Puppy food subscriptions in the UK: what they cost once the puppy grows

Every fresh-food subscription asks the same questions at signup: breed, age, weight, how active. Then it gives you a price. That price is honest, and it is also the single most misleading number in the category, because it is the cost of feeding the dog standing in front of you — and a puppy is the one customer who will not be that dog for very long.

Here is what that means in pounds. Butternut Box, on prices sampled in September 2026, charges about £76.62 a month to feed a 9kg dog and about £148.55 a month to feed a 30kg one. A labrador puppy passes through 9kg at roughly three months and arrives at 30kg before he is a year old. Same dog, same plan, nothing changed except him. The bill nearly doubles, and it does it quietly, a few pounds at a time.

That is not a criticism of Butternut in particular. It is how every plan priced by weight works, and it is the thing nobody puts on the signup page.

What the plans actually cost

These are ongoing prices, not introductory ones, for a 12kg dog. Twelve kilos is a useful reference point for a puppy: it is roughly a cocker spaniel at six months, a labrador at four.

Brand	Per day	Format	Storage	AADF score
tails.com	£0.85	Tailored dry kibble	Cupboard	48–56%
Bella+Duke	from £1.18	Raw, frozen	Freezer	—
Marleybones (half plan)	£1.79	Pantry fresh	Cupboard	86%
Pure Pet Food	£1.83	Air-dried, mixed with water	Cupboard	61–74%
Different Dog	£2.96	Fresh, chilled	Fridge or freezer	94%
Marleybones (full plan)	£3.09	Pantry fresh	Cupboard	86%
Butternut Box	£3.26	Fresh, frozen	Freezer	87%

The AADF column is the independent nutritional rating from All About Dog Food, which scores recipes on ingredient quality rather than on marketing. It is the closest thing this market has to a referee, and the spread in that column is the real story of the table: the cheapest option is not a slightly worse version of the most expensive one. It is a different product.

Now multiply the right-hand end of that table by a growing puppy. A labrador on Butternut goes from roughly £77 to roughly £149 a month inside a year, and on the fresh plans generally you should expect the figure you are quoted in month one to be somewhere near half of what you will be paying by month twelve.

Why a puppy costs more than the weight chart suggests

There is a second multiplier on top of growth, and it catches people out because it runs the other way.

A puppy under four months old needs far more food per kilo than an adult of the same weight. PetMD’s figures put a 4.5kg puppy under four months at 649 kcal a day, and the same puppy over four months at 433 — a drop of about a third, at a point when the dog is still getting heavier. So in the first few months you are paying for a dog considerably larger than the one on your scales, and then the per-kilo rate falls away just as the kilos start piling on.

The practical consequence is that the plans price a puppy by asking you for a weight, and the weight is only correct on the day you type it. Butternut’s own guidance is that most dogs reach adult weight between twelve and eighteen months, and that puppies need extra food throughout — but the portions follow the weight recorded in your account. Nobody at the company is watching your puppy grow. If you do not go in and update it, the plan carries on feeding a dog that no longer exists.

Put a reminder in your phone for the first of each month for the first year. Weigh the puppy, update the account, and look at what the new price is before it arrives as a payment. That single habit is worth more than any discount code in this article.

The storage question, which nobody asks at signup

Fresh food is frozen food. A month of Butternut for a labrador puppy is a genuinely large volume of pouches, and the most common complaint from owners who leave is not the price — it is that the food took over the freezer.

Work this out before you order, not after the first delivery is on your doorstep. If you have a freezer drawer rather than a freezer, the honest options are the cupboard-stored ones: Pure Pet Food, which is air-dried and mixed with water at mealtimes, or Marleybones, which is cooked fresh but shelf-stable until opened. Both trade some convenience or some nutritional score for the shelf space, and for a lot of British kitchens that is the right trade.

What to check before you sign up

The introductory price is not the price. Butternut’s standard offer is 50% off the first two boxes, which covers roughly the first four weeks. tails.com routinely runs a first box at around £5, a discount of about 75%. Both are legitimate, and neither tells you anything about month three. Find the ongoing figure for your dog’s projected adult weight before you decide, not the trial figure for his current one.

Prices move. Butternut raised UK prices for boxes arriving from 14 May 2026, and the increase covered plan pricing, the delivery fee and per-recipe surcharges — four recipes, Beef It Up, Wham Bam Lamb, You’ve Got Game and Gobble, Gobble Turkey, now carry a supplement. The company’s stated reason was ingredient costs and staff pay, and it noted that prices had held for two years before that. That is a reasonable way to run a business. It is also a reminder that the number you agree to in September is not a fixed-term contract.

Recipe surcharges are a real cost. If your puppy settles on one of the surcharged recipes, your monthly figure is not the headline figure. Check which recipes carry a supplement before you let the dog pick a favourite.

Cancellation. The better operators in this category are genuinely easy to pause and cancel — Bella+Duke states no minimum commitment and allows pausing at any time. Check this yourself before you enter a card number, because it is the one term that decides how much a mistake costs you.

Who should not do this

If you have a giant-breed puppy, speak to your vet before you put him on a calorie-dense fresh plan. Controlled growth rate matters in large and giant breeds for reasons that are skeletal rather than financial, and this is not a question a subscription questionnaire is designed to answer. It is also the case that a great dane on a fresh plan is comfortably over £160 a month, which makes it an expensive way to get the decision wrong.

If £150 a month is the difference between comfortable and tight, do not sign up on the strength of a half-price first box. A puppy is already an expensive year, and a food subscription is the single easiest line in that budget to underestimate, precisely because it starts small and grows with the dog.

And if your puppy is doing well on a decent kibble, there is no obligation here. The gap between a good dry food and a good fresh food is real and it shows up in the AADF scores, but it is a smaller gap than the one between a good kibble and a bad one — and the second gap costs nothing to close.

What to do next

Work out the adult weight first. If you are not sure what your puppy will finish at, the same question decides what crate you buy, and the puppy crate size guide walks through how to arrive at the figure. For cockapoos in particular, where the adult size depends on which poodle the breeder used, the cockapoo guide covers the same problem in more detail.

Then price the plan at that adult weight, not at today’s. If the number still works, the fresh plans are a good product and the nutrition scores back that up. If it does not, you have found that out for free, which is the entire point of doing it in this order.

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Prices in this guide were checked in September 2026 and are personalised by each company to your dog’s weight, age and activity, so treat the figures as a guide rather than a quote. Nutritional scores are from All About Dog Food, which is independent of this site and of the brands listed. Nothing here is veterinary advice — for anything to do with your puppy’s growth or health, speak to your vet.