The honest economics of a $20 subscription.

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

$8 goes to WFP. 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 until the end-of-month transfer. Refunds unwind it; failed charges never enter it. Ten meals per subscription per month at ShareTheMeal's $0.80/meal, with a receipt.

$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 15,000 subscribers, the math works if usage stays close to the averages. If Anthropic drops API prices materially — as they have twice since we launched — we pass that through by extending the average subscriber's usage headroom rather than dropping the $20 price. The $8 to WFP stays constant regardless.

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

"Can you charge less?" Not without cutting the meal donation 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 donate more?" We considered a $30 tier with $16 to WFP. Passed on it because it would require a two-tier product (users on the $30 tier would need to see they were funding 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.

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