A table booking system costs a restaurant from €79 a month by published price lists — or nothing, if you choose a commission model. But for a restaurant, price is not the question to settle first. The first question is which channel the booking comes from, and who owns the customer relationship afterwards. The entire pricing structure is built around that question.
Prices checked 21 July 2026 from providers’ own published price lists. Pricing can change — always verify current terms with the provider.
Starting prices from published price lists
| Service | Starting price | Basis | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| TableOnline | from €79/mo | Fixed monthly fee; covers bookings from own channels | tableonline.fi |
| Fiest | €0/mo | 0.99% on POS payments, 1.99% on online orders + processing | fiest.io |
| Hallinnoija | €7.90/mo | Per bookable resource — person or space | hallinnoija.fi |
| Evaraus | €19.95/mo | On a 12-month billing period | evaraus.fi |
TableOnline states that its pricing is based on a fixed monthly fee covering all bookings from the restaurant’s own channels such as its website and social accounts, that pricing is flexible according to the features selected, and that the monthly fee starts at €79. The service also states that it provides visibility across several platforms including Google and its own portal, and that a Google integration allows table booking straight from search results.
Fiest states a price of €0/month and charges 0.99% on point-of-sale payments and 1.99% on online orders, with Stripe or SumUp processing fees on top; the company gives an example where €10,000 of monthly sales results in a €99 fee.
So the comparison only becomes straightforward once you know your own volume. €79/month is fixed. 0.99% is €99 at ten thousand and €198 at twenty thousand. In a quiet month the commission wins; in a busy one, the fixed fee does.
Channel is a restaurant’s real cost variable
This separates a restaurant from every trade covered so far. For a barber, a booking is a booking. For a restaurant, it matters whether it came from your site or from a portal.
When a guest books a table through your own website, they have already chosen you. When they book through a portal, they scrolled past ten restaurants and picked one — and next time they will open the same portal again, not your site. A portal brings guests you would not otherwise get, but it also places itself permanently between you and the guest.
Neither is the right answer on its own. A portal is effective at acquiring new customers; your own channel is cheaper and keeps the relationship with you. In practice a working structure runs both in parallel, as long as you know whose share is growing. There is one number worth checking monthly: what percentage of bookings came through your own channel. If that share falls year on year, you are paying an ever larger part of your revenue for visibility you rent.
A table is not a time slot
The second restaurant-specific issue is the bookable unit itself.
A barbershop books a person’s time. A restaurant books a table and its seats, with no link to staff at all — the guest does not care which server takes the table. What does matter is how many people fit at the table and how many it is sold to.
A four-seat table sold to two people produces roughly half of what it could. An evening where this happens ten times is a significant loss, and it shows up as a loss in no report at all — the tables were booked, the evening looked fine. That is why a restaurant system should be judged on floor plan and seat management, not just time slots. The same applies to consecutive sittings: does one table take two parties in an evening, or one.
A third specific issue is group bookings. A party of twenty is not five bookings of four; it is its own event with different advance details, different cancellation terms and often a different menu. Check whether the system bends to this, or whether you will be handling groups by email regardless.
No-shows and deposits
An empty booked table on a Friday evening is a direct loss, and unlike in a barbershop it could have been sold to someone waiting.
Automated confirmation and reminders are the baseline. There is precise measurement of their effect from healthcare, and the mechanism is the same: in a randomised study of 9,835 patients, no-shows were 23.1% with no reminder, 17.3% with an automated reminder and 13.6% with a staff phone call (The American Journal of Medicine). Deposits or card guarantees have become common for larger tables, and compiled industry figures indicate a prepayment reduces no-shows by up to 65% (Simple Salon, 2026).
The arithmetic: if the average spend is €40 and one party of four fails to show on a Friday, that is €160. One such evening a month is €1,920 a year. Against that, €79/month is a small number — provided the system actually sends the reminders and releases cancelled tables back for sale.
Your own site alongside the portal
Website prices are one-off: single-page €400–900 plus VAT, multi-page €700–2,500 plus VAT (WebFin, 25 June 2026), with booking €2,000–6,000 (Poickeus, 2026), with integrations €3,000–10,000 (Nerot.fi, 2025). Maintenance €35–50/month, domain €10–30/year. Our own packages are Starter €790, Business €1,290 and Premium €2,490, VAT 25.5% included; the agency prices exclude VAT.
A restaurant website has three jobs a portal does not cover: an up-to-date menu, opening hours including exceptional days, and booking without an intermediary. Of these, the menu is what people look for most and what is most often out of date. Put plainly: if the menu on your site is from last spring, a new booking system is not your most urgent problem.
Where an owned site loses to a portal: it does not bring you a guest who does not yet know you exist. A comparison is on our comparison page, and the background to the figures is in our website cost guide.
Who this does not suit
If you run a lunch place where nobody books tables, a table booking system solves a problem you do not have. The money is better spent on making sure the day’s menu is online and current — that is a lunch restaurant’s single most important piece of content.
The same applies to a small place with ten tables and a queue at the door every evening. In a full room a booking system does not add revenue; it only redistributes control.
The investment justifies itself when you have clear peaks and quiet sittings, when group bookings arrive regularly, or when you notice you are paying a portal for an ever larger share of your bookings. That last one is the moment when building your own channel pays back fastest of all.
See an example on our demo sites or run your own numbers in the calculator.