Spared reads your grocery receipts and counts the animals your basket didn’t contain. The hardest part of eating less meat is that the effort is invisible. This makes it a number.
No launch spam. One email when it opens.
A basket from last Thursday
67%
spared
It held 0.28 animals where an average basket that size holds 0.85.
Most people don’t start near it, and that’s the point. Veganism has an all-or-nothing culture that quietly tells people at 40% they’ve failed — so a lot of them stop.
Spared scores every receipt, and the number you’re chasing is your own last one. Going from 56% to 67% is the whole product. Nobody is grading you against someone who’s been at this for fifteen years.
Or forward the email one. Spared reads the line items, works out what each held, and checks the totals balance so you know the read was right.
Each basket turns into a score and a count. Skipping a shop never counts against you — baskets you don’t add simply don’t earn credit, so the number can only go up.
Your first four weeks set a baseline from your own receipts, then freeze. Everything after that is measured against the real you, not an average stranger.
Spared makes one claim, and it is a narrow one: this basket contained fewer animals than an average basket of the same value. That is a statement about baskets, not about you, and it is what the data supports.
A broiler lives about 42 days for under two kilos. A beef animal lives eighteen months for over two hundred. Per kilo, chicken costs roughly ten times the animal-days — so giving up chicken does far more for animals, and giving up beef does far more for the climate. Both figures are shown because they genuinely disagree.
Neither produces a whole death per unit, so neither is counted as one. A laying hen produces around 450 eggs before slaughter. Dairy is smaller still per litre — but the figure includes the calf, which most counts quietly leave out.
Farmed shrimp run 20–30 to the kilogram. Counted in the headline they would swamp everything else and imply beef is the ethical choice. They are counted, in full, on their own line.
When a line can’t be resolved it is scored as an average item, not as zero. Scoring it zero would quietly claim it held no meat and inflate your number. Scored as average, a failed read costs you nothing and earns you nothing.
Credit is earned per receipt you add, so incomplete coverage makes your number too low, never too high. Whatever Spared says you spared, you spared at least that.
A purchase you didn’t make does not map one-to-one onto an animal that was never raised. Demand elasticity in meat markets runs somewhere between 0.3 and 0.7, so the real-world effect is smaller than the count. We report what was on your plate and what wasn’t — not a causal claim about production.
Built on USDA Economic Research Service food-availability data, FAOSTAT carcass yields, BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey grocery spend, Faunalytics and Our World in Data per-capita counts, and Rethink Priorities welfare weights.
No launch spam. One email when it opens.