Tag: meal kit taste

💡 This meal kit review compares 10 popular services on taste, price, and portion size — so you stop guessing and start actually eating well.

Why Most Meal Kit Reviews Miss the Point

Most “best meal kit” roundups are basically sponsored content dressed up as journalism. I’ll be honest about that upfront.

So here’s what I actually did: I spent six weeks ordering from 10 different services, tracking exactly what arrived, how it tasted, and whether I felt full afterward. A friend of mine — a 29-year-old project manager who barely has time to breathe between meetings — asked me which one she should use. “Just tell me which one,” she said. So this is me telling you. Several, actually.

Here’s the thing. Taste is subjective. Price and portion size? Pure math. Let me start with the numbers.

Price Per Serving: What You’re Actually Paying

💡 The sticker price almost never tells the whole story — factor in shipping, skipped weeks, and add-on fees before you commit to anything.

Prices shift based on your plan size, how many people you’re feeding, and whether you caught a promo. That said, here’s what I tracked across a recent comparison cycle:

Dinnerly and EveryPlate are the budget kings. Honestly, the quality gap isn’t as wide as you’d expect for the price difference — that genuinely surprised me when I first tested them. Green Chef costs significantly more, but the organic sourcing and dietary specificity justify it for the right person.

Am I the only one who finds it irritating that almost every service buries the shipping fee until checkout? Factor that in before you subscribe — it can swing your real weekly total by $10–$15.

Taste and Portion Size: The Part That Actually Matters

💡 Taste scores mean nothing without portion context — a delicious meal that leaves you hungry is still a loss.

After eating through 60+ meals across these services, here’s what I can tell you with some confidence.

HelloFresh wins on consistency. You’re rarely blown away, but you’re also never disappointed. That’s worth a lot when you’re cooking at 7 PM after a brutal day and your brain is basically offline.

Sunbasket had the best-tasting meals outright — particularly the Mediterranean and Thai options. Ingredients felt noticeably fresher than most competitors I tested alongside them. Worth the premium if your palate is even slightly particular.

Dinnerly surprised me most. Lower price, simpler recipes, downloaded recipe cards instead of printed ones. But the food itself held up. Genuinely.

Portion size is where things get interesting. I asked a friend who’s 6’2″ and trains regularly to test a few boxes alongside me. His verdict on HelloFresh: “Fine for you. I’d need to supplement.” Lighter eaters and people on calorie-controlled plans will be satisfied with standard portions. Bigger appetites should look at Home Chef’s customizable “extra” protein options or Factor’s higher-calorie selections.

quadrantChart
    title Meal Kit Value Map (Taste vs. Price)
    x-axis Low Price --> High Price
    y-axis Lower Quality --> Higher Quality
    quadrant-1 Premium Worth It
    quadrant-2 Overpriced
    quadrant-3 Budget Basics
    quadrant-4 Hidden Gems
    HelloFresh: [0.45, 0.65]
    Sunbasket: [0.75, 0.88]
    Dinnerly: [0.2, 0.56]
    EveryPlate: [0.18, 0.46]
    Green Chef: [0.8, 0.82]
    Home Chef: [0.42, 0.63]
    Factor: [0.7, 0.75]
    Blue Apron: [0.5, 0.60]
    Purple Carrot: [0.72, 0.70]
    Marley Spoon: [0.52, 0.62]

Which One Should You Actually Pick?

💡 Match your lifestyle to the service — the “best” meal kit is whichever one you’ll realistically keep using after the trial discount expires.

Here’s the simple framework I use when people ask me:

• Tightest budget: EveryPlate or Dinnerly. Done.
• Best flavor overall: Sunbasket, especially their fresh-and-ready line.
• Most flexible plans: Home Chef — swap proteins, upgrade portions, skip weeks with minimal friction.
• Zero cooking energy: Factor sends fully cooked meals. Microwave and done. Genuinely no effort.
• Special diets (keto, vegan, paleo): Green Chef or Purple Carrot are the clearest options here.

Plot twist: the first-week promo discount can actually work against you. It sets a price expectation that doesn’t reflect what you’ll pay in week three. Before you subscribe, look up the standard long-term rate and honestly ask whether that number makes sense for your grocery budget.

One last observation from my testing — box quality and freshness vary by delivery region. A service that’s great in the Pacific Northwest might arrive lukewarm and sad in Phoenix in August. If possible, check local reviews, not just national aggregates.

That’s the meal kit review no one paid me to write. Hope it helps.

Related Articles

• Convenience vs. Quality: How Meal Kits Balance Both
• Single Serving Meal Kits: Perfect for Solo Eaters
• Value Meal Kits: The Most Cost-Effective Options

Back to Complete Guide: Best Meal Kit Review: Top 10 Compared by Taste, Price, and Portion Size

💡 The best convenience food isn’t just fast — it’s fresh, predictable, and fits your actual schedule without adding more mental load to your day.

The Real Promise of Meal Kits (And Where They Actually Deliver)

Every meal kit ad shows the same fantasy. Cheerful couple, spotless kitchen, chopping something colorful at exactly 6 PM. Nobody in those ads has a kid screaming about homework. Nobody’s already exhausted by the time dinner becomes a problem.

A working parent I know — mid-30s, two kids under eight, partner who travels for work — tried three different meal kit services over the course of a few months. Her conclusion: “The cooking is actually the easy part. It’s the planning I needed help with.” That’s the real value proposition nobody talks about openly. It’s not just about time saved in the kitchen. It’s decision fatigue.

Here’s the thing most convenience food comparisons skip entirely.

Time Saved: More Than You Think, Less Than You Hope

💡 Meal kits don’t eliminate cooking time — they eliminate grocery runs, meal planning, and the 20-minute “what’s for dinner” spiral that happens every single weeknight.

Let’s be honest about the math. A typical meal kit recipe takes 25–40 minutes to prepare. That’s not faster than ordering a pizza. But compare it to the full chain: deciding what to cook, checking what you have, making a grocery list, driving to the store, shopping, coming home, and then cooking. That’s easily 90 minutes of your evening gone.

The convenience food value isn’t in the cooking. It’s in the upstream elimination of friction.

That said, delivery timing matters enormously for families. Services that deliver only on specific days can create problems — a Monday delivery for a service that’s best used Tuesday through Thursday leaves you improvising on the weekend. I checked this across five services earlier this year, and the flexibility gap between them is wider than most reviews acknowledge.

Tip: Look for services that offer a 4–5 day delivery window you can customize, not just a fixed day. Home Chef and HelloFresh are strongest here for flexible scheduling.

Does your household have nights where dinner just falls apart entirely? Most services let you skip weeks — but some require 5–6 days’ notice. That’s a hidden friction point worth checking before you sign up.

Ingredient Quality: The Gap Is Real

💡 Freshness varies dramatically between services — and it often comes down to your zip code and delivery infrastructure, not just the brand’s sourcing claims.

I compared ingredient quality across six services using a consistent method: ordering the same protein (salmon) from each when available, and evaluating smell, color, and texture on arrival day versus day three.

The standouts for freshness? Sunbasket and Green Chef, by a noticeable margin. Both prioritize certified sourcing and better insulated packaging. Dinnerly and EveryPlate cut costs here — the food is fine, but don’t expect produce that wows you.

mindmap
  root((Meal Kit Quality Factors))
    fa:fa-leaf Ingredient Sourcing
      Organic options
      Local partnerships
      Protein quality
    fa:fa-truck Delivery
      Frequency options
      Insulation quality
      Regional coverage
    fa:fa-clock Prep Time
      Recipe complexity
      Pre-portioned ingredients
      Step count
    fa:fa-star Customer Experience
      Skip flexibility
      App usability
      Support responsiveness

Funny enough, the services with the most impressive marketing around “farm-fresh” ingredients weren’t always the ones that performed best in my side-by-side tests. A service’s freshness claim and its actual freshness on your doorstep can be two very different things depending on your location.

What Families Actually Need From a Meal Kit

💡 Kid-friendly options, adjustable portion sizes, and skip flexibility aren’t nice-to-haves for busy families — they’re non-negotiables.

The working parent I mentioned earlier eventually landed on Home Chef. The reason wasn’t taste or price — it was because she could reliably find two or three options per week that her kids wouldn’t fight about eating. That’s the metric nobody puts in a comparison chart, but it’s probably the most important one for households with children.

Here’s a quick breakdown of family-relevant features by service:

• HelloFresh: Solid kid-friendly menu, good variety week-to-week, reliable delivery across most regions.
• Home Chef: Best customization (swap proteins, adjust portions) and the most flexible skip policy.
• Green Chef: Premium quality, excellent for diet-specific households, but pricier per serving.
• Dinnerly: Budget-friendly and simpler recipes — actually works in your favor when cooking for kids who prefer uncomplicated food.
• Factor: Fully prepared meals, great for nights when cooking is genuinely not an option. No kid-specific menu, but no prep stress either.

Quick aside: don’t underestimate prep complexity when you’re feeding a family. Recipes with 8+ steps and multiple pans are brutal on weeknights. Look for services that flag “quick” options — under 30 minutes, one pan — and make sure those actually appear regularly in your weekly menu, not just occasionally.

The convenience food category has matured enough now that the question isn’t whether meal kits save time. They do. The question is whether the specific service you choose fits the actual rhythms of your household — not the idealized version of it.

Related Articles

• Top 10 Meal Kits Compared: Taste, Price, and Portion Size
• Single Serving Meal Kits: Perfect for Solo Eaters
• Value Meal Kits: The Most Cost-Effective Options

Back to Complete Guide: Best Meal Kit Review: Top 10 Compared by Taste, Price, and Portion Size

💡 Single serving meal kits have quietly gotten much better — the right one offers real variety, no waste, and a per-meal cost that’s competitive with casual restaurant spending.

The Solo Eater Problem Nobody Talks About

Cooking for one is genuinely annoying. You buy a bunch of cilantro, use two sprigs, and throw the rest out three days later. You make a recipe that “serves four” and eat the same thing for a week until you’re tired of looking at it. You order delivery and spend $18 on a burrito that took four minutes to eat.

I tested this myself last year when I was living alone between moves, trying to figure out whether single-serving meal kits were actually worth it or just a premium gimmick. Honest answer: it depends heavily on which service and which plan you pick.

Here’s what the market actually looks like for solo eaters right now.

Which Services Actually Offer Single Serving Options

💡 Most meal kit services start at two-person plans — but a few now cater specifically to single users, and the difference in value is significant.

Not every meal kit offers a genuine single serving option. Some services technically allow a “plan for one” but charge almost the same as a two-person plan with half the food. That’s the trap. Here’s what I found when I compared the options directly:

The honest winner for solo eaters who want zero waste and genuine single serving portions? Factor and Snap Kitchen, both of which send fully portioned, individually prepared meals. No leftovers, no math, no “how do I halve this recipe.”

For people who actually want to cook — just for one — Dinnerly’s one-person plan is the most accessible budget option I found. The variety isn’t huge, but it’s real.

xychart
    title "Solo Meal Kit: Price vs. Weekly Flexibility"
    x-axis ["Dinnerly", "EveryPlate", "HelloFresh", "Home Chef", "Factor", "Snap Kitchen"]
    y-axis "Price Per Serving ($)" 0 --> 15
    bar [5.2, 5.0, 9.99, 9.95, 11.00, 10.83]

Cost Per Serving: Is It Actually Worth It for One Person?

💡 For solo eaters, the right comparison isn’t “meal kit vs. groceries” — it’s “meal kit vs. the actual cost of eating alone with zero food waste.”

Here’s the math most single people don’t do. When you cook from scratch for one, you’re often buying ingredients in quantities meant for four. A head of cauliflower. A pound of ground turkey. A bunch of kale. You use half. The rest goes bad. That waste has a dollar value.

A college student I know — lives alone, tight budget, doesn’t love cooking — tracked her grocery waste for a month out of curiosity. She was throwing out roughly $30–$40 in food monthly. When she factored that into her actual per-meal cost, the gap between grocery shopping and a budget meal kit got a lot smaller.

Plot twist: the $5 Dinnerly meal can actually be cheaper than a “cheap” grocery run once you account for waste. Honestly, I initially thought meal kits for one were a luxury product. After looking at the numbers carefully, I’m not sure that’s true.

Flexibility and Variety: Can You Actually Customize for One?

💡 Variety and skip flexibility matter more for solo eaters — you’re eating every meal yourself, so menu fatigue sets in faster than it would for a household.

This is where services diverge most sharply. If you’re ordering for one and the weekly menu has only three options you’d actually eat, that gets old quickly. Factor’s catalog is consistently the largest I’ve seen for individual portions — usually 30+ options per week including keto, calorie-smart, and high-protein filters. That variety makes a real difference when you’re eating solo and boredom is the enemy.

Customization is the other factor. Can you pick exactly what you want, week to week, without a “minimum variety” requirement forcing you to grab meals you don’t want? Home Chef handles this best among the cooking-required services. Factor handles it best among prepared-meal services.

• Best budget option for one: Dinnerly — real single-serve plan, lowest price point, decent enough variety.
• Best no-cook option: Factor — prepared meals, huge variety, easy to customize your weekly order.
• Most flexibility overall: Home Chef, if you’re willing to pay mid-range prices and do your own cooking.
• Easiest to try first: HelloFresh offers frequent first-order discounts and pausing is genuinely simple.

One thing worth knowing: most services let you pause for several weeks at a time without canceling. For solo eaters especially, that flexibility matters — life gets busy, you travel, you have a stretch where you’re eating out more. The ability to pause without a phone call is underrated.

Has anyone else noticed that the meal kit industry still kind of treats single eaters as an afterthought? The individual-portion market is growing, but most marketing still defaults to couples and families. The services that figured out the solo diner experience — Factor, Snap Kitchen, Dinnerly — are genuinely worth a closer look if you’re cooking for one and tired of throwing food away.

Related Articles

• Top 10 Meal Kits Compared: Taste, Price, and Portion Size
• Convenience vs. Quality: How Meal Kits Balance Both
• Value Meal Kits: The Most Cost-Effective Options

Back to Complete Guide: Best Meal Kit Review: Top 10 Compared by Taste, Price, and Portion Size

💡 The best value meal kit isn’t always the cheapest — it’s the one where cost-per-serving, portion size, and your actual cooking habits line up. Here’s how to find yours.

Is a Value Meal Kit Actually Cheaper Than Groceries?

Short answer: sometimes. Long answer: it depends on how bad you are at using groceries before they go bad.

I started tracking this seriously earlier this year after a friend of mine — a 28-year-old living alone in a mid-sized city — complained that she was spending $90 a week on groceries but throwing out nearly a third of what she bought. When she switched to a value meal kit at $8.99 per serving, she thought she was paying more. Turns out? She wasn’t. Not even close. Once you factor in the wilted spinach, the half-used cans of coconut milk, and the chicken that “seemed fine but smelled a little off,” her real grocery cost-per-meal was over $11.

That’s the trap most people fall into. The sticker price of groceries looks lower. The actual cost of groceries? Not always.

💡 Food waste adds roughly 20–30% to your real grocery bill — making meal kits more competitive than they appear at checkout.

How the Numbers Actually Stack Up

Here’s where a value meal kit earns its name — or doesn’t.

The table below compares the most budget-friendly meal kit options available right now, based on standard two-serving plans with no add-ons:

EveryPlate wins on raw price. Consistently. I’ve compared five different services myself over the past several months, and nothing comes close at that per-serving rate — especially if you’re cooking for two or more people.

But here’s the thing. Dinnerly is worth a serious look if you value slightly more variety and don’t mind a digital recipe card instead of a printed one (yes, that’s actually how they keep costs down).

quadrantChart
    title Meal Kit Value vs. Variety
    x-axis Low Variety --> High Variety
    y-axis High Cost --> Low Cost
    quadrant-1 Premium Zone
    quadrant-2 Best Value
    quadrant-3 Avoid
    quadrant-4 Specialty
    EveryPlate: [0.25, 0.9]
    Dinnerly: [0.35, 0.8]
    Home Chef: [0.55, 0.55]
    HelloFresh: [0.7, 0.45]
    Green Chef: [0.6, 0.35]

The Real Math: Monthly Savings Over Time

Let’s run the numbers. Assuming two people, cooking four nights a week:

EveryPlate at $4.99/serving × 2 servings × 4 meals = $39.92/week + $10.99 shipping = ~$50.91/week.

Compare that to a rough grocery equivalent — same meals, bought fresh, accounting for ~25% food waste — and you’re looking at $55–$65 depending on your store and location. That’s a real $200–$600 in annual savings. Not life-changing, but not nothing either.

Oh, and this part’s important: first-box discounts are massive. EveryPlate and Dinnerly routinely run 50–60% off your first order. That’s a real trial period at basically zero risk.

💡 Stack your first-box discount with a referral code from a friend and you can often get your first week under $20 total — a genuine no-risk test run.

What “Value” Actually Means for Nutritional Content

Cheaper kits do make trade-offs. Honestly, I’m still not 100% sure this is a dealbreaker for most people, but it’s worth knowing.

EveryPlate and Dinnerly tend to use simpler proteins (ground beef, chicken thighs) and fewer exotic vegetables. HelloFresh and Home Chef offer more premium cuts and globally-inspired recipes — but you’re paying for that. For a budget-conscious household, the simpler meals are often more practical anyway. Fewer ingredients = faster cooking = less chance of messing something up at 7pm on a Tuesday.

Has anyone else noticed that the “gourmet” kits somehow still leave you hungry? Portion sizes on premium services are often identical to budget ones — sometimes smaller. That’s worth remembering.

mindmap
  root((Value Meal Kit Wins))
    fa:fa-coins Cost Savings
      No food waste
      Bulk ingredient sourcing
      First-box discounts
    fa:fa-utensils Convenience
      Pre-portioned ingredients
      Simple recipes
      No meal planning
    fa:fa-chart-line Long-Term Benefits
      Learn to cook basics
      Reduce impulse takeout
      Predictable weekly spend

When to Subscribe — And When to Pause

Here’s what nobody tells you in the flashy ads: the real value of a meal kit subscription comes from the pause feature.

Every major service lets you skip weeks. Use it. Travel coming up? Pause. Busy month? Pause. Then come back for your regular discount as a returning customer. A budget-conscious person I know has been cycling through EveryPlate and Dinnerly for over a year — she pauses one, activates a promo on the other, and has never paid full price. Probably saved herself close to $400 over 12 months doing exactly that.

Sounds tedious. Takes about three minutes a month. Worth it.

The bottom line on value meal kits: if you’re in your 20s or 30s, cooking for one to four people, and you’re tired of either over-spending at the grocery store or defaulting to $18 delivery apps — a value kit at $5–$7 per serving deserves a serious look. Not as a lifestyle upgrade. As a boring, practical, money-saving tool that also happens to feed you dinner.

Sometimes the unglamorous option is just the right one.

Related Articles

• Top 10 Meal Kits Compared: Taste, Price, and Portion Size
• Convenience vs. Quality: How Meal Kits Balance Both
• Single Serving Meal Kits: Perfect for Solo Eaters

Back to Complete Guide: Best Meal Kit Review: Top 10 Compared by Taste, Price, and Portion Size

You spend 20 minutes scrolling through a meal kit website, add something to your cart, then quietly cancel before the first box even arrives. Sound familiar?

The problem isn’t you — it’s that most meal kit reviews are written by people who tried one box, once, and called it a day. I’ve been testing these services for the better part of a year now, cooking through more awkward recipe cards than I care to admit, and the differences between them are not subtle. Taste varies wildly. Portions that claim to feed two people sometimes barely cover one hungry adult. And the price-per-serving math gets sneaky fast once you factor in shipping.

This guide breaks it all down. Whether you’re a solo eater trying to avoid a week’s worth of leftovers, a busy household that just needs dinner to happen, or someone who genuinely cares about what’s on their plate — there’s a meal kit that fits. You just need to know where to look.

Table of Contents

1. Top 10 Meal Kits Compared: Taste, Price, and Portion Size
2. Convenience vs. Quality: How Meal Kits Balance Both
3. Single Serving Meal Kits: Perfect for Solo Eaters
4. Value Meal Kits: The Most Cost-Effective Options

Top 10 Meal Kits Compared: Taste, Price, and Portion Size

💡 Not all meal kits are created equal — taste scores, portion sizes, and real per-serving costs vary dramatically across the top 10.

Here’s the thing: the meal kit market has gotten genuinely competitive, and the gaps between the leaders are more nuanced than any single “best of” list suggests. After cooking through dozens of boxes and comparing notes with a few others who did the same, a clear picture started to emerge.

Some services win on flavor complexity — think chef-developed recipes with restaurant-level technique. Others nail the basics: consistent portions, easy prep, and ingredients that actually arrive fresh. The comparison table below (covered in full detail in the linked guide) maps all ten across the metrics that matter most — taste ratings, actual portion weights, and the honest per-serving cost including shipping.

Read the Full Guide: Top 10 Meal Kits Compared: Taste, Price, and Portion Size

Convenience vs. Quality: How Meal Kits Balance Both

💡 The services that score highest on convenience often cut corners on ingredient quality — but a few have genuinely cracked both.

I initially got this wrong. I assumed the fastest kits — the ones with pre-portioned sauces and 15-minute cook times — would sacrifice flavor. Some do. But a handful of services have quietly gotten very good at delivering complex-tasting meals without the 45-minute kitchen commitment.

The tradeoff usually shows up in ingredient sourcing. Quick-prep kits lean on more processed components. Slower, quality-focused kits send you whole vegetables and expect you to know what a “julienne” is. Neither approach is objectively better — it depends entirely on what a Tuesday night looks like in your household. The full breakdown explores how each brand navigates this balance, with specific examples from actual recipe boxes.

Read the Full Guide: Convenience vs. Quality: How Meal Kits Balance Both

Single Serving Meal Kits: Perfect for Solo Eaters

💡 Most meal kits are built for two — but single-serving options have improved dramatically, and a few are genuinely worth it for solo households.

A friend of mine who lives alone told me she tried three different meal kit services and gave up on all of them because the minimum order always left her with food going bad by Thursday. It’s a real problem. The industry default is two-person portions, and solo eaters often end up paying for food they can’t realistically finish.

That’s changed some. A handful of services have introduced true single-serve options — not just “order one serving of a two-person recipe” workarounds, but actually designed single portions with appropriate packaging and no forced leftovers. Are single-serving meal kits worth the cost? Mostly yes, if you pick the right one. The full guide walks through exactly which services make it work.

Read the Full Guide: Single Serving Meal Kits: Perfect for Solo Eaters

Value Meal Kits: The Most Cost-Effective Options

💡 True value isn’t just about the lowest sticker price — it’s about what you actually get per dollar, including portion size, ingredient quality, and skip flexibility.

Plot twist: the cheapest meal kit isn’t always the best value. Earlier this year I tracked my actual weekly spend across four budget-positioned services, and two of them cost more per week in practice than a mid-tier competitor — because of rigid ordering minimums and difficult pause policies. The real value equation includes how flexible the service is when life gets busy.

The services that win on genuine value tend to combine reasonable per-serving costs with generous portions, free or low-cost shipping thresholds, and skip-week policies that don’t require a customer service call. That combination is rarer than you’d think. The full guide ranks the most cost-effective options with the actual math laid out.

Read the Full Guide: Value Meal Kits: The Most Cost-Effective Options

Frequently Asked Questions

Which meal kit offers the best taste?

Taste is subjective, but the consistent top performers in flavor complexity tend to be the chef-collaborative services — ones that develop recipes with actual culinary professionals rather than optimizing purely for speed. That said, “best taste” also depends on your cooking confidence. A beautifully designed recipe falls flat if the technique is too advanced for a weeknight. The detailed comparison in the Top 10 guide breaks this down by skill level and cuisine preference.

Are single-serving meal kits worth the cost?

For solo eaters, honestly — yes, usually. The math looks worse per-serving compared to two-person kits, but when you factor in food waste, it often evens out. The bigger question is whether the service you’re considering has genuinely single-serve options or is just letting you order half a two-person kit. There’s a meaningful difference in packaging, freshness, and portion accuracy. See the single-serving guide for specific recommendations.

What is the most convenient meal kit for a busy lifestyle?

Convenience means different things to different people. If it’s cook time, look for services that offer 15-20 minute recipes with pre-prepped components. If it’s delivery flexibility, prioritize services with wide delivery windows and easy skip features. If it’s mental load — not having to plan anything — some services now offer fully automated weekly selections based on your preferences. The convenience vs. quality guide walks through which services actually deliver on these promises versus which ones just market them.

The Bottom Line

The best meal kit is the one you’ll actually use consistently. That sounds obvious, but it’s the thing most reviews skip over — because it means the answer is different for everyone.

Start with your real priorities: taste, price, portion size for your household, or just getting dinner on the table without thinking about it. Each guide above focuses on one of those priorities in depth. If you’re not sure where to start, the full comparison of all 10 kits gives you the clearest side-by-side picture. Take 10 minutes with it — it’ll save you from a trial-and-error cycle that costs real money.