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If you are interested in trying Instacart, click HERE, and use code:LOVEMONNIIBEE to get $10 off your first order!

Back in April, I wrote a blog about Walmart grocery pick up (you can read that here) and why I over all loved using them as a busy mom. I mentioned in that blog, and in my eMeals blog as well that both companies worked with Instacart– a grocery delivery service.

I was instantly interested in this service and waited patiently for them to come to my area (I live in a small town 3 hours outside of Seattle, so it took them a while to get sit up here.)

So imagine just how excited I was to get the opportunity to work with Instacart and review their service for my followers. Hint: I was very excited.

I do want to note here for complete honestly that I was paid by Instacart to try their service and my delivery fees were comped. But this review of Instacart is 100% my real honest opinion on the company, and truth be told, I would have done this review regardless.

So lets dive into an overview of instacart and my experience.

What is Instacart?

In short, Instacart is a third party grocery deliver service. From what I’ve seen, it’s very similar to Uber Eats and having a personal shopper. They hire shoppers who pick out your groceries and they drop them off at your door step.

Instacart has partnered with a wide variety of grocery stores, including Safeway, Albersons, Costco and PetCo (for the fur babies). So you should be pretty well covered for your grocery needs.

Sadly thought their deal with Walmart has apparently fallen through and they do not work together. This bit is really unfortunate because I feel like these two together would have been the online grocery dream team–but that’s neither here nor there now.

One of their key selling points is that they can get you your groceries with an hour during their operating hours, which is high key amazing and undoubtably one of the best reasons to try them out.

Trying them out

So I decided to try them out the day of our long weekend road trip. I knew that I wouldn’t have time to run to the store before we left, and I knew that I would be too lazy to want to drive to Walmart to pick up an order on our way back home. So this seemed like the perfect opportunity to give them a go.

I downloaded the app and signed in with Facebook, selected my store and easily picked out the groceries that I needed. Similarly to Walmart groceries, the app is very intuitive simple to use and it took no longer than 10 minutes to do my shopping.

Unlike the Walmart app however, Instacart offers a coupon section, which is great for frugal mamas like me. They also have bonus items and if you purchase them, you can earn free delivery. These items tend to be things such as cereals, snacks, seasonal items etc. So I think this could potentially be a great way to save on the delivery fee if you were already planning on picking up one of the items on the list.

When picking my items out, I didn’t see anything on that free delivery list that I particularly wanted so I ended up pay for delivery fees ( or rather, I would have had to pay if it wasn’t being comped).  And here is my first (and really only) negative about Instacrat:

Those delivery fees are expensive!

My order total was $22.80. My deliver fees were $9.99 (this might be because they delivered during a peak hour?). That’s 30% of my total cost. Yikes!

To be fair, I personally didn’t have to pay this fee, and I’m assuming that most peoples grocery bill would be higher as well, so the percentage you end up paying in delivery (possibly) wouldn’t come out to being 1/3 of your bill. But still, that charge was a sting.

Instacart does offer a yearly subscription service, Instacart Express, where you pay $149 for the year ($12.50 a month) and you receiver free delivery on all your grocery trips.

This program doesn’t sound too bad when I compare it to the delivery fee of one trip, or even when I compare it to the price of Amazon Fresh, which is $14.99 a month or $179 a year– on top of your Prime membership.

I placed my grocery order at 8:05 in the morning, and Instacrat immediately began to send me updates, which I very much appreciated.

By 8:20, my shopper was on their way to the store. Then, at 8:32, my shopper made a brand substitution. By 8:40, they were checking out and at 9:00 they were at my door.

It was really that quick and that straight forward.

Would I Recommend Instacart?

Overall I enjoyed the experience. It was a huge relief to pass on one of my household responsibilities to someone else so that I could spend my energy focusing on other task.

And while the delivery price was high in my opinion, it was still  significantly cheaper that hiring a nanny, or personal assistant. Instacart also offers ways to get free or reduce cost of your delivery, so in the end, it’s not enough of a ding against them for me to not recommend them.

Whether you pay for the Express membership or just go with their standard service should be based entirely on your lifestyle. In my opinion Instacart Express is well suited for busy families who just don’t have the time to stop by the store at all.

For us, I feel like the standard plan works just fine. While we’re a busy family, it’s not difficult for us to get to the store to pick up an order. But I do love having the option to delegate a time consuming task for a reasonable price.

Interested in giving Instacart a try? click HERE, and use code:LOVEMONNIIBEE to get $10 off your first order! Then let me know how your experience went down below!