About r/budgetfood
In its own words:
Food on a Budget
Community guide
r/budgetfood (#364, about 3.0 million) is for cooking and eating on a budget—recipes, hauls, and thrifty meal talk. Collected rules require a recipe (not just a link), ban food-safety questions and health claims, and insist haul posts list location and cost. Text-heavy sample (~1.4 ppd).
Recipe, not a bare link
Submissions that only drop a URL without the recipe itself tend to fail rule 1; write ingredients and steps into the post or comments.
Hauls, requests, and what to skip
Hauls need location + cost; advice and recipe-request flairs appear in samples. Skip food-safety questions, health claims, and low-effort spam.
Practical pointers
Be kind; no solicitation or ads. Activity is modest in this snapshot—confirm live flairs before posting.
SubMouse Editorial
The community was created on May 21, 2011, which makes it 15 years old. Since Oct 26, 2026, it has gained 670 subscribers (+0.02%). It sits just behind r/hacking (#363) and ahead of r/FanTheories (#365) in our ranking.
What sets r/budgetfood apart
Relative to its huge audience, posting is calm — around 0.5 new posts a day per million members, which puts it in the quietest fifth of the Top 100. A good post has less competition here.
Subscriber growth
Between Sep 19, 2026 and Nov 2, 2026, r/budgetfood went up from 3,000,348 to 3,005,149 subscribers (+4.8K, +0.16%). That is about 109 new members per day. The chart uses our weekly snapshots (9 so far), so it gets longer every week.
Activity and best time to post
r/budgetfood gets about 1.4 new posts a day. The public archive holds 25,880 posts and 407,473 comments in total, about 15.7 comments per post.
Rules of r/budgetfood
The moderators of r/budgetfood list 11 rules. In short:
- Include a recipe, not just a link
- No food safety questions
- Recipe Test Flare Is only for Recipes from this subreddit
- Hauls must include Location and Cost
- No health claims
- Recipe Request Rules
- No low effort content
- No inappropriate content, spam, karma farming or solicitation
- No solicitation or advertising
- Be kind
How to join
Open reddit.com/r/budgetfood and press “Join”. Read the community rules in the sidebar before you post: every subreddit is run by its own volunteer moderators.
Frequently asked questions
How many members does r/budgetfood have?
r/budgetfood has 3,005,149 subscribers (Nov 2, 2026), which makes it the #364 safe-for-work subreddit in the SubMouse ranking. It added 4,801 members between Sep 19, 2026 and Nov 2, 2026.
When was r/budgetfood created?
r/budgetfood was created on May 21, 2011, so it has been around for 15 years.
Is r/budgetfood still active?
Yes. r/budgetfood gets about 1.4 new posts a day (average of the last week). Over its lifetime the archive counts 25,880 posts and 407,473 comments.
What kind of posts are on r/budgetfood?
The community describes itself as: “Food on a Budget” Recent post titles often mention thanksgiving, meal, rising and food.
Is r/budgetfood SFW?
Yes. Reddit does not mark r/budgetfood as an 18+ (NSFW) community. SubMouse lists safe-for-work subreddits only.
What are the rules of r/budgetfood?
Join the community on Reddit first, then use “Create post”. r/budgetfood accepts both text and link posts, with images and galleries enabled. It has 11 posted rules, starting with: “Include a recipe, not just a link”; “No food safety questions”; “Recipe Test Flare Is only for Recipes from this subreddit”. Moderators remove posts that break the rules, so read them in the sidebar before posting.
What subreddits are similar to r/budgetfood?
Communities with similar topics include r/Shoestring (5.2M), r/food (24.6M), r/StupidFood (2.8M), r/EatCheapAndHealthy (11.5M) and r/HealthyFood (3.5M).
Stats from public data (data updated Nov 2, 2026; activity, rules and archive totals via the Arctic Shift archive, Nov 6, 2026). Point and comment counts are archive snapshots and can be lower than on Reddit today. SubMouse is an independent directory and is not affiliated with Reddit or the moderators of r/budgetfood.