Restaurant owners get quotes that will not line up next to each other: a delivery app taking a cut of every order, a booking platform charging per cover, and an agency asking for five figures, all pitched as the thing that fills your tables. This tool gives you a band to hold the agency number against. It is not a quote.
Run the free tool ↓Tap three buttons: what you need, how competitive your market is, and how big the operation is. The range updates as you tap. Nothing is submitted or stored, and like the more than 50 free tools published here, no email wall.
Prefer a full page? Open the What Should You Pay? tool here.
All three questions land oddly for a restaurant.
What it cannot see is what actually moves a restaurant quote: ordering on your own domain, how often the menu changes, and whether anyone has photographed the food. The main what should you pay tool covers the arithmetic.
It does not grade your restaurant. It gives a band, so hold it against the proposal you were sent.
A quote near the band with real scope attached is the healthy case. Scope for a restaurant is a list of nouns: whether the menu is text you can edit yourself, whether ordering runs on your domain or hands the guest to a third party, and who fixes the hours before a holiday weekend.
A quote far under the band is rarely a discount. It usually means a template, an automated package, or an arrangement selling the same hungry person to the other places on your block.
Then read the fixed red flag list. One line matters more here than in most trades: whether they own your Google Business Profile or you do. For a restaurant that profile is the storefront: hours, photos, the menu link, and whether you show as open right now. Plenty of people decide where to eat without opening your website.
Two more free checks for restaurants: the website report card grades a page you paste in, and the AI visibility checker asks an AI engine your customers' questions and shows whether it names you.
Both invented. Neither is a client or a quote.
Say a single-room neighborhood restaurant in a mid-size city wants a real site. The owner taps a new website, mid-size city, growing with multiple staff, since the build has to carry ordering. The tool displays $5,500 to $14,500, one-time. The bottom is a fast, clean site with the menu as readable text and the hours right. The top is what happens once ordering runs on the restaurant's own domain, the menu can be edited on a Tuesday afternoon without calling anyone, and the private dining pages earn their place. That spread is machinery, not design taste.
Imagine a three-location taqueria group in a major metro. They tap SEO / Local SEO, major metro, multi-location. The tool displays $4,600 to $10,600 per month, and those two answers do almost all of that work. Three addresses means three profiles, three sets of hours that drift apart around holidays, three review streams to answer, and three neighborhoods where the results look nothing alike. The same group with one room would see a far lower band.
Neither number says what the money produces. No tool knows that.
A band is only useful if you know what the money buys.
The full argument for the trade sits on the restaurant marketing page.
So you can hold this page to its own standard, here are ours. Custom website builds run $3,500 to $12,000+ one-time. Ongoing SEO or local SEO runs $1,500 to $3,500 per month for most businesses, and $3,500 to $7,500 per month in competitive metros or multi-location work. Online ordering and small stores start at $3,500, the line the tool has no button for. Everything ongoing is month to month, and you own the site, the content, and the accounts. We publish no fee for Google Ads management: the industry runs on flat fees or a percentage of spend, and a percentage pays the agency more for spending more. We quote flat after a free consult.
One figure is worth writing down: what you paid the delivery and booking platforms last month. Hold a retainer against that number, not against zero. Trade detail sits in the answers on what SEO costs for a restaurant and what a restaurant website costs. Orlando based, working with local service businesses nationwide since 2008.
No. It produces a band from three broad answers and knows nothing about your restaurant: not how long the menu is, not whether you want ordering on your own domain, not what your photos look like. Use it to sort a reasonable proposal from an unreasonable one, then ask for scope.
Because this is the general pricing tool with a restaurant reading attached, not an ordering calculator. Ordering on your own site is a store, priced separately: ours start at $3,500. If your build includes ordering, read toward the top of the band and expect the store as its own line.
It changes what you should insist the build includes. A menu you can edit yourself in minutes costs a little more up front and almost nothing after. A menu only your agency can touch turns every seasonal change into a support ticket. Ask where menu edits live before comparing quotes.
Google now sells ads in and around AI answers, so paid placement does appear on that surface. What no budget buys is the organic answer itself naming your restaurant. That comes from being readable and checkable: dishes as text rather than trapped in an image, dietary notes, and correct hours.
Add it up first. Marketplace commissions and per cover fees are charged as a share of business you already earned, and they climb with your good months. A retainer does not. Run the two side by side over a full year before deciding which line is the expensive one.
What Should You Pay?: full tool page and methodology · Marketing for restaurants · SEO cost for restaurants · AI Visibility Checker for Restaurants · Website Report Card for Restaurants · All free tools
Send over the proposal you are holding and we will tell you what it leaves out. Or ask for a free mockup of your homepage, yours to keep either way.
Book a free consultation → Or call/text directly: (407) 694-2055Tell us a little about the business and we will come back with an honest read: what we would fix first, what it costs, and whether you need us at all. Prefer to see work before you talk numbers? Get a free homepage mockup, built for your business, yours to keep either way.
Brandon reads every one of these himself. You will hear back shortly with an honest read on what we would do first, what it costs, and whether it is worth it for you.