You are on the phone with a sales rep on a Tuesday afternoon, between lunch and the evening prep. You called about one thing: you want guests to book a table online. Simple. The rep is friendly and has a plan for you. The cheapest tier "won't really cover you". The middle one is the popular choice. Then there are a few modules that "most restaurants like yours" add. You are tired, you have forty covers to prepare for, and you say yes.
A few months later the invoice does not match what you were told on the call, and you find out you signed for twelve months.
In the previous article we saw that restaurants keeping a card on file report fewer no-shows, and we left a question open: what does it cost? This article answers it, and the answer is not a number. It is a way of reading the price list, because the main cost of booking software is rarely the thing you wanted. It is everything bundled around it.
A small restaurant needs a short list from a booking system: guests book online, they get a confirmation and a reminder, they can cancel or change, and you see the evening on one screen. Most software on the market is built for a different buyer: large groups, hotels, restaurants with a marketing team. Its price list reflects that, and a small restaurant ends up paying for the structure of the list.
Here is how public price lists tend to work (checked in October 2026).
Tiered plans. Booking software is usually sold in plans, often with a one-year minimum.
Add-ons on top. Text messages, a website, marketing and similar extras are often separate modules, each charged on its own. Each looks small, but together they add up before any message is sent.
Card fees that depend on the plan. When you take a card guarantee or deposit, the fee often depends on the plan, and it is higher on the cheaper plans. Think about what that does. The smaller restaurant, which has the smaller plan, pays the highest rate on every euro it charges.
None of this is hidden. It is all on the public page.
Take the most common bundled extra. Guests need a confirmation and a reminder. The usual pitch is that you need text messages for that.
Think about what each channel does. An email costs nothing per message to send. It can carry the full booking: date, time, party size, your notes (parking, the terrace in bad weather, the deadline for a free cancellation), and a link to cancel or change the booking. A text message is short by nature, and it is charged one by one.
Which is better depends on your guests and on your restaurant. Some people read texts faster; others never open them, and an email with a clear link may do more. We are not claiming that one always beats the other, and we have no statistic to give. The point is simpler: a reminder is not the same thing as a text message. If a supplier ties reminders to a paid text bundle, you are paying for a channel you did not choose.
Per-text charges are usually a few cents each. Do the sum yourself:
texts per booking × bookings per month × price per text
A confirmation plus a reminder is two texts. A 60-seat restaurant with average trade takes, by our estimate, about 420 bookings a month (roughly one guest per seat per day, from the revenue per seat in an Austrian industry study). At an example price of €0.07 each, that is 2 × 420 × €0.07 = about €59 a month (an example; use your own figures). That is a second subscription, and it grows when you are busy.
Then run the sum again with your busiest month, not an average one. Per-message charges rise exactly when the restaurant is full, which is when you look at the invoice least.
Beyond the bundling, a few other things deserve a line each. They matter less than the main question, but they decide what a mistake costs.
The term. Many price lists state a minimum of twelve months, and some charge more each month if you want to cancel month by month. A twelve-month term is not wrong in itself, since suppliers want to recover what it costs to start you. But if the system does not fit, you pay for months you do not use. Ask for the term before the price.
"Pay for results". Some plans charge a smaller monthly fee plus a fee for every guest who books online, and a set-up fee for each module. For a nearly empty restaurant that may be a fair start. But it means the better the system works, the more you pay. A restaurant that fills forty seats on a Saturday through online bookings pays for each of those guests, every week. Work out your busiest month before you call it cheap.
Costs outside the invoice. In November 2022 three French trade associations, GNI, UMIH and SNRTC, published an information note to their members about a promotion run by a large booking platform. Their objection, in short: the half-price offers were paid for by the restaurants, while the platform kept its fixed commission per seat and carried no risk, and restaurants that did not take part might be ranked lower. We do not comment on that dispute. It shows a kind of cost that no price list contains: a discount you did not choose.
If the supplier goes. In March 2026 a booking platform that had operated in Europe for years announced its closure. It took new bookings until 30 September. Little more than a month earlier it had signed a partnership with an Italian restaurant association, and spoke of nearly 6,000 restaurants in Italy. No one should read that as a prediction about any supplier. It shows that "established" does not mean "permanent", and that your guest list may live on someone else's servers.
Fewer companies. In July 2025 two European booking systems announced a merger, with more than 36,000 restaurants between them. When fewer companies set the terms, you have fewer places to go, and the cost of leaving matters more.
Put the pieces together and the method is short.
1. Decide what is enough. Write down what a booking system must do for you on a normal week. Not what it could do. For most small restaurants the list is short: online booking, confirmation and reminder, cancel or change by the guest, a view of the evening, and a way to deal with no-shows.
2. Ask of every feature: is it in the base monthly fee? Not "available", not "optional", but included in the price you will pay each month. If it is a module, a tier upgrade, a per-message charge or a per-guest charge, it is not included.
3. Ask who decides whether it is used. A good feature is one you can turn on or off yourself, and that costs nothing while it is off. If you do not send texts, you should not pay for texts. If you do not want group bookings, you should not be on a plan that is priced for them. A feature you cannot refuse is a charge, not a feature.
4. Among the options where everything you need is included, choose the most complete. This is the only place where "more features" is a good reason. Once the base fee covers what you need and nothing is charged for what you do not use, a richer product at the same price is simply better. Before that point, more features is just a longer invoice.
Print this, or keep it on your phone. Ask for every answer in writing.
Then do one more calculation: add the base price, the messages you will really send and the modules you really need, for twelve months, and do it again for your busiest month. That is the price you are comparing, not the one on the front page.
If you also want to know how much the problem of no-shows itself costs a restaurant like yours, the previous article does the maths.
The next article is about the one thing booking software should do best: spreading guests across different times of the evening.
Curious how it feels in practice? See the demo or try it with your restaurant.
