Lifestyle

I spend $11,000 a year on takeout!

A few months ago, Kris Ruby lost her credit card and briefly had to borrow her dad’s while waiting for the replacement.

When her dad saw the bill, it wasn’t clothes, cabs or nightclub charges that gave him a fright — it was sushi.

“Dad was like, ‘What are all these charges for Seamless?’ ” Ruby, 27, recalls.

She used his card for just one week, but in that amount of time she racked up about $225 worth of sushi, superfood salads and other takeout to her Wall Street home.

He promptly banned her from using his card on any future delivery purchases.

“I felt like it was my guilty little pleasure and secret,” Ruby says. “I couldn’t wait to put my own card back on it so no one could see my meals.”

Ordering through Seamless’ handy delivery app almost every night chomps $900 a month off Ruby’s salary as president of her own p.r. and social media agency — almost $11,000 a year, enough for 98 unlimited MetroCards or 4,720 slices of pizza.

“Oh, my God, this is shocking,” she says, when realizing just how much she spends. “Sometimes I look at this and I’m like, ‘I need to stop this with Seamless.’ ”

Sure, generations of New Yorkers have been on a first-name basis with their neighborhood pizza delivery guy. But a new wave of tap-and-done delivery apps are turning a casual habit into a full-on addiction: WunWun, which delivers virtually anything to your door, and Caviar, which specializes in high-end food, both launched in 2013. They join delivery services Postmates, Delivery.com and Seamless — the website and app that started in 1999 and recently introduced a “Food Tracker” that gives real-time updates of their deliveries.

According to Zagat Survey, New Yorkers ate 58 percent of meals from restaurants and takeout in 2013 — a big jump from 49 percent the year before, and way higher than the national average of 47 percent.

Jason Saltzman spends as much on delivery food as some people spend on rent.Zandy Mangold/NY Post

Jason Saltzman, 36, the founder of Midtown co-working space AlleyNYC, recently tallied up all the delivery food he’s ordered into his office in the past few weeks.

He averaged $20 per meal, sometimes three meals a day — including baked clams from Pizza Italia, egg whites from Guy & Gallard, and his “cheat day” splurges of a bagel with cream cheese from Murray’s Bagels and chicken lo mein from Chef Yu — his absolute favorite meal. The total? $1,800 a month.

“That’s rent!” he exclaims.

But he’s not about to change his habits and start brown-bagging it.

“I’m always in the office,” says Saltzman, who lives in Chelsea. “Where am I going to cook stuff?”

Another big perk of the new apps is the ease with which they allow takeout junkies to get their fix.

“I don’t order from places where I have to pick up the phone,” says Enovia Bedford, who prefers simply swiping her iPad to yelling over the din of a busy restaurant.

Enovia Bedford still rocks a Seamless shirt; it pairs well with her $800-per-month delivery habit.Tamara Beckwith/NY Post

The 30-year-old sponsorship coordinator says she spends as much as $800 a month on Seamless delivery to her Harlem apartment. And she still loves to wear a Seamless T-shirt she got seven years ago, when the company was still young. Years of use later, she knows the delivery guys at a nearby deli so well that she brought them a pie for Thanksgiving that her sister had baked.

Delivery options, meanwhile, continue to expand and are no longer limited to greasy grub.

WunWun — an app that launched last year offering delivery from clothing stores, restaurants and grocery stores in under an hour — has become a personal concierge for some: Users have had a $3,500 bottle of 15-year-old Pappy Van Winkle whiskey and a birthday cake, with candles, delivered to a bar. The service is free; users just tip their delivery person.

“We have a customer who WunWuns Starbucks every day,” says the app’s founder, Lee Hnetinka. “The Starbucks is right below her building.”

Rameet Chawla, 31, is a devotee of Caviar, which launched in Manhattan in November 2013 and just started servicing Brooklyn last week, and targets high-end restaurants and places that don’t normally deliver. (And yes, you can get caviar brought to your door.)

“Seamless is . . . great for your average Joe who isn’t into artisanal food at all,” says Chawla, founder of Fueled, an app and mobile design company based in Soho. Caviar lets you “order from restaurants that are too cool to deliver. Those are typically the restaurants you want to eat from.”

He estimates that he forks over $1,200 each month on lunch and juices alone, typically starting his day with a coconut water from Juice Generation, summoning a lunch of lobster rolls, duck confit salads or Thai sausages, and finishing the work day with a smoothie.

Chawla, who has never used his kitchen in the three years he’s lived in his apartment, says he’s too busy to cook — or to personally track down his next meal.

“It’s all about saving time for me. I have a tough schedule,” he says.

The delivery apps, in turn, are working to keep their customers hooked.

This delivery guy carrying pad Thai saved the day for Aubrey Sabala (inset), who was stuck at the DMV in July.Aubrey Sabala

Aubrey Sabala, a marketing and communications executive, often uses the app Postmates to order food from places like the Meatball Shop that don’t normally deliver.

She was stuck at a Manhattan DMV five months ago when the computers went down. Frustrated, she sent out a half-serious tweet: She tagged delivery companies and asked for someone to rescue her with an order of pad Thai and a Diet Coke.

Postmates — and two other competitors — saw the tweet, setting off a delivery-guy sprint to reach her first. Postmates won. As she sat in the DMV enjoying the meal, other customers leered.

“Sorry you didn’t think of this,” was all Sabala, 37, could say in response.

Still, some hold out hope that they’ll kick the habit eventually.

Though she only uses her kitchen to make smoothies with her Vitamix, Ruby envisions a day when her stove is finally put to use.

“I do think that if I could find a guy that cooked while I sat there and worked and plugged away, that might break my Seamless addiction,” she says. “But the food would still have to be literally delivered to me.”