Annual billing math: 2 months free, 10 months' meals.

The annual plan costs 10× the monthly price. On Ladle base that's $200 instead of $240 over the year — two months off. On Max 5x it's $1,000 instead of $1,200. On Max 20x it's $2,000 instead of $2,400. Same math at every tier.

The interesting choice isn't the discount. It's what happens to the meals.

**Meals match months paid.** Annual is 10 months' worth of price, so it's 10 months' worth of meals: 100 meals on Ladle base annual (10 × 10), 500 on Max 5x annual (10 × 50), 1,000 on Max 20x annual (10 × 100). All of them commit to WFP in the month you pay the invoice, not spread across the year.

If you paid MONTHLY for a full year — twelve separate $20 charges — you'd fund 120 meals over that year. Annual billing gives you two of those months back as savings, and the meal count moves down with the money. This is the honest version: **you pay for 10, meals match**.

Two design choices worth explaining.

**Why book all 100 meals on the invoice month, not spread them across 12.**

The obvious alternative is: accrue 1/12th of the annual meal count each month, matching the monthly cadence. Cleaner accounting on paper, less month-over-month surge.

We don't do that. When an annual invoice clears, we book the full 100 (or 500, or 1,000) meals to that invoice month. Two reasons.

First, the meal donation follows the money. The $80 (or $400, or $800) goes to WFP as one line in that month's donation batch. Sitting on someone's cash for eleven months in a "future meals" ledger would be a fiction — the money isn't reserved for them, it's already been paid to Anthropic and to ops as we serve their usage across the year. The clean accounting matches reality: money in, meals booked, done.

Second, it removes a class of failure mode. If a monthly-drip approach lived in code and something broke in month seven, the last five months of an annual subscriber's meals could silently not accrue. With one-shot booking at invoice time, if it lands, it lands. Nothing to break later.

**Why the meals count matches months paid, not months of access.**

The alternative is: "you get access for 12 months, we donate meals for 12 months too — the two extra months' meals are a bonus." That'd be a marketing win but a math loss. LADLE's meal donation is derived from the money that came in ($8 of every $20). If we donated 12 months of meals against 10 months of money, we'd be donating $96 for a $200 invoice — that's $16 more meals than the $8-of-$20 formula supports, and the extra has to come out of ops or margin.

We chose to keep the formula clean: $8 to WFP for every $20 of price paid. If you pay $200, we donate $80. That's 100 meals. Simple, verifiable, protected against future price/cost drift.

**What about cancellation?**

If you cancel an annual subscription mid-year, Stripe's default is no refund on the prorated remainder — you keep access through the paid period. We follow that default. The meals we already booked stay booked. The 10 months' worth funded meals; you used part of the 12 months' worth of access. Both sides of the contract were met.

The refund policy handles the edge case: cancel within 7 days of purchase (annual or monthly) and we refund the full amount. In that case we reverse the meal booking too — WFP handles the return through their partner platform. Nothing complicated for the subscriber, nothing pretend on the ledger.

**Bottom line.**

Annual pricing is the plan for people who know they're staying. Two months off, all of that year's meals booked the day you pay. Nothing back-loaded, nothing conditional, no fake "bonus" meals. If you'd rather have the extra two months of meals per year, pay monthly — you'll spend $40 more per year and fund 20 more meals with it. Same rate either way, just a different way to arrange the math.