Calculators
Feeding guides on a bag are ranges for an average animal, and they are a large part of why so many pets are overfed. These calculators start from a real weight and life stage, work out the daily calorie requirement, then convert that into a serving size for one specific food using that food’s own verified calorie content — not a generic cups-per-day table.
Dog food cost calculator
Daily calories, serving size and cost per day across 543 priced dog foods, drawn from 1,112 verified labels.
Cat food cost calculator
Daily calories and serving size — cups of dry or cans of wet — for any of 1,242 verified cat foods, leading with dry-matter protein and estimated carbohydrate.
Dog food cost database
The same arithmetic applied to everything at once: every priced dog food ranked by cost per 1,000 kcal.
Why cost per 1,000 kcal
Price per pound tells you almost nothing, because a wet food is roughly three-quarters water and a freeze-dried food is nearly none. What a pet actually consumes is calories, so the only honest price basis is what a thousand of them cost. It is also why a cheap-looking bag can turn out to be the expensive option once you feed it. The methodology page shows the calculation, including how bag size is handled.
Browsing by animal? Dog food data · cat food data.