If you order groceries online more than twice a month, a paid membership almost always beats paying delivery fees one order at a time — and the best overall deal right now is Walmart+ at $98 per year with free delivery on orders over $35, with Kroger Boost as the cheapest entry point at $59 per year if a Kroger store serves your area. Instacart+ and Target Circle 360 both land at $99 per year with the same $35 minimum, so the right choice comes down to which stores you actually shop. The math is straightforward. Instacart’s per-delivery fees run $3.99 to $7.99, and Kroger charges $6.95 to $14.95 per delivery without a membership.
A household ordering groceries weekly could spend $300 to $700 a year in fees alone. A $98 Walmart+ membership wipes most of that out, paying for itself in roughly 12 to 20 orders. For someone ordering twice a month at an average $6 fee, that’s $144 a year in fees replaced by a $98 flat cost — a modest but real savings that grows with every additional order. The catch is that every program has a minimum order threshold, and one of them — Amazon Fresh — sets that bar far higher than the rest. Below is how the major services compare, what the fine print costs you, and how to pick the membership that fits your shopping habits rather than the one with the best marketing.
Table of Contents
- Which Grocery Delivery Services Waive Fees, and What Do Memberships Cost?
- How Much Do Delivery Fees Really Cost Without a Membership?
- Discounted Memberships Most People Don’t Know About
- Annual vs. Monthly Plans — Which Structure Saves More?
- The Fine Print That Erodes Your Savings
- Matching the Membership to Where You Actually Shop
- Where Fee Waivers Are Headed
- Conclusion
Which Grocery Delivery Services Waive Fees, and What Do Memberships Cost?
Five major programs waive delivery fees in exchange for a membership. Instacart+ costs $99 per year and removes delivery fees on orders over $35; it also exempts members from “busy pricing” surcharges that hit non-members during peak demand. Walmart+ runs $98 per year with free delivery over $35. Target Circle 360 is $99 per year or $10.99 per month and includes free same-day delivery on $35+ orders through the Shipt network. Kroger Boost ranges from $59 to $99 per year depending on tier, again with a $35 minimum. DashPass from DoorDash takes a different shape: $9.99 per month for $0 delivery fees on grocery orders of $25 or more, plus reduced service fees roughly 5 to 10 percent below standard rates.
Amazon Fresh is the outlier. As of March 2026, Prime members get free grocery delivery only on orders of $100 or more — lowered from the $150 threshold Amazon set in 2023, but still nearly three times higher than every competitor. Under $100, Prime members pay $6.95 on orders between $50 and $100, and $9.95 on orders under $50, according to Amazon’s official customer service page. To put that in concrete terms: a $60 grocery order is delivered free under Walmart+, Instacart+, Target Circle 360, and Kroger Boost. That same $60 order costs a Prime member $6.95 on Amazon Fresh. If your typical basket is under $100, Amazon Fresh is the worst fee-waiver deal of the group, even if you already pay for Prime.
How Much Do Delivery Fees Really Cost Without a Membership?
Pay-per-order fees are the baseline you‘re comparing against. Instacart charges $3.99 to $7.99 per delivery. Kroger’s non-member fees run $6.95 to $14.95. Across competing services generally, non-member delivery fees fall in the $4 to $10 range per order. At even a conservative $6 average, an every-other-week shopper pays about $156 a year — already more than a Walmart+ membership. But the delivery fee is only part of the bill, and this is where comparisons get misleading.
Service fees, tips, and item markups often add more than the delivery fee itself. Instacart and Shipt typically price items above in-store prices at many retailers (Shipt does offer in-store prices at Target, Kroger, and Meijer specifically), and a 10 percent markup on a $100 order is $10 you pay whether or not your delivery fee is waived. DashPass addresses this partially with its reduced service fees, but no membership eliminates tipping, which remains an expected cost on courier-based services like Instacart, Shipt, and DoorDash. The warning here: a fee waiver is not free delivery. A “free” $100 Instacart+ order can still carry $10 to $15 in markups, service fees, and tip. Memberships reduce the cost of grocery delivery; they don’t make it equal to shopping in the store.
Discounted Memberships Most People Don’t Know About
Target Circle 360 offers the most generous discount structure of any program. While the standard price is $99 per year or $10.99 per month, Target Circle Card holders pay just $49 per year or $4.99 per month — half price. The same $49 rate extends to verified groups including teachers, military members, students, and government-assistance recipients. At $49 a year with a $35 minimum, a discounted Circle 360 membership is the single cheapest annual fee-waiver deal on the market, undercutting even Kroger Boost’s $59 entry tier. For comparison, a standalone Shipt membership — which uses the same delivery network — costs the full $99 per year or $10.99 per month, with deliveries at in-store prices from Target, Kroger, and Meijer.
So a student or teacher who shops mostly at Target effectively gets the Shipt network for half what Shipt itself charges. If you qualify for any of the verified categories, this discount alone should put Target Circle 360 at the top of your list. There’s also a newer development for SNAP recipients: on May 31, 2026, DoorDash launched SNAP/EBT grocery delivery at nearly 2,700 Kroger stores nationwide, with a $0 delivery fee on the first Kroger-brands order paid with EBT for a limited time. It’s a one-time promotion rather than an ongoing waiver, but it signals that delivery platforms are starting to build pricing programs around assistance recipients.
Annual vs. Monthly Plans — Which Structure Saves More?
Annual plans are cheaper per month but only if you’ll use them year-round. Target Circle 360 at $99 per year works out to $8.25 per month versus $10.99 paid monthly — a $33 annual difference. DashPass, at $9.99 per month with no widely promoted annual equivalent for groceries, costs about $120 a year, making it the most expensive option on an annualized basis despite its lower $25 grocery minimum. The tradeoff is flexibility.
If you only order delivery heavily during winter months, a monthly DashPass or monthly Circle 360 you cancel in spring can beat an annual plan you use eight months a year. Three months of DashPass costs about $30; an unused annual Instacart+ membership costs $99 regardless. Conversely, if delivery is a year-round habit, the annual plans win clearly: Walmart+ at $98 per year is roughly $8.17 a month, and Kroger Boost’s $59 tier is under $5 a month — less than a single non-member Kroger delivery fee. A practical rule: pay monthly for the first one or two months to confirm the service’s selection, pricing, and reliability in your area, then switch to annual once you know you’ll keep it. The few extra dollars spent testing beat locking $99 into a service whose nearest store turns out to be 40 minutes away.
The Fine Print That Erodes Your Savings
Minimum order thresholds are the most common trap. Every major program requires $35 (or $25 for DashPass groceries, $100 for Amazon Fresh) before the waiver kicks in. If you habitually place small fill-in orders — milk, eggs, a forgotten ingredient — you’ll either pad orders to hit the minimum or pay fees anyway. Padding a $20 order to $35 with items you don’t need isn’t savings; it’s spending $15 to avoid a $6 fee. Surge and peak pricing is another.
Instacart+ explicitly exempts members from busy-pricing surcharges, which is a genuine advantage during holidays and weekends, but other line items — heavy-order fees, alcohol fees, long-distance fees, priority delivery upcharges — can still apply across services even with a membership. And Amazon Fresh’s threshold history is a cautionary tale in itself: Amazon raised free delivery to $150 in 2023, then lowered it to $100 in March 2026. Thresholds move, and a membership that pencils out today can quietly get worse. Finally, watch auto-renewal. Annual memberships renew by default, and a service you stopped using in March will still charge you the full $98 or $99 in the fall. Set a calendar reminder a week before renewal to run the math again.
Matching the Membership to Where You Actually Shop
The best deal on paper is irrelevant if the service doesn’t cover your store. A Walmart+ membership saves nothing for someone whose nearest Walmart doesn’t offer delivery to their address; Kroger Boost is useless outside Kroger’s footprint.
Instacart+ is the flexibility play — it covers many regional and national chains under one $99 membership — while Walmart+, Boost, and Circle 360 lock you into one retailer’s ecosystem in exchange for, generally, better item pricing. A practical example: a household that splits shopping between Kroger for groceries and Target for household goods could cover both with a single Shipt or Circle 360 membership, since Shipt delivers from Target, Kroger, and Meijer at in-store prices. That beats paying for both Boost and Circle 360 separately — a $108 to $198 combined cost reduced to $99, or $49 with a qualifying discount.
Where Fee Waivers Are Headed
The trend through 2026 has been toward lower barriers and broader eligibility. Amazon cut its free-delivery threshold from $150 to $100, DoorDash extended SNAP/EBT payment to nearly 2,700 Kroger stores, and Target’s half-price tier for teachers, students, military, and assistance recipients suggests retailers now see discounted memberships as a customer-acquisition tool rather than pure subscription revenue. Competition among Walmart+, Prime, and Circle 360 is likely to keep pushing thresholds down and bundled perks up.
For shoppers, that means the calculus is worth revisiting annually. The membership that was the best deal when you signed up may be beaten a year later by a lowered threshold, a new discount tier, or a promotion in your area. Treat these programs like insurance policies: re-shop them every renewal.
Conclusion
For most households, Walmart+ at $98 per year offers the best general-purpose deal, with free delivery on orders over $35 and the lowest standard annual price among the big national programs. Kroger Boost’s $59 tier is the cheapest full-price option for Kroger shoppers, and Target Circle 360’s $49 discounted rate for cardholders, teachers, students, military, and assistance recipients is the best price anywhere if you qualify. Instacart+ wins on store flexibility, DashPass wins on the lowest grocery minimum at $25, and Amazon Fresh — with its $100 free-delivery threshold even for Prime members — is the weakest fee-waiver deal of the group.
Before paying for anything, count your actual orders from the past three months and multiply by the fees you paid. If the total exceeds the membership price, sign up — starting monthly, then converting to annual once the service proves itself. And remember that waived delivery fees don’t erase service fees, markups, or tips, so the cheapest grocery delivery is still the order you consolidate into one large weekly trip instead of three small ones.
