What a digital menu costs a UAE restaurant

Digital menu pricing in this market is deliberately hard to compare. Here is how to read it.

The four pricing models

Almost every product you will look at uses one of these, sometimes two at once.

Flat subscription. A fixed monthly or annual fee per venue. Easy to budget, no surprises. This is what we do, at 59 AED a month or 500 AED a year.

Tiered subscription. Several plans where the cheap one is missing something you will need within a month. The advertised price is rarely the price you end up paying, because the feature you actually want — usually translation, analytics or more than a token number of items — lives two tiers up.

Per-branch or per-table. Priced by something that grows as you grow. Fine at one location, uncomfortable at four.

Commission. A percentage of orders placed through the system. This is the one to look at hardest, because it is the only model where being successful costs you more. A few percent of every order compounds into a very large number over a year, and it is the reason we do not process orders at all.

What to compare it against

The useful comparison is not against other software. It is against what you already spend.

Add up last year’s:

• Menu design or designer time
• Printing
• Lamination or finishing
• Reprints when prices changed
• Replacement copies for damaged or missing menus
• Separate printed versions in other languages

For most independent venues that total is well into the hundreds of dirhams, and for anyone printing more than once a year it is comfortably over 500 AED — which is a whole year of a flat-fee digital menu.

We are not going to tell you what your number is. You have the invoices; go and look. The point is that the comparison is against a real cost you are already paying, not against zero.

The hidden costs to ask about

When you are evaluating anything, ask these directly:

Is there a setup fee? Some products charge to onboard you, which can be several hundred dirhams before you have shown a single menu.

Are scans or views limited? A cap on monthly views is a bill that arrives exactly when business is good.

What happens when I add a branch? Ask for the number, not the sales answer.

Is translation included or extra? In the UAE this is not optional, and it is very commonly upsold.

Do I need hardware? Tablets, stands, printers and installation visits turn a software subscription into a capital purchase.

What happens to my QR codes if I cancel? If the codes are printed on packaging, this matters. Get the answer before you print.

What “free” usually means

There are genuinely free QR code generators. They produce a working code that points wherever you tell it.

What they do not give you is the menu. You still need somewhere to host it, something to build it with, and a way to change it. In practice “free” usually resolves to a PDF on a Drive link, which means a menu that is hard to read on a phone and a code that dies the next time you change the file.

That is not a criticism of free tools — they do exactly what they say. It is just worth being clear that the code was never the expensive part.

A reasonable way to decide

1. Work out what you spent on printed menus last year.
2. Write down the features you would actually use — translation, photos, filters, analytics — and check which tier each one requires.
3. Add the setup fee, the per-branch cost and any hardware.
4. If there is a commission, model it against a realistic month of orders. This number surprises people.
5. Compare the annual totals.

If the answer comes out in favour of staying with print, stay with print. But run the numbers first, because most people have never actually added up what their menus cost them.