Healthy isn't the expensive option.

No, and it won't pretend to. It can't look up prices anywhere, so it never invents a figure or claims something is cheapest in your area. Instead you enter the prices from your own shelf and it does the arithmetic — which is more useful anyway, because prices vary enormously between countries, shops and months. What it teaches you is where to find the unit price on a label and how to compare properly, and that skill keeps working long after any list would have gone stale.

Not the ones this is built around. Dried pulses, eggs, oats, frozen vegetables, tinned fish and root vegetables are all inexpensive nearly everywhere and none of them are compromises. Frozen vegetables in particular hold their nutrition well and people are unnecessarily apologetic about buying them. The expensive part of a food budget is usually convenience and out-of-season produce, not nutrition.

You say so, and the plan changes rather than assuming. A beginner gets numbered steps and no assumed technique, and someone who's never cooked gets three meals to start with instead of seven. The equipment question matters too — a plan built around an oven is no use to someone with a hob and a microwave, and there's a genuine version for either.

No. You say upfront what you won't eat and that's respected without argument — if pulses are out, you get what does the same job at a similar price instead. The week is also built from what you actually like eating, because a cheap plan full of meals you'd never choose gets abandoned by Wednesday and costs more than it saved.

Yes, and frozen and tinned are the reason. They're the equaliser when fresh produce is poor, expensive or simply absent — long-lasting, nutritionally sound, and available almost everywhere. The plan is built around what's actually in the shops you can reach rather than an idealised supermarket, and the cheap staple categories were chosen partly because they turn up nearly everywhere.