What Popotam costs
Popotam is free, with no ads and no selling your data. This page shows what it costs to run, line by line, with amounts read from the database when the page loads, and what donations have brought in.
What Popotam costs
Popotam has three expenses and only one that moves. The AI that builds the meals cost €36.99 over the last 30 days. The server comes to €20 a month for the share assigned to it. The domain name costs less than one euro a month.
At last week's pace, that's about €61 a month, for 5,923 saved meal plans. That's 1.03 cents per meal plan per month.
AI cost €4.25 over the seven days three weeks ago, and €9.40 over the last seven: 2.2 times more. That's the whole reason this page exists. An amount copied by hand would be wrong before you even read it, so these figures are read from the database the moment the page loads.
AI, line by line
It's the main expense, and the only one that follows usage: every generated week costs something, and so does every recipe written. Popotam calls mistral-small-latest at Mistral, a French company, and pays per token. Meal prep plans go through a sturdier model, mistral-large-latest, three times pricier. And the weeks are built by gpt-6-luna at OpenAI: compared on real weeks, it follows constraints better, for a third less. Each model is counted here at its own price.
- What you ask for yourself
- €17.18 for 8,133 requests. Until September 23, 2026, the log didn't tell a full week apart from a simple dish swap: this line still mixes the two.
- Dish swaps
- €5.28 for 5,273 swaps, since they've been counted separately
- Weeks prepared overnight
- €6.95 for 2,591 weeks, for people who picked automatic mode
- Recipes written
- €2.97 for 7,417 recipes
- Meal prep plans
- €1.24 for 334 plans
- Weeks reviewed by AI
- €0.40 for 2,172 reviews, when Popotam builds from its dish catalog
- Price checks
- less than €0.01 for 15 reviews of in-store prices
- Pricing your own recipes
- less than €0.01 for 64 price estimates of ingredients missing from our price database
- Recipes on the "What's for dinner?" pages
- €0.35 for 912 recipes, written once and for all per dish
- Dish illustrations
- €2.60 for 30 images generated by AI, once per dish, then reviewed by hand
- Imported recipes
- €0.01 for 34 translations of recipes from a link or from Mealime
- Estimated prices
- Adjusted every week to real in-store prices collected by Open Prices volunteers (Open Food Facts), data under the ODbL license.
- One week of meals
- 0.27 cents measured on weeks prepared overnight, the only group we know contains nothing but full weeks
- One recipe
- 0.04 cents
- Successful calls
- 101.4%, out of 26,975 calls
- Rates applied
- €0.13 per million tokens read, €0.51 per million written. Checked September 21, 2026.
The cost of a week is measured on a clean sample. It was first calculated across all generations, which gave 0.18 cents, and that was wrong: until September 23, 2026, "Swap it" was logged as a week generation, so the average mixed full weeks with single-dish swaps, three times cheaper. So the figure above comes from weeks prepared overnight, which are never anything but full weeks.
These amounts are recalculated from the number of tokens, not read from the cost recorded at the time of each call. The difference isn't theoretical: until September 21, 2026, Popotam charged the same price for tokens read and tokens written, which underestimated its own bill by a factor of 3.4. The token count, though, has been right since the very first call.
"My own AI" mode doesn't cost Popotam anything: the generation happens on your side, with your subscription to the assistant of your choice. So it doesn't show up anywhere in these numbers.
The server and the domain name
Popotam runs on a machine rented from Scaleway, in Paris, France, which costs €40 a month. This machine isn't Popotam's alone: it also hosts my other projects. Pinning the whole bill on it would be the only possible lie on this page.
- Machine
- Scaleway BASIC3-X2C-4G, 2 cores, 4 GB of memory, 45 GB of disk
- Location
- Paris, France (fr-par-1)
- Machine price
- €40 a month, all projects combined
- Share assigned to Popotam
- €20 a month, so half. Measured September 22, 2026.
- Domain name
- popotam.fr, less than one euro a month
Half, and here's how it's counted. On September 22, 2026, four ways of measuring gave four shares: 44% of CPU time, 55% of the database, 38% of memory, 16% of disk. None gave Popotam the clear majority its traffic might suggest. Half is the most defensible reading, and it's rounded down rather than up: inflating the displayed cost is exactly the temptation this page is written against.
What donations have brought in
Popotam has received 4 donations, for a total of €21.
This number isn't copied by hand: Stripe, which collects the donations, notifies the server with every payment, and the total above is recalculated from those notices, refunds deducted. Along the way, Popotam records neither the name nor the address of the person giving: a total doesn't need to know who.
The amount shown is what supporters gave. Stripe takes a fee on every payment, so what actually arrives is a bit lower.
The difference between what Popotam costs and what it receives, I pay. That's not a complaint, it's the number this page exists to show.
What Popotam won't do to make money
A free service always gets paid for one way or another. Here are the ways Popotam rules out, and the last one matters most to you.
- No ads, anywhere, in any form.
- No selling your data. There's no account, no name, no required address, and meal plans serve no purpose other than you.
- No tracking cookies, and a self-hosted analytics tool that knows neither who you are nor where you live.
- No store commissions. This is the big one: no store pays Popotam, so nothing pushes a product or a brand into your list, and you shop wherever you want. A tool paid by a store chain can't tell you to go elsewhere.
- No features behind a paywall. There's no paid version, no limited trial, no quota to unlock.
What a donation changes, and what it doesn't
What a donation doesn't change: nothing, for you. Popotam stays free and complete, with or without a donation. Giving unlocks no feature, removes no limit, gives no perk. If it did, it wouldn't be a donation anymore, it'd be a subscription too shy to say its name.
What a donation does change: the margin. As long as the bill stays small, it gets paid without trade-offs. If it keeps climbing at the current pace, I'll have to choose between paying out of pocket and cutting back on the service, and that's the choice a donation pushes back.
It all happens at this month's pot: you see what's left to pay this month, you pick your ingredient, and the payment goes through Stripe, in your language, with no account to create anywhere. Stripe asks for an email address to send you the receipt: it stays with Stripe, Popotam doesn't record it.