Why this exists
Two dogs, one calculator, and no business model that depends on you buying anything.
Perla
An English Mastiff who weighed more than most of the people at her vet and had the calm of someone who knew she would win any argument. She died in 2023. Her last two years were a slow negotiation between what she wanted to eat and what her joints could carry, and the hardest part of it was arithmetic: how much food, exactly, for a dog with a metabolism that had stopped cooperating.
Every page on this site exists because of that arithmetic.
Moka
A Bernese Mountain Dog, currently three years old and convinced that the kitchen is his department. Berners are a breed with real joint problems and real dietary needs, and they are large enough that being 10% overfed is measured in kilograms rather than grams. He is the current test subject for the numbers on this page.
What this site refuses to do
- It will not call a recipe nutritionally complete when it is not. Complete means the supplement, formulated properly, not a shorter ingredient list.
- It will not offer a recipe for a sick dog. Kidney, heart, pancreas and diabetes cases go to the vet with numbers attached.
- It will not sell a subscription. There is nothing behind a paywall, because the people who need a portion number are usually the people least able to pay for one.
- It will not collect your email. There is no form. There is nothing to collect.
How the money works
Honestly: through affiliate links for the things every home-cooked diet needs anyway — a kitchen scale, a supplement completer, a freezer-safe container, food quality testing for water. If you buy through a link on this site I may earn a commission, and it never changes the number the calculator gives you. Those links are marked. If that ever feels like it is shaping the advice, tell me and I will remove them.
The method
Resting energy requirement from body weight, multiplied by a life-stage factor, converted to grams using a typical energy density for cooked food. It is deliberately simple and it is the same basis as the reference calculators: WSAVA Global Nutrition Guidelines, NRC 2006 nutrient requirements for dogs. What the tool cannot know is your dog, which is why the site keeps telling you to weigh the dog every two weeks and adjust.