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About this tool
Plan a trip food budget across street stalls, cafés, snacks and splurge meals, and see how many nice meals your budget really allows.
Builds a complete trip food budget from a repeating daily pattern of street meals, café meals, snacks and drinks, plus a chosen number of splurge meals, and then solves the same equation backwards to say how many splurge meals a fixed budget actually allows. The detail most hand-written food budgets get wrong is handled explicitly: a splurge meal replaces a meal you were already paying for, so only the difference between the two prices is new money.
Open Street Food Budget Planner on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Add your input to the workspace.
Adjust the options until the result looks right.
Copy or download the output and put it to work.
Only the price difference over the meal it replaces is added, not the whole bill.
Enter a budget and it returns the number of nice meals that fit inside it.
The two lines travellers forget, and often the reason a food budget runs out early.
Work it up from real prices rather than a single figure: a typical day is one or two street meals, one café meal, one or two snacks and two or three bottles of water per person. The total varies enormously between cities, so the reliable method is to check three actual stall prices at your destination and multiply, then add a buffer of about 15%.
No — it replaces a meal you would have bought anyway, so the extra cost is the difference between the two. A 1,500 splurge dinner replacing an average 137 routine meal adds 1,363 per person, not 1,500. Budgeting the full price is the most common reason a trip food budget looks unaffordable when it is not.
Around 15% is the usual planning convention. It absorbs the day the cheap place is closed, prices that moved since the blog post you read, and the drinks and tea stops nobody counts in advance. Below 10% the plan tends to break within the first few days.
In most of South and South-East Asia, yes — a single street meal often costs less than the ingredients for one, and hostel kitchens rarely stock oil, spices and staples you would need to buy whole. In Western Europe, Japan and Australia the balance reverses and self-catering usually wins. Compare a real stall price against a real supermarket basket at your destination rather than assuming either way.