Something I find kind of difficult is meal planning. I don’t really like cooking. I am sort of cheap, so buying everything to make some fancy meal really adds up when you don’t cook regularly and already have a cabinet full of spices and oils and the basics to cook.

I also am either on my own or it’s just me and my dad, so unless we want to eat a ton of leftovers, that has to be factored into the plan too.

So, of course, things like meal delivery services have always caught my eye bit.

I was curious how complicated they are to make.

I wondered what the actual cost was.

And what would be the quality of these meals?

Well, friends, I have been experimenting for the last few months so I could report back to you all whether or not the service is worth it.

I started with Hello Fresh. They’re the largest provider of meal kits in the U.S., and (in an entirely unscientific survey here) the one most of my friends seemed to know about.

When I think of these meal services, I think of Hello Fresh like I think of Kleenex for tissues.

So they seemed a good place to start.

Pretty much all of these companies have a discount to reel you in. Hello Fresh offered $90 off across 4 boxes.

I went with the smallest option, which is 2 different meals a week. Each meal has 2 servings.

While there are also multiple food options (healthy, vegetarian, etc.), I went with Classic.

Without the discount, the box works out to $49.96 per box or $12.49 per meal and $8.99 for shipping.

Hello Fresh claims you get a $90 discount over the four boxes. There must be some fine print somewhere that I didn’t see, but I guess this is only for the like the largest order. It’s also not evenly divided, so it can be hard to figure out what the discount does wind up being because it doesn’t tell you.

• The first order had a discount of $25.03, so it cost $24.93 for that box.
• The second order had a discount of $20.84, so it cost $38.11.
• The third order had a discount of $7.49, so it cost $51.46.
• The fourth order had a discount of $4.00, so it cost $54.95.

So the total discount was $57.36.

Total cost was $169.45 or $10.59 per meal for 16 servings (8 different meals).

So not really much of a discount for this “trial” period. The advertising definitely feels a bit misleading.

Each week you can log in and adjust the meals you want. There were about a dozen choices to pick from each week and they were quite diverse. You can also set several weeks at a time, so you don’t have to remember to check it each week. The system defaults to 2 choices, so if you forget to check it, you will still get a delivery.

I don’t like some of the psychological choices they made here – that scaled discount being one of them.

Another thing I didn’t like was that at least 25% of the meal choices each week to pick from had an upsell on them – generally the beef and fish choices would cost you even more. If you weren’t paying attention, you can easily get hit with extra fees.

What I did like was that I thought the recipes were really good. I’d say we didn’t have a single bad meal and one of them was so good I saved the recipe to make again in the future.

I also liked that several of the meals were really interesting and more complicated than I would generally pick. To buy all the ingredients I would’ve needed to make them would’ve been very expensive, but Hello Fresh just sends you the little packets of exactly how much you need.

I think that the amount of garbage generated by the Hello Fresh packaging is extensive. If you are really concerned about how much trash you generate, it may upset you.

What I will give Hello Fresh a big thumbs up for is that it was incredibly easy to cancel. One click, no phone calls, done and done.

They did send several emails offering a free box or extra discounts, so if you kind of liked it but don’t want to pay full price, you can do a few more boxes at a lower rate if you reenroll via one of those emails.

I would consider Hello Fresh an ok splurge, but definitely not a budget friendly way to make dinner. The only exception to this is if you love cooking and trying new recipes, it is probably cheaper to buy these meals than to buy all the spices and ingredients for recipes like these.

On the flip side though, if you do love cooking, you may already have a cabinet of cooking supplies, nullifying that statement.

So, is Hello Fresh worth the splurge? I think it is sometimes, but it is one of the more expensive meal services.