The honest economics of a $20 subscription.

Six weeks in, the most-asked question after "is the meal earmark real" is "how does the $20 actually break down". Here's the full answer.

$8 goes to the pooled meal fund. Fixed portion, not a fraction, not conditional. It's earmarked the moment your Stripe charge clears and lives in a separate ledger from operating funds. Refunds unwind it; failed charges never enter it. Ten meals per subscription per month at the partner's $0.80/meal peg, reported monthly. When the pooled fund crosses the $50,000/year threshold that unlocks the corporate partnership with the hunger-relief charity we select, each month's aggregate ships as a real donation with a partner receipt — [context here](/blog/the-fifty-thousand-threshold).

$7 goes to Anthropic for API inference. This is the largest operating cost. The average LADLE subscriber sends and receives around 800K tokens per month across all their chats. At Claude Sonnet's per-token pricing on our tier, that averages to $6.20-$7.20 depending on the specific mix of input and output tokens and whether context caching kicks in. We budget $7 as the fair average; heavy users are subsidized by light users.

$5 goes to ops. This covers Stripe fees (~2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, so ~$0.90 of your $20 in the first month, less on renewals), infrastructure (AWS + a small SaaS stack, ~$0.60 per subscriber), and roughly $3.50 of margin for the human costs of running this — the founder's salary equivalent (extremely modest at current scale), legal/compliance, and reserves.

At meaningful subscriber scale, the math works if usage stays close to the averages. If Anthropic drops API prices materially, we pass that through by extending the average subscriber's usage headroom rather than dropping the $20 price. The $8 to the meal fund stays constant regardless.

Two questions this economics raises that we've heard variations of.

"Can you charge less?" Not without cutting the meal earmark or losing money. The $20 is the equilibrium price that makes the meal math work at our current usage patterns. If we were subsidized by VC funding, we could — for a while — subsidize a lower price. We aren't, so we can't.

"Can you charge more and earmark more?" We considered a $30 tier with $16 to the meal fund. Passed on it because it would require a two-tier product (users on the $30 tier would need to see they were earmarking more, users on $20 would compare and feel like they were doing less). One plan, one price is a load-bearing constraint. The right answer at scale is more subscribers, not more per subscriber — and more subscribers is exactly what closes the distance to the $50,000/year partnership threshold.

If any of these numbers change materially, we'll update this post and note the change in the changelog.