Why this exists
The short, honest version.
The mission
Helping people eat well on £1 a day — especially when money's tight.
Practical, tested meals and real shop-floor tricks. No lectures, no judgement, no politics. Whether you're doing it for the challenge or because you have to, the food and the tips are exactly the same.
This isn't a diet app. It's not a hack. I actually lived like this.
A few years back I had a stretch of months where, after rent and bills, I had about a pound a day for food. Not as a stunt, not for content — just the maths of being skint. I got very good at it very fast, because the alternative was being hungry.
I learned which supermarket reduced the good stuff at 7pm and which one did it at 3. I learned that a bag of red lentils and a spice box will feed you better than a meal deal ever will. I learned that porridge is basically free, that yellow stickers are a contact sport, and that cooking once and eating five times is the whole game.
Nobody teaches you this stuff. Every "budget eating" app I found was either calorie-counting in disguise or AI-generated recipes nobody had ever actually cooked. So I built the thing I wish existed back then: a challenge, not a lecture. Log what you ate, prove it with a photo, keep your streak alive, and steal tips from people doing the same.
Every meal in this app was really cooked and really eaten, at the price it says. The community board is where the good tricks live — add yours.
And if you're doing this because you have to, not because it's fun: I see you. There's no shame in it. There are food bank links in the setup screen, and the pledge feature exists so people doing it for fun can help people doing it for real.
— the founder
Cheap food is usually high-fibre food
Most UK adults eat around 20g of fibre a day; the recommendation is 30g. It's one of the few nutrition gaps where the fix is also the cheap option.
Beans, lentils, oats, tinned tomatoes, frozen veg, potatoes with the skins on — the things that keep a day under £1 are the same things that carry the most fibre. Eating well on a budget and hitting your fibre aren't a trade-off; they're the same shopping list.
🌾 The fibre tags in this app are rough estimates from what you type — a nudge, not gram counts. It's a challenge app, not a clinical nutrition tracker.
No judgement on what you've eaten before. Some days it's a meal deal, and that's fine.
Surplus bags absolutely count 🛍️
Apps like Too Good To Go and Flashfood sell food that would otherwise be binned at a steep discount. Grabbing a £3 bag of perfectly good food and stretching it across two days isn't gaming the system — it's playing it properly.
Log what you got and what you actually paid, tag it as a surplus bag, and it counts toward the challenge at the real discounted price, same as any other meal. Cheap, real food — and less of it in the bin. Everyone wins.
We link out to these apps — we don't pull live bag availability into £1 A Day. What you find there is between you and the app; what you log here is between you and the streak.
Eating out, honestly 🍽️
This challenge is about everyday eating, not never treating yourself. People eat out. Pretending otherwise would just make the app feel like a telling-off.
So the venue price log covers food as well as drinks. A £3 lunch plate cooked from real ingredients and a £1 burger off a stall are both worth knowing about — they're just not the same thing. Log the price, and add an honest word on what you actually got: real ingredients, somewhere in between, or cheap but very processed.
It's not a health score and nobody's marking you. It's the thing you'd say to a mate: worth it, or fine once in a while. Then everyone can make their own call on the price and what's behind it, instead of just the number.
Open the venue price log →House rules
- 📸 Photo proof or it didn't happen
- 🏷️ Yellow stickers are a skill, not cheating
- 🤝 Share one tip for every one you take
- 🚫 No skipping meals to win — that's not the point
- 🌾 Beans and lentils are cheap and full of fibre. Bonus points.