Signing up now across Vancouver, BC
Dinner from three
doors down.
Porchfare is a neighbourhood marketplace for home-cooked meals. Neighbours cook simple dinners in their own kitchens — a protein, a grain, a vegetable — and you pick yours up from a chilled box on their front step. About $8 to $10 a plate, fully cooked, still cold, ready to heat and eat.
Three quick fields. No payment, no spam.
$8–10 a plate
Under takeout and well under delivery, with no service-fee stack on top.
0 min of prep
Fully cooked, portioned and chilled. Open the lid, heat it, eat it.
A few blocks away
Walk or drive two minutes to a porch box. Nobody is paying a driver.
How it works
Three steps, one of them is eating.
- 01
See who's cooking this week
Neighbours post what they're making and how many portions they have. Real name, real photo, real street — closer to Facebook Marketplace than a delivery app.
- 02
Reserve your plates
Claim portions for the nights you want and pay in the app. One price, around $8 to $10 a meal. No delivery fee, no surge, no tip prompt.
- 03
Take it off the porch
At your pickup window, unlock the cook's refrigerated porch box with a one-time code. No knocking, no waiting around, no conversation unless you want one.
The handover
The porch box does the awkward part.
Buying dinner from a neighbour shouldn’t mean standing in someone’s doorway making conversation while your food gets cold. Every cook gets a chilled box on their step, and the exchange happens without either of you having to be home.
- Refrigerated and provided by us, so a meal cooked at four is still properly cold at seven.
- Opens with a one-time code tied to your order, during the pickup window you chose.
- No knocking, no small talk, no hovering in a doorway. Lift the lid, take your plate, go home.
- Meals come in standard reusable containers you drop back on your next pickup.
For cooks
If you already cook for five, cook for eight.
Some of the best cooking on your street is happening in a kitchen nobody outside the house ever sees. Porchfare turns a bigger batch of it into a little income — from something you were already doing, on the nights you feel like it.
$3.30 yours, on every $8 plate
After ingredients, packaging and our 15%. Ten plates out of one batch is about $33 for the hour you spent cooking.
- Cook the thing you already cook
- One menu, one big pot, ten portions. The rice, chicken and vegetables you were making tonight anyway — just more of it.
- Your nights, your numbers
- Post two portions or twenty, Tuesdays only or four nights a week. Nothing is scheduled for you and nothing is expected of you.
- Paid without the awkward bit
- Neighbours reserve and pay in the app, then collect from the box on your step. No cash, no chasing, no doorbell.
Trust and safety
Dinner from a kitchen you can walk to.
A neighbour cooking for you is a different thing from a stranger in a warehouse kitchen. Here’s what keeps it that way.
Real neighbours, real names
Every cook has a name, a face and a street on their profile. Nobody is an anonymous vendor behind an app icon — knowing whose kitchen it came from is the whole point.
Food that travels the length of a block
Fully cooked dinners only: nothing raw or rare, no home canning, no unpasteurised dairy. The menu is deliberately simple — the sort of thing that comes out of a hot oven or a big pot.
Kitchens on the record
Cooks record their kitchen while they cook for Porchfare. Nobody watches it and it auto-deletes within days — it exists so that if anyone ever has a complaint, there's an answer.
Ratings that say something
Five separate scores instead of one blurry average: taste, cleanliness, reliability, communication and value for the portion — plus what your neighbours wrote in their own words.
Questions
The things you're already wondering.
When does it start?
As soon as enough neighbours in one pocket of Vancouver have signed up for a first meal drop to be worth cooking. You'll get an email about one specific meal, at one price, with one pickup window, on one date. If it isn't for you, ignore it.
What kind of meals?
Weeknight dinners rather than dinner-party food — a curry and rice, a tray of roast chicken and potatoes, a big pan of pasta, whatever that cook makes well and often. Each listing says what's in it and how big a portion is.
Why is this cheaper than Uber Eats?
There's no restaurant markup, no driver, no delivery fee and no commercial kitchen rent. One person makes twenty portions of the same dinner instead of twenty different orders, and you walk over and get it yourself.
What about allergies and dietary needs?
Cooks list what's in each meal and you'll be able to filter for what you can eat. These are family kitchens, though, not allergen-controlled facilities — if a trace of something sends you to hospital, this isn't the right way to buy dinner, and we'd rather say so plainly.
Which neighbourhoods?
We start with whichever pocket of the city fills up first, which is exactly what your postal code tells us. East Van, the West Side, the North Shore, Burnaby border — put yours down and it counts toward your blocks going first.
What happens to my email address?
It's used to contact you about Porchfare in your neighbourhood, and nothing else. No selling it, no sharing it, no newsletter you didn't ask for. Reply to any email asking to be removed and you're removed.
Be there for the first dinner.
Porchfare opens one neighbourhood at a time, and the list decides which one goes first. Put your name down and you’ll hear about the first meal cooked near you — one dinner, one price, one porch.