What a Restaurant Reservation System Really Costs

The monthly fee was 59 euros. The invoice came to 214. Nothing had gone wrong that month. The restaurant had simply been busy.

That is the part of booking software that catches people out. The number you compare when you sign up is the subscription. The number you actually pay depends on how the system charges for the bookings it sends you, and that one moves with your covers.

Here is how the three pricing models work, what each costs at 50, 150 and 300 bookings a month, and when paying a commission is genuinely the right call.

The three ways you get charged

Flat subscription. One monthly price for the software. Take ten bookings or ten thousand, the invoice reads the same. Plans usually differ by features or by the number of venues, not by volume.

Per booking. A subscription plus a fixed amount for every reservation that arrives through the provider's own channels. In the Baltics that fee sits around 1 euro. Bookings that come from your own website or phone are normally free, which matters more than it sounds.

Percentage commission. A share of the money, charged when guests pay through the platform: deposits, prepaid set menus, event bookings. This is the model diners' marketplaces are built on, and it is the one that scales fastest with your success.

Most systems in this market combine at least two of the three.

What each model costs at 50, 150 and 300 bookings

Take a 59 euro subscription and run it against a per-booking fee of 1 euro:

At 150 bookings a month, that is 708 euros a year against 2,508 euros. The software is identical. The difference is 1,800 euros, which is a commercial coffee machine.

Commission works differently again, because it follows the money rather than the booking, and it usually applies to prepaid events and paid extras rather than to every table. Take a New Year's dinner for 30 people at 60 euros a head, collected in advance. The prepayment is 1,800 euros. At 8 percent, that single evening costs 144 euros.

You can budget a flat fee. You can only forecast a commission.

What the Estonian market actually charges

Vabalaud, the established Estonian portal, publishes its terms openly. As listed in July 2026, the standard package is 59 euros a month and the premium package 99 euros. Bookings arriving through Vabalaud channels carry a fee of 1 euro each. Under additional services, prepaid events listed in their events section and paid products sold alongside a booking carry 8 percent, with a minimum of 1 euro per person. Note that this is not a commission on every reservation, which is worth checking on any provider's price list. The contract runs for a minimum of six months, the monthly fee is paid a month in advance, and extras such as banner placement or homepage featuring run from 50 to 300 euros. (Vabalaud service terms)

At the other end, Tableo lists a plan that is free for up to 100 covers each month, with no card required and no time limit. Smaller local tools sit in between, with tiers in the 5 to 50 euro range.

DinnerBooking, the other name you will meet in Estonia, takes the opposite approach and publishes no figures at all. Its three tiers, Essential, Business and Enterprise, each sit behind a demo booking. That is worth knowing before you give up an hour to a sales call, and worth asking about in the first five minutes of it.

Watch the line items underneath the headline price as well. Text reminders on that same portal are billed at 0.07 euros a message, and if you send one before every booking, that is another 10 euros a month at 150 bookings.

Prices change, and packages get renamed. Check the current terms yourself before you sign anything, and ask for them in writing.

When paying commission is the right call

Commission is not a trick. It buys something a flat fee does not: an audience.

A new venue with no mailing list, no regulars and a street position nobody walks past has a discovery problem, not a software problem. A portal that already has thousands of diners browsing it every week can fill tables you could not fill yourself. Paying 8 percent on covers you would otherwise not have served is a straightforward trade, and often a good one.

The trade goes bad quietly, and always for the same reason. Two years later the regulars are yours, the mailing list works, and people search for your name directly. They still land on the portal, still book through it, and you still pay for every one of them. You are now renting an audience you already own, and there are cheaper ways to keep them.

The test is simple. If the platform is bringing you guests who had never heard of you, it is earning its share. If it is charging you for people who typed your name into Google, it is a toll booth.

Questions to ask before you sign

Ask these before the demo ends, and get the answers in writing:

Which bookings carry a fee: all of them, or only the ones from your channels?

What happens to bookings that come from my own website and my own phone?

Is there a commission on prepayments and deposits, and what is the minimum?

What is the minimum contract term, and what notice do I give?

If I leave, do I take my guest list and booking history with me?

That last one decides more than the price does. Guest history is the asset the software is sitting on, and some providers make it very hard to walk away with it.

We built Hollapp on a flat monthly fee with no commission and no per-booking charge, because the alternative meant sending our customers a larger invoice for every good week they had. The Starter plan is free and stays free, and the paid plans do not change price when you get busier.

Run your own numbers first. Take last month's online bookings, multiply by the per-booking fee, add the subscription, and multiply by twelve. If that annual figure surprises you, you have found the real price of the system. And if no-shows are eating into those covers as well, there are nine tactics that reduce them before you pay anyone a cent more.