How much does it cost to create a website for a restaurant?
Restaurant website prices run from about $17 a month for a do-it-yourself template to $15,000 for a fully custom build, according to RICHMENU's 2026 restaurant website cost guide. Broken out by build method, RICHMENU puts DIY website builders at $17 to $65 a month, freelancers at $1,500 to $4,000 for a project, a generic web agency at $2,000 to $8,000 upfront plus $0 to $200 a month in maintenance, and a custom WordPress build at $5,000 to $15,000. The same guide notes that leaving a SaaS restaurant platform later, if a restaurant starts there and migrates off, typically costs $3,000 to $8,000 in migration work plus six to twelve months of ranking recovery.
That $2,000 to $8,000 generic-agency range, or the flat one-time fee disclosed further down this article, is the number most restaurant owners fixate on. As the sections below show, it is usually the smallest of the three costs a restaurant actually carries.
What moves the price up or down
Within RICHMENU's ranges, the same two variables separate a $2,000 to $8,000 generic-agency build from a $5,000 to $15,000 custom WordPress build: page count and whether the design is built from a template or from scratch. More pages and a fully custom design push a build toward the top of either range; a small, templated site sits at the bottom.
Integration scope is the other lever, and it is worth being precise about what "integration" means for a restaurant site. A booking or reservation link wired to the system the restaurant already uses is a small, well-defined piece of work. A full online-ordering system, the kind that takes payment and routes tickets to a kitchen, is a separate and much larger build. Press's restaurant scope treats a wired booking link as the one included integration and links out to ordering and delivery platforms rather than building ordering software itself, which is why a design fee and an ordering build are not the same purchase, or the same price.
Photography and the menu itself are the other cost drivers worth planning around, mainly because they determine whether the finished site does its job. Both come back later, once the pricing is on the table.
The subscription platforms: headline price vs what you actually pay
A subscription restaurant platform's monthly plan price is rarely the whole cost. Popmenu's published plans run Starter at $179 a month, Essentials at $299, and Premier at $499, with a 10% discount for paying annually, per Restolabs' breakdown of Popmenu pricing. Online ordering is not included in that base price: it is a roughly $50-a-month add-on per location, on top of which Popmenu charges $1 per order (billed to the customer, not the restaurant) and 3% processing on catering orders. Delivery adds another $7 to $9 per order, and each additional location is $300 a month, per the same Restolabs breakdown.
Square's website and checkout carry no separate platform fee in the sources checked for this article, but every online order carries a transaction fee. On Square's own fees page, the free plan charges 3.3% plus 30 cents on online orders and 2.6% plus 15 cents in person; the Plus plan drops that to 2.9% plus 30 cents online and 2.5% plus 15 cents in person. As of this writing, that is what Square's own fee page states for online transactions; the number to check against is the one on that page, not one printed in an older guide.
Owner.com's plans run $249 to $499 a month plus 5% per order, per the same RICHMENU cost guide cited above.
Put those three on a three-year clock at a stated assumption: 500 online orders a month, averaging $30 an order, or $15,000 a month in online order revenue.
| Platform | Monthly cost at assumed volume | 3-year total |
|---|---|---|
| Popmenu Essentials ($299 base + $50 ordering add-on) | $349 | $12,564 |
| Square free plan (3.3% + 30 cents per online order) | $645 | $23,220 |
| Square Plus plan (2.9% + 30 cents per online order, processing only) | $585 | $21,060 |
| Owner.com ($249 to $499 base + 5% per order) | $999 to $1,249 | $35,964 to $44,964 |
Computed from each vendor's published rates at an assumed 500 online orders per month averaging $30 each. This is our arithmetic, not a published statistic. Sources: Popmenu pricing via Restolabs, Square's own fees page, Owner.com pricing via RICHMENU, all linked above. Popmenu's $1-per-order fee is billed to the customer and is not included in the restaurant's total; its 3% catering charge applies only to catering orders and is not modeled here. The Square Plus row models processing fees only, because the Plus plan's monthly subscription fee is not listed on the fees page cited above.
The bigger number: what delivery-marketplace commission costs per year
Marketplace delivery commission is usually the largest of the three numbers, and it recurs every month a restaurant keeps using the marketplace. DoorDash's partnership plans, as reported by SWIPEBY's fees explainer, run Basic at 15%, Plus at 25%, and Premier at 30% commission on delivery orders, with 6% on pickup orders across all three plans. DoorDash's own pricing page did not return usable content when checked for this article, so the figures here are as reported by SWIPEBY, not from DoorDash directly.
Run the arithmetic at a stated volume: a restaurant doing $6,000 a month in DoorDash delivery on the Plus tier, at 25% commission, pays $1,500 a month, or $18,000 a year, in commission alone. That single year of commission is more than double the $8,000 top of RICHMENU's generic-agency build range, and nine times the $2,000 low end. Extended to three years, the same restaurant pays $54,000 in commission, more than the three-year cost of even the priciest subscription platform in the table above.
None of this promises that a restaurant's own site will convert those orders or pay for itself; the two numbers are simply not comparable in scale. What the arithmetic argues for is a direct channel the restaurant controls: a marketplace owns the customer relationship and the commission line, while a restaurant's own site is the one place that ranks under its own name.
Who actually publishes a price? A quick transparency audit
Comparing restaurant-site vendors turns out to mean comparing how openly each one discloses a number, not comparing like-for-like prices. Square publishes its transaction fees outright on its own fees page, cited above. Popmenu publishes its three base plans, but the real operating cost, the ordering add-on, the per-order charge, the catering processing rate, only shows up once you read the add-on terms in the Restolabs breakdown. DoorDash's commission tiers are known only secondhand, through SWIPEBY's reporting, because DoorDash's own pricing page returned nothing usable to this article. And BentoBox, the restaurant-website vendor many older cost guides still quote a monthly figure for, no longer publishes a price at all: BentoBox's pricing page now states that BentoBox is Clover and directs visitors to talk to Clover or a customer success manager, with no dollar figure on the page.
What the fee should actually buy
Whatever a restaurant pays, the site needs to do four jobs: show that the restaurant is open and when, show where it is, show the menu as a real, readable page rather than a photographed PDF, and carry a booking or reservation link that is actually wired to the system the restaurant uses, not just a phone number typed into a paragraph. That scope, menu, hours, location, and a wired booking link as the one included integration, is what Press builds for restaurant clients, which links out to ordering and delivery platforms rather than building an ordering system itself. A restaurant that also wants an ordering system is buying a second, separately quoted piece of work, not a feature bundled into a design fee.
Press, the studio publishing this guide, prices exactly that scope on a see-first model: the finished restaurant site is hand-built first and shown to the owner free within five working days, and if the owner keeps it the price is a flat one-time $299, with no deposit and the source code included on payment. That is one studio's published price, not a market average, and it is disclosed here once so there is a real number to weigh against the $18,000-a-year commission line and the three-year platform totals computed above.
For the general question of what any small-business website should cost and who to hire, see how much web designers charge. For how many pages a restaurant site actually needs, see what pages should my website have.
Questions
No. 01What's the cheapest way to get a restaurant website?
A do-it-yourself template builder is the cheapest option, running roughly $17 to $65 a month per RICHMENU's cost breakdown above. It costs the least upfront but puts the design, copy, and photography work on the restaurant owner.
No. 02Is a subscription platform like Popmenu or Square cheaper than a one-time design fee?
Not usually, once ordering fees are included. The three-year table above shows Popmenu, Square, and Owner.com all compounding past $12,000 over three years at a modest order volume, which is worth weighing against a one-time build price before signing up for a monthly plan.
No. 03How much does DoorDash commission cost a restaurant per year?
At $6,000 a month in delivery orders on DoorDash's Plus tier, 25% commission works out to $1,500 a month, or $18,000 a year, as shown in the commission section above. That is a recurring cost, not a one-time build fee, which is why it is worth comparing against a website's price rather than treating the two as unrelated line items.
No. 04Does a restaurant website's price include online ordering?
Not in most build-fee models, including Press's scope described above, where the site links out to ordering and delivery platforms and carries a wired booking link, but does not include building an ordering system. A restaurant that wants ordering software built or subscribed to is pricing a separate piece of work from the website itself.