Every score in the app is one of the formulas below, run on the device over the menu's prices and portions. No secret weighting, no vibes.
✓ Verified — a price a person confirmed, or a chain published, within the last 30 days. The app shows the date and how many people agreed. Nothing else ever gets the green check.
🖩 Estimated — nutrition, margins, satiety, ingredient value and every buffet or per-pound projection. Drawn with a calculator, always.
Every item gets a score for the goal you picked, highest first. Ties break by the lower price, then alphabetically, so the order is stable. The bar under each row is that item's score as a share of the winner's. The last row is the sucker item; an item priced below its estimated cost is a loss leader.
How much of your dollar is actually food. Ingredient value is the estimated retail cost of
what is on the plate; where we have no costing, we fall back to
price × (1 − margin%).
Hours of not-being-hungry per dollar. About 200 kcal buys an hour for an average adult, then protein, fibre and sheer volume stretch it. Capped at 8 hours so a 4,200-calorie pizza cannot claim a day.
Where the restaurant profits least — the item they would rather you did not order. Estimated from ingredient costs and published industry reports, and useful for comparing items on one menu, not as anyone's accounts.
How many plates of the good stuff it takes to out-eat the door price. Rice, bread and pasta are near-zero value and are excluded from the average — that exclusion is the whole point of the mode.
Everything costs the same per pound, so the only question is how much protein is in a pound — and how much of that pound is sauce you could have drained.
Anything under 3 g/$ — or any pure filler — lands in “Skip”. 6 g/$ and up is “Load up”.
The combo builder is an exact bounded-knapsack search at one-cent resolution over the whole menu: the most of your goal that your budget can buy, up to six of any one item and three lines. Drinks and desserts are excluded. It also looks for bundles that cost the same as buying units (five slices for the price of a whole eight-slice pizza) and for upgrades whose extra dollars buy almost nothing.
Spot something wrong? Verify the price in the app. A dated correction from a person beats our best guess, every time.