Two restaurants subscribe to the same booking system on the same day, at the same price. The first is a place with forty seats, run by its owner. The second belongs to a group with a dozen sites. When the invoice arrives, both pay the same amount. For one it is a line in a spreadsheet nobody reads. For the other it is a decision, made on a quiet Tuesday, between the software and something else.
This is not a complaint about anyone. It is arithmetic, and it shows up all over a restaurant's costs: whatever has a fixed price takes a bigger bite out of a smaller business. We think it is worth saying plainly, with numbers, because it explains how to judge any tool you buy.
Start with who we are talking about. Across Europe, restaurants and food-service businesses are overwhelmingly small. According to Eurostat (structural business statistics, food and beverage service activities, 2024), businesses with fewer than ten people make up:
If you have a handful of staff and a single site, you are not an edge case. You are the middle of the market.
In the EU, the value added per person employed in food-service businesses with up to nine people was €21,300 in 2024. In businesses with 250 people or more, it was €31,700 (our calculation from Eurostat data). Larger businesses generate more per person. That is not a criticism of either kind. A big operation can spread a kitchen, a purchasing team and a marketing budget across many covers. A small one cannot.
What matters for you is what remains at the end. Here the best figures we found are French, from the Banque de France's sector booklet on restaurants for 2022, covering 8,544 companies subject to corporate income tax. It measures what it calls the "taux d'excédent brut global": gross surplus as a share of turnover excluding VAT. The median restaurant company had 8.6%. A quarter of them were below 3.8%.
Read that again as a business owner. For a typical restaurant in that sample, out of every €100 of sales, under €9 is left as gross surplus. For a quarter of them, under €4. Every fixed cost has to be paid out of that thin slice.
Take the median, 8.6%, and put a software package next to it. As an example, take a package at €169 a month. Over a year, that is €2,028.
Same software, same price, twenty times the turnover: a twentyfold difference in the weight of the fee. The larger business will not notice the invoice. The smaller one will see it every year, every time it does its accounts.
A word of caution about the example. The 8.6% is a median for French restaurant companies in 2022, not a forecast for your restaurant. Yours may be higher or lower. Do the same calculation with your last full year, and with the best and the worst month, to see how the fee behaves when trade is slow. Use it as a yardstick. The point survives any reasonable change: the fixed fee is a much bigger share of a small margin than of a large one. To see where you stand, ask your accountant for your own figure and redo the sum with it.
That is why the price of a tool matters more to a small restaurant than any feature list suggests. It is also why you should ask a simple question about every subscription: what share of my gross surplus is this?
Fixed fees are not the only difference. Other costs shift with size too, and we will not pretend to put a number on each one.
There is one place where the facts go against the story you might expect, and it is worth being straight about it. Austrian official statistics (Statistik Austria, 2024, published by the Austrian Economic Chamber) show that labour costs as a share of output are lower in the smallest food-service businesses, 29% for those with 2 to 9 people, against 38% for those with 250 or more. One reason is that in a small business, the owner's own working hours are not counted as wages.
So, in a small restaurant, a good part of the profit is really wages the owner did not pay themselves. That is exactly why the margin matters. If a fixed cost takes a bite out of that profit, it is not coming from a comfortable cushion. It is coming from your own pay.
The margin is thin, and the market is tough. In Italy, according to the FIPE 2025 report (based on InfoCamere data), 10,719 food-service businesses opened in 2024, while 29,097 closed. We do not claim to know why each of them closed, and a booking system is not the reason for any one of those figures. It is one more reminder that restaurants do not have much room for costs that give little back.
Whatever you buy, three rules keep the price fair. You can check each one before you sign.
The 5% is our suggested ceiling, not a statistic.
Large groups can negotiate and employ someone to read contracts. A small restaurant has the owner, on a Tuesday afternoon, between deliveries. Rules this simple are written for that reader.
Bientenu does one thing, bookings, and it is built for small restaurants. We set the price by what a small restaurant can carry.
It costs €30 a month plus VAT, and everything is included. There are no separately charged modules, no commission on your bookings, no minimum term, and you can export your data at any time. It is free until 31 December 2026. Included: the card guarantee, so guests who arrive on time pay nothing; automatic reminders; guests cancelling their booking from a link; an online waiting list for freed tables; a limit on arrivals per time slot; a warning when you add a phone booking beyond that limit, with the decision left to you; and tables planned for the whole evening.
If you take a deposit or card guarantee, the payment provider, Stripe, charges its own fees. That is separate from our price.
Ready to look? See the demo or try it with your restaurant.
