How the sausage is made.
The full pipeline from your $20 subscription to the meals reserved in the meal fund — the fund pooling toward the $50,000/year threshold that unlocks a formal our future hunger-relief partner partnership. A worked example month. Rounding rules. What happens when something goes wrong.
Five moments, four stations shown. Each station is a specific event with a specific timestamp. If any station fails, the failure is public — nothing is silently retried without a note.
One month, end to end, with the math.
Beginning of month. Assume 1,000 active subscribers, all on Base for this walk-through. (Numbers here are illustrative — real monthly figures publish to /impact/reports as they clear.)
Throughout the month. Each subscriber’s monthly Stripe charge clears. The $8 earmarking per subscriber is not a transfer — it’s an accounting entry in our internal ledger that reserves that $8 in the meal fund. Total earmarked at 1,000 subscribers: 1,000 × $8 = $8,000. Add contributions from Max 5x subscribers ($40 each) and Max 20x ($80 each), plus prorated adjustments for mid-month starts/cancels.
Last day of the month, 23:00 UTC. Batch job triggers. It sums the earmarked amount across all subscribers for the period and adds it to the meal fund balance. The pooled balance is measured against the $50,000/year partnership threshold — the amount our future hunger-relief partner require to open a formal corporate partnership.
Same day, minutes later. The monthly fund report publishes to /impact/reports — new balance, month’s earmark, cumulative-since-launch, distance from the $50k threshold. In this sample month: $8,000 added, equivalent to 10,000 meals reserved at the $0.80/meal peg. Real partner receipts publish alongside the fund report the month the partnership threshold clears.
Next morning. Per-user impact statements (business plan) delivered to billing contacts and admins. Personal My Table screens update with the plates funded for the closed month.
Fund report, not marketing.
Meals match months paid.
Annual billing costs 10× the monthly price (“2 months free”). Because the meal earmark is derived from the money that came in — $8 of every $20 into the meal fund — annual reserves 10 months’ worth of meals, not 12. Ladle base annual ($200) → 100 meals reserved to the invoice month. Max 5x annual ($1,000) → 500 meals reserved. Max 20x annual ($2,000) → 1,000 meals reserved.
The math anchor: Annual = 12 months of LADLE, 10 months’ meals reserved — you pay for 10, meals match. If you’d rather reserve 12 months of meals per year, pay monthly ($240/year for Ladle base, 120 meals reserved). Same $0.80/meal peg either way.
All meal earmarks for an annual subscription land in the month the invoice clears — no drip across the year. This matches how the money actually flows and removes a class of failure mode (nothing to break in month seven).
What we round, and why.
- USD in meal fund — reported to the cent on public fund reports. The actual balance is to-the-cent.
- Meals reserved — integer count, always rounded down. If the USD amount would compute to 700.5 meals, we report 700 meals reserved and the remaining $0.40 rolls into the next month’s balance.
- Public MRR figure (on /open) — rounded to the nearest $10 for cleanliness in commentary, not for hiding precision. The exact figure is in our books.
- Lifetime reserved-meal count — sum of monthly integer reserved-meal counts. Reconciles exactly to the public fund reports.
What happens when something goes wrong.
Monthly reconciliation failure. If the end-of-month batch that posts the aggregated earmark to the meal fund fails to reconcile on July 31, we retry within 6 hours. If it still fails, we post to /status with the specific error and post again to /impact/reports with “July 2026 fund report — delayed, pending resolution” instead of a completed report. We do not silently retry or backfill without acknowledging the delay in public. When the reconciliation eventually clears, the fund report lands with the actual clearance date, not the intended one.
Discrepancy between our earmarked figure and the meal-fund balance.If our internal Stripe reconciliation shows $96,412 earmarked but the meal-fund entry ends up different (rare, usually due to Stripe fee reconciliation on refunds), we post the reconciling entry to /impact/reports as a follow-up note within 48 hours. The audited meal-fund balance is authoritative; the pre-reconciliation earmark is a projection.
The selected partner's per-meal cost differs from the working peg. We re-anchor publicly. If the number changes from $0.80 to $0.85 (hypothetically), we update the peg immediately on our reserved-meal-count calculations. This can only make the reserved-meal count smaller for a given USD; we do not lag the change to inflate our metric.
$50,000 partnership threshold not reached in twelve months. The fund is held. We surface options publicly — including donating the pooled balance directly to the partner we select as an unrestricted gift or another appropriate hunger-relief org, with a public subscriber vote. What we will not do is spend the fund on operations.
Subscriber refund after the earmark posts. If we refund a subscriber for a month whose $8 has already been added to the meal fund, the refund comes from LADLE’s working capital, not from the meal fund. The reserved-meal count stays. See /legal/refunds.
Every line on the fund report maps to a step in this pipeline.
If you find a discrepancy, email hello@ladle.chat — we'd rather fix it than hide it.