How the sausage is made.
The full pipeline from your $20 subscription to the specific meals funded through the World Food Programme. 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 actual numbers.
Beginning of July. 16,054 active subscribers on LADLE across plans (Base, Max 5x, Max 20x). Assume for simplicity that all are on Base for this walk-through.
Throughout July. 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 for WFP transmission. Total earmarked: 16,054 subscribers × $8 = $128,432. Add contributions from Max 5x subscribers ($40 each) and Max 20x ($80 each), plus prorated adjustments for mid-month starts/cancels; total for July = $96,412 (reflects actual plan mix).
July 31, 23:00 UTC. Batch job triggers. It sums the earmarked amount across all subscribers for the period, generates a single ShareTheMeal donation request for $96,412. This is not a series of individual donations — it’s one aggregate transfer.
July 31, 23:47 UTC. ShareTheMeal confirms receipt of the transfer with reference number 4471-A. The transfer clears their processing pipeline. We publish the receipt to /impact/reports the same day — 120,515 meals funded ($96,412 ÷ $0.80 per meal).
August 1. Per-user impact statements (business plan) delivered to billing contacts and admins. Personal My Table screens update with the plates funded for July.
Receipt, not marketing.
Meals match months paid.
Annual billing costs 10× the monthly price (“2 months free”). Because the meal donation is derived from the money that came in — $8 of every $20 to WFP — annual funds 10 months’ worth of meals, not 12. Ladle base annual ($200) → 100 meals booked to the invoice month. Max 5x annual ($1,000) → 500 meals. Max 20x annual ($2,000) → 1,000 meals.
The math anchor: Annual = 12 months of LADLE, 10 months’ meals — you pay for 10, meals match. If you’d rather fund 12 months of meals per year, pay monthly ($240/year for Ladle base, 120 meals). Same $0.80/meal rate either way.
All meals for an annual subscription commit 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 to WFP — reported to the cent on public receipts. The actual transfer is to-the-cent.
- Meals — integer count, always rounded down. If the USD amount would compute to 700.5 meals, we report 700 meals and the remaining $0.40 rolls into the next month’s pool.
- 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 meal count — sum of monthly integer meal counts. Reconciles exactly to public receipts.
What happens when something goes wrong.
ShareTheMeal API failure at batch time. If the monthly transfer fails to clear 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 batch — delayed, pending resolution” instead of a completed receipt. We do not silently retry or backfill without acknowledging the delay in public. When the transfer eventually clears, the receipt lands with the actual clearance date, not the intended one.
Discrepancy between our earmarked figure and the transfer. If our internal accounting shows $96,412 earmarked but the ShareTheMeal transfer confirms a different amount (rare, usually due to Stripe fee reconciliation), we post the reconciling entry to /impact/reports as a follow-up note within 48 hours. The public transfer amount is authoritative; our earmarking is a projection.
ShareTheMeal changes their per-meal cost. They publish it publicly. If the number changes from $0.80 to $0.85 (hypothetically), we update the divisor immediately on our meal-count calculations. This can only make the meal count smaller for a given USD; we do not lag the change to inflate our metric.
Subscriber refund after the batch has cleared. If we refund a subscriber for a month whose donation has already been transferred, the refund comes from LADLE’s working capital, not from WFP. The meal count stays. See /legal/refunds.
Every line on the receipt maps to a step in this pipeline.
If you find a discrepancy, email hello@ladle.chat — we'd rather fix it than hide it.