What Does It Cost to Eat Indian Food Every Day in Singapore?

Search for an Indian tiffin service in Singapore and you will find plenty of websites. What you will struggle to find is a number. Most say “contact us for rates”, which is fine until you are trying to work out whether you can actually afford to eat properly this month.

So here are the numbers, including ours — and including the parts where we are not the cheapest option.

The Four Ways to Eat Indian Food Here

Hawker centre or food court. Still the cheapest way to eat in this country. A plate of biryani or a set meal runs roughly $5 to $8 depending on where you are. Nothing beats it on price. What you give up is choice on the days you cannot get there, and it is rarely the everyday home cooking people actually miss.

Delivery apps. The convenient option, and by some distance the most expensive — more on why below.

A tiffin or tingkat service. The traditional answer: a full meal delivered daily. Published prices in Singapore sit around $7 to $9 per meal — one long-running Indian caterer lists a $7 minimum per delivery, another quotes $8 per meal plus $1 delivery, both on their own websites at the time of writing. Most services do not publish anything and quote monthly on request; in the Indian community groups here people generally budget $150 to $200 a month for a daily tiffin.

Cooking it yourself. Cheapest per plate on paper. The catch is that Indian home cooking does not scale down well — a dal, a sabzi and fresh rotis is three separate operations, and buying spices, atta and fresh vegetables for one person means a lot of waste. Most students who tell me they will cook every night are, by week three, not cooking every night.

What a Delivery App Actually Costs

This is where the arithmetic surprises people.

The menu price on a delivery app is usually not the menu price in the shop. Platforms charge restaurants a commission — commonly quoted around 25–30% in Singapore — and that gets priced in. Then the delivery fee goes on top, from about $2 and rising with distance and demand, plus a platform or service fee, plus surge at exactly the times you want dinner.

When local media have compared an identical order in-store against the same order through an app, the gap has come out at close to $10 on a single meal. A dish listed at $12 can land at $18–$20 by the time it reaches your door.

Do that five nights a week and you are at $90–$100 weekly. That is the number worth sitting with.

What We Charge

Plainly, so you can compare:

• Campus bento — $10 to $15.50, priced per day on the calendar. No subscription, no minimum, and no delivery fee, because you collect it from a pickup point at your own block rather than waiting for a rider.
• From the main menu — vegetarian mains run $12 to $17, and fresh rotis and parathas are $1 to $3 each. A main plus a few rotis feeds two people comfortably.

Everything is cooked the day it reaches you, in a home kitchen in Queenstown. Nothing is batch-cooked days ahead and reheated.

Where We Are the Wrong Answer

I would rather say this than have you work it out after paying.

If your budget is the deciding factor, we are not the cheapest. A $7 tiffin is a $7 tiffin, and hawker food is cheaper still. Eating our bento five nights a week comes to roughly $270 a month at typical prices, against $150–$200 for a standard daily tiffin. That gap is real and I am not going to argue you out of it.

We are worth it if you were otherwise ordering delivery two or three nights a week. Against $18–$20 an app order, a $12.50 bento with no delivery fee is straightforwardly cheaper, and it is home cooking rather than restaurant food.

Most students do not order every weeknight. They order the nights they would have reached for an app — after a late class, before a deadline, when the canteen has shut. That is the comparison that matters, and on that comparison we win.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much is a bento? Between $10 and $15.50, priced per day on the calendar. No subscription and no delivery fee.

Is there a minimum order? No. One bento on one day is a perfectly normal order.

Is a tiffin cheaper than a bento? Usually, yes — around $7–$9 per meal published elsewhere. A tiffin is a daily commitment; the bento is per-day with no lock-in. Different things.

Do you charge for delivery? Not for the campus bento — you collect it from a pickup point. For regular orders we arrange Grab or Lalamove and charge it at cost, with nothing added.

Can I eat Indian food in Singapore for under $10 a day? Yes, at a hawker centre, or by cooking. Not through a delivery app, and not from us.

The Honest Summary

If you want the cheapest, go to the hawker centre. If you want a daily meal handled for you at the lowest price, a standard tiffin at $7–$9 is hard to beat.

If you are a student who keeps ordering delivery because there is nothing else at nine at night, look at the campus bento instead — pre-order the days you want, collect it downstairs, and pay less than the app was charging you for food cooked the same afternoon.

Prices quoted for other services are those published on their own websites and in community groups at the time of writing, and will change. Ours are on the calendar and the menu, where you can check them yourself.