What Should a 20-Person Restaurant Actually Pay for Software?

If you search "how much does restaurant software cost," you'll find vendor pricing pages and generic estimates that ignore team size. A 20-person full-service restaurant has very different needs from a quick-service counter, and the monthly gap between an unoptimized stack and a right-sized one is often thousands of dollars.

Here's what we see, pillar by pillar, when we run the numbers for a 20-person restaurant.

Sales & Marketing: $1,500-2,500/mo

Reservation and table management is the biggest variable here. OpenTable runs around $449/mo and Resy around $399/mo — both cover online booking, waitlist, and table management. If you also run commission-free online ordering, ChowNow adds about $149/mo. Email and SMS marketing through Mailchimp runs $65/mo, local social advertising through Meta Ads around $600/mo, and review generation via Birdeye around $300/mo. The total depends on whether you're driving discovery through reservations, direct ordering, or both.

Core Operations: $700-1,100/mo

Your POS is the anchor. Toast POS runs $340/mo and Square for Restaurants runs $249/mo — both include kitchen display integration and tableside ordering. Staff scheduling adds another $135-210/mo depending on whether you use 7shifts or HotSchedules. Food-cost and inventory tracking runs $399-475/mo between xtraCHEF and MarginEdge. The high end of this range only makes sense if you're tracking invoice-level food costs in real time.

Finance: $400/mo

Core accounting via QuickBooks Online is $90/mo. Payroll for a mixed tipped, hourly, and salaried crew through Gusto runs $200/mo. Bill.com for vendor bill pay automation adds $99/mo. Ramp covers corporate-card expense management at $0/mo, which keeps this pillar cheaper than most owners expect.

Admin & Security: $430/mo

Google Workspace Business Standard is $170/mo for hosted email and productivity. 1Password Business is $95/mo for shared password vaults. Huntress Managed EDR is $85/mo for endpoint security on back-office PCs and POS terminals. DocuSign is $80/mo for e-signatures on vendor and lease agreements.

What this adds up to

Add it up and a genuinely optimized stack for a 20-person restaurant usually lands somewhere in the $3,000-4,500/mo range depending on reservation and ad choices — but we regularly see restaurants paying $6,000-9,500/mo for the same coverage because they're running overlapping tools, paying for enterprise POS tiers they don't need, or never renegotiated after their team size changed.

Run the free audit with your actual headcount and current spend to see exactly where your restaurant's stack stands.