes say when a batch is worth making and when it is not.
• Anything that takes three hours. A slow-proved dough is cheap in money and expensive in attention. The pages that need a day say so at the top.

The subscription question

Delivery subscriptions remove the delivery fee but not the mark-up or the service fee, and they only pay for themselves above a certain order frequency. Set the delivery fee to zero above and leave the other two alone to see what a subscription actually changes: for most households it is a smaller number than expected, because the fee was never the largest component.