For the past few months, I’ve been reviewing meal kits to see if they are worth the splurge.

The best thing about Dinnerly is that it’s a barely a splurge.

It has solidly been the most affordable of the meal kits I’ve tried the last few months.

The introductory offer advertised was $60 off but by selecting the lowest number of meals, it wound up only being $30.

I am quickly learning that the discount offered online is often for a larger number of meal kits than the minimum.

This was spread out over 3 weeks at $10 off per week.

Dinnerly’s minimum meal order per week is also 3 meals as opposed to the last three services we used which was 2.

The meals we went with for this test included:

• Chicken & Cheddar Tostadas with Guac
• Low-Cal Caramel Chicken with Steamed Green Beans and Rice*
• Grilled BBQ Steak with Ranch Potato Salad
• Vegan Crispy Kung Pao Tofu with Broccoli and Steamed Rice*
• Creamy Dijon Chicken with Buttery Noodles & Broccoli*
• Seared Steak with Scalloped Potatoes
• Black Bean Burrito Bowl*
• Low-Carb BBQ Chicken
• Crispy Pork Schnitzel with Cucumber Salad

I did appreciate that there weren’t surprise upcharges on the meal list.

It was also possible to set your setting to pick between some dietary restrictions and vegetarian options.

Without the discount, the meals are $40.73 per box or $10.58 per meal and $8.99 for shipping.

With the discount, it was $30.73 per box of 3 meals (6 servings) and shipping. That brings each meal in at $5.12, slightly lower than a night of fast food.

Now let’s talk about what that $5.12 gets you.

In that list of meals above, I starred the meals that came with a protein, carb and vegetable. You may not care about that, but my dad (who I have dragged on this cooking journey with me) does.

Dinnerly does not send you recipe cards. Not a huge deal, you just look up the recipe on your phone or computer through your Dinnerly account. It was a little inconvenient but not a deal breaker for me.

The website is easy to navigate and it’s easy to add extra servings to your shipment, if you have people coming over for dinner. You can also add things like extra protein and they have some breakfast and snack add-ons.

You can easily pause or skip a week.

Cancelling was really simple. Just a few clicks and no hassles.

Now for some of the things I didn’t like:

Dinnerly requires you to have a lot more ingredients in your kitchen already than any of the other meal kits I’ve used so far. The night I made the Caramel Chicken almost went awry because we were out of sugar.

Items I regularly needed from the kitchen that were not included for these recipes:

• Eggs
• Butter
• Sugar
• Flour
• Milk
• Different Kinds of Vinegars

Items I needed regularly that all the meal kits have made me provide:

• Salt
• Pepper
• Oil

Another thing that irritated me was the “Extra” step at the bottom of each recipe. It was things you could do to make the meal even better. Like the crispy pork and cucumber extra step might be “what would make this meal even better is some potatoes. If you have some potatoes, we recommend mashing them up and stirring in some of the extra garlic we sent you.”

Like… if a potato makes this a whole meal, send me the potato? The Extra step always pissed me off a little. If something makes this meal better, charge me another $1 and send it. Or don’t mention it.

The meals themselves are very basic and not that exciting. A few of them I could have easily made myself, for much cheaper, with ingredients already in the house.

Also, you need a grill to cook some of these meals, which they don’t really warn you about.

Of all the meals listed above, the black bean burrito bowl is the only one I would probably make again. The vegan crispy kung pao tofu was the only meal that felt a little complicated and while I’m not a tofu person (I don’t think I saved the order right when I switched out the meals for that week because we definitely got the 3 defaults, not the 3 I thought I picked), I was pleased with how it came out and felt like I had tried something new that night.

Now for the biggest dealbreaker:

Their shipping and customer service is atrocious.

My first box arrived two days late. I sent customer service a message.

I mostly wanted to know whether or not the food was going to still be safe to eat.

I didn’t hear back from them for 2 weeks and then they didn’t answer the question and just gave me a $10 credit towards my next box (which would’ve meant I had to stay for week 4 and I was not interested in that).

I live a bit on the edge, so we ate the food. Though everything was still cool, it was all defrosted. We did not get sick, but this feels more like luck. Honestly, for this reason alone I’d tell people to avoid this service because it is dangerous to eat some of those foods when they have been defrosted for who knows how long.

Every box they sent had exploded sauces in it and looked like it had been through World War III. One box literally had a hole stabbed in it, which, while sort of intriguing (what happened to you, box??), can’t possibly be good for the whole keeping meats frozen goal, especially in July in New Jersey.

Luckily for us, in each case it was either sour cream or Dijon mustard and we had both those thing in the fridge. There are some meals that just would’ve been ruined if the single sauce packet exploded.

Less lucky is that since everything is just heaped haphazardly in this box, all the produce and meat packages were then covered in sour creams or mustards as I unpacked them.

A really interesting thing to me is that this box is supposed to be one of the cheapest, and it is, but I thought the savings would be more substantial for an extra $1.75 a meal I’d absolutely rather have a Blue Apron meal and I wasn’t super impressed with those recipes either.

So if you’re looking for the best budget friendly meal kit, I would still say that Blue Apron is the way to go. Skip Dinnerly, it’s not worth the splurge.

Our current high subjective meal kit rankings (based on a combo of good recipes that felt worth the price):

• #1: Hello Fresh
• #2: Sunbasket
• #3: Blue Apron
• #4: Dinnerly

Next up – Home Chef