Online reservations for restaurants — with no fee per table

The guest opens the QR menu from the table, from your Google listing or from the link in your Instagram bio and taps "Book a table". The calendar shows 30 days ahead by default. They pick a day, a 30-minute slot and a party of up to 12, then leave a name with a phone number or an e-mail. No account, under a minute.

Confirmation and every change go by e-mail, and the message carries a cancellation link. A guest who cannot make it cancels without ringing the venue, and the slot goes back into the pool. The earliest bookable time is 2 hours from now by default, so nobody grabs a table for fifteen minutes' time while the kitchen is buried in tickets.

The card itself does not change. It is the same QR menu your guests already scan, with one extra button. No second code, no separate booking page.

Six settings decide whether the calendar works for you or against you: the slot interval, the sitting length, the lead time, how far ahead the calendar opens, the largest party and the number of seats per slot. The defaults are 30 minutes, 90 minutes, 2 hours, 30 days and 12 guests. A bistro turning tables fast will set a 60-minute sitting; a tasting-menu restaurant, something like 150.

Seats per slot deserves a plain warning. Zero means seats are not counted: the calendar accepts every booking, including the ones that arrive after the room is full. That is fine in the first week, while you watch how guests book. For a Saturday night, enter the real number of seats, or the overbooking is your own doing.

You assign the table when you seat the party, not at booking time, so a group of six gets whichever table is actually free rather than the one somebody pencilled in a week ago.

Walk-in venues, and any venue after the last free slot, get the same question at the door: "how long?". The WMenu queue runs off the same QR code: the guest scans it at the entrance, enters the party size and sees on the phone how many parties are ahead. They can step out for ten minutes instead of blocking the doorway.

Staff see the queue in the panel and seat parties in order. The queue does not replace bookings in a restaurant where guests plan a week ahead. It earns its keep where the trade walks in off the street: a pizzeria, a ramen bar, a café at Saturday noon.

A party that never shows costs you the takings of the table it blocked. In PRO you set an amount per guest, a minimum party size from which the guarantee is required (0 means every booking), or specific dates: New Year's Eve, Valentine's, the office Christmas dinner. Then a free-cancellation cut-off in hours, 24 for example.

The guest saves a card through Stripe Checkout. Nothing is taken at booking time. A charge happens only when you mark a no-show in the panel or the guest cancels inside the cut-off. Seating the party, or cancelling it yourself, releases the card. A booking whose card page was abandoned frees the seat after 40 minutes, so a half-finished form never blocks the room.

The guarantee is a tool for groups and peak dates, not for everyday trade. In a small casual place where people book a table for two on a Tuesday, asking for a card costs more bookings than it saves. Require it from 6 guests upward and on the dates when the room is full anyway.

You check the effect in the panel: the no-show statistics for the last 30 days list bookings that reached their date, seated, no-shows, the no-show rate, seats lost and guarantees charged. How PRO compares with the other plans is on the pricing page.

You set an event up in the panel: date, price per seat, number of seats, a maximum per order and when sales close. Guests pay through Stripe before the doors open, the ticket arrives by e-mail and you see who bought. A 60-seat New Year's Eve at €90 a head is sold out before anyone has typed in a bank transfer.

Refunds are done in the Stripe dashboard, not in WMenu. The card guarantee and events need a connected Stripe account; bookings and the queue work without one.

Bookings, the queue, the card guarantee, no-show statistics and events are in the PRO plan: €45 net a month, or €36 a month billed yearly (€432). STANDARD at €29 does not have them; PREMIUM at €59 adds online ordering on top. There is never a charge per booking, whether you take 20 or 600 a month.

Reservation platforms count differently: a fixed fee per processed booking (industry reviews of CoverManager quote about €1.50) or a share of the bill, the TheFork way. At €1.50 a booking, the PRO subscription pays for itself from roughly 30 bookings a month. A venue with a handful of bookings a month pays less per booking, and for that venue a subscription is the wrong choice.

What a percentage of the bill costs at your volume is in the commission calculator.