Free digital menu
for your restaurant

It is also the cost you can cut to almost nothing, and the way to do it is unglamorous:

• Decide the shape once, then never touch it. Six lines, price on the right, one heading. Everything after that is typing, and typing takes two minutes.
• Do not centre the prices. Aligned to the right they scan in one movement; centred they force the eye to hunt, and that is what makes a menu feel slow to read.
• Write the longest dish name you will ever have and design for that. Otherwise the layout breaks the first Tuesday you serve something with a long name, and it breaks at the moment nobody has time.

Once that exists, the weekly job stops being design and becomes replacing words in a fixed frame. That single change is the difference between a menu that gets updated for years and one that gets updated twice — and it has nothing to do with which plan you are on.

There is a related habit that saves the same hour again later: keep the previous version. Menus repeat seasonally, and rebuilding October's from scratch each year is the most common avoidable work in this whole area.

Before you compare plans, do the layout once and time it. If it took an evening, that evening is your real cost, and it is the number you should be trying to reduce — not the monthly fee.

With two screens the split writes itself: food on one, drinks on the other, or menu inside and offers in the window. With one, every line you add pushes another one off. That sounds obvious until you are standing in front of it at nine in the morning trying to fit the set lunch, the opening hours and the card-machine minimum onto the same board.

Allergen information is the usual casualty. Customers in the UK and Ireland expect to be told, and staff get asked several times a service. It does not all fit on a board that is also selling the specials, so the workable pattern is a permanent line — «allergen information: ask at the counter» or a small code by each dish — rather than fourteen icons that shrink everything else into unreadability. What matters is that the answer exists and that whoever is asked knows where it is, not that the screen carries the whole table.

Prices earn their place, decoration does not. On one screen the logo at the top costs you a line, the photo costs you three, and the welcome message costs you the one thing a passer-by would actually have read. A single board that shows six dishes with prices outperforms a beautiful one that shows two, and it is not close.

And when the second screen does arrive, do not clone the first. The most common upgrade mistake is buying a second TV and putting the same loop on it, which doubles the hardware and adds nothing. The point of the second one is to stop compromising: it takes the queue, or the window, or the allergens — the thing that was being squeezed — and gives the first board its space back.

The fix costs nothing and has to happen before the printing, not after. Point the code at an address on your own domain — a page on your website, or a short path you control — and have that address forward to whatever tool you use today. The code on the table then belongs to you permanently, the tool becomes replaceable, and the day you switch you change one redirect instead of an afternoon with a scraper and a bin bag. Nobody does this, because at the moment of setting it up the future in which you might leave feels theoretical.

The same logic applies to what sits between the scan and the food. Free tiers pay for themselves somehow, and the usual ways are an interstitial, a logo across the top, or a request for an email before the menu opens. None of that is dishonest and all of it is a cost, paid by your guest at the hungriest moment of their day and charged to your reputation rather than to your card. It is worth scanning your own code from a strange phone once and counting the taps to the first price.

And there is a quieter version of the same question: who can see the numbers. Scan counts, times of day, which dishes get looked at — that is a genuinely useful set of data about your own room, and on some free plans it is visible to the provider and not to you. It does not have to be a scandal to be worth knowing; it is simply another line in the same answer to «what is this actually costing me».

None of this is an argument against a free plan. A free plan is the right way to find out whether a digital menu suits your room at all, and most of them do the job. The argument is only about sequence: settle the address before you print, because printing is the moment a reversible decision becomes an expensive one — and it is the single step in this whole process that nobody thinks of as a decision at all.

To be straight with you: this applies to us as much as to anyone else, and it is the reason we say it. Ask us, or any provider, where the code points and what happens to it if you leave — a supplier who cannot answer that plainly has told you something useful about the rest of the arrangement.