MealPal Discount Truth
Helps subscription-lunch users see through discount math and find the truly best meal
- Problem
- A developer built a Chrome extension to fix MealPal's UX and discovered the platform's displayed discount percentages are miscalculated. Paying subscribers think they are saving money when they may not be, and nobody is checking. Pricing transparency in subscription meals is a real blind spot.
- Solution
- A browser extension that pulls the user's local plan menu, recalculates real discounts (original price, actual paid, portion), highlights newly added and underrated meals, sorts by actual savings, and shows a daily break-even indicator. Start with MealPal only, then expand to similar subscription meal services.
- Users
- Urban office workers using MealPal-style lunch subscriptions, especially those on tight lunch breaks who care about saving
- MVP
- Cover only MealPal; recalculate and fix discount percentages; sort by real discount; flag newly added meals; a simple daily break-even indicator.
- Revenue
- Free extension plus paid tier for history, alerts, and multi-city; affiliate deals with local restaurants; later a white-label version for other subscription platforms.
- Why now
- Subscription lunches are widespread in cities like New York and users increasingly doubt whether they actually save; the platform won't fix its own math, leaving a clean niche for an indie.