Some cheap lunchbox ideas we love:

Homemade mini pizzas (use wraps or bread + sauce + cheese)
Pasta salad with whatever veggies you have
Egg sandwiches or eggs muffins
Snack boxes like crackers, cheese, celery, and carrot sticks
Leftover dinner and salad
Banana muffins or oat slices for something sweet treat

Along with my comments below about muffins, slices and other yummy baked foods, a range of sweet and savoury fritters and vegetable patties are also good foods to make and to cook and they are easy foods to eat. They are also good for getting extra vegetables and healthy foods into bodies.

Baking and cooking snacks and food for lunch boxes is a fun activity and also incredibly good for the family budget, We love to make our own muesli bars, savoury and sweet muffins and savoury and sweet slices and mini savoury quiches. We also make lots of other baked goods that the family enjoy eating.

So many wonderful options out there that you can make with your kids if they don’t have any allergies you need to consider. Some things that come to mind are mini quiches, sausage rolls, mini pies, home made muesli bars, chocolate balls, rice bubble slide, home made bread rolls or bagels that you can freeze and pull out when needed.

There are so many great recipes out there (on this site) for things like savoury Muffins, Muesli Bars and healthier breakfast bickies.

I love the simplicity of fruit jelly. We used to buy the supermarket brand cups but peeling the seal off was the hardest for the kids. More cost effective is adding gelatine to jelly crystals for firmness, dissolve then add to tinned fruit and/or fresh fruit mix. Refrigerate! Much healthier and easier for them to open a reusable container from home.

Sausage rolls are cheap and easy to make. If you have a pie maker you can make leftover dinners into pies (our favourites are spaghetti bog or stew pies). If it’s more snacks you are after, a cake mix and can of lemonade makes cheap cupcakes.
Anzac biscuits (dribble some chocolate on top) and rock cakes are good too. Hard to think of more cheap things to bake now 😐

I always made weekly fruit muffins or fruit and vegetable muffins or solely vegetable muffins, sausage rolls (I always made them both vegetarian and with meat), spinach rolls with feta or goats cheese. And my kids loved always protein balls too, depending on the nut policy at school, you can easily substitute nuts with roast sunflower seeds.

Every fortnight I make up a tray of chewy muesli bars and granola (for fruit yoghurt containers) from Nagi’s site. They are so customisable to suit whatever you have in your pantry and what flavour preferences the house has. She also has great muffin recipes, the morning glory ones are high in our rotation because of the hidden carrot and apple. These have simple, cost effective ingredients that keep you fuller for longer