The pricing question, asked the way restaurants actually ask it
Restaurant operators ask about price differently than other industries. The shape of the question is usually some version of "what am I getting for the four hundred a month I'm already paying, and is it different from what you'd charge," and the answer that gets you off the call fastest is the one with the actual numbers in it. Here are ours.
Build tiers, one-time
- Site, $2,500. Up to eight pages, your menu and dish pages, with hours and contact written where machines can read them, one reservation provider wired in (OpenTable, Resy, or Tock), and the question-and-answer section on the landing page. The starter for a single-location spot that needs the menu current and the details in place.
- Story, $5,000. Up to fifteen pages plus the setup that turns a chef's voice note into a written piece and a phone photo into an updated dish page. Per-menu-variant pages (brunch, dinner, vegetarian, prix-fixe, kids, catering) and per-occasion pages (date night, business dinner, group dining, private events) come standard. This is where most independent restaurants land.
- Engine, $9,000. Up to 200+ pages generated from one list. Useful for a multi-location group, a rotating seasonal calendar, or a catering arm that needs per-event-type landing pages. Every neighborhood, menu variant, and occasion combination becomes its own findable page.
- Studio, $15,000+. Custom builds for multi-domain restaurant groups, embedded ordering apps, or a conversational reservation layer. Rare for a single restaurant, the right shape for a hospitality group running five rooms under one operating system.
Retainers, monthly
- Local, $300/mo. Hosting, upkeep, a post a month, and a report on how people are finding you. The floor that keeps the build alive after launch.
- Local, $300/mo. Hosting, upkeep, plus one post a month, Google Business Profile, local citations, and on-page upkeep. The right fit for most independent restaurants and cafes.
- Growth, $700/mo. Local plus four posts a month, off-page link building, competitor share-of-voice tracking, and a monthly strategist. The right fit for restaurants competing in a dense urban market like downtown Toronto, Vancouver, or Montreal.
- Authority, $2,000+/mo. Growth plus work to get you named in AI answers, press seeding, digital PR, and original research.
The free audit includes a line-item comparison between what your current agency is shipping and what we'd ship at the same monthly. The honest answer most of the time is that the agency is doing some combination of Instagram reposts, a generic blog post on "five reasons to eat seasonally," and a monthly invoice. The menu pages, the dish pages, the per-occasion question pages, the per-dish photography pipeline, and the Cite-met monitoring across six AI engines almost never appear in the deliverable list.
What about Squarespace, Wix, or Toast's website builder?
Those platforms ship the room and the brand-photo carousel, which is the easy part. The hard part is the menu pages, the dish pages, the dietary details, the per-menu-variant pages, and the AI-citation flow. None of the off-the-shelf restaurant website tools ship those, and the ones that ship menu pages usually serve them as either a PDF or a widget that ChatGPT and Perplexity cannot read. We rebuild on a stack we own, which is why the same site can carry a Story build's depth without the platform tax. The full breakdown of how this maps to our solutions sits inside the solutions overview if you want the long version.
The rule of the house
The rule we run on is that the website should keep up with the kitchen, and the price should come down each year as the agent fleet absorbs more of the repeated work. The Story build at $5,000 plus Local at $300 a month is what most independent restaurants end up paying, and the math against a $600-a-month agency retainer over twelve months is usually the conversation that closes the call. Send us the URL during the free audit and we'll come back with the written comparison.
Cross-industry notes
If you're a hospitality operator who also runs retail (think a bakery with a packaged-goods line, or a wine bar with a bottle shop attached), the same model maps to the boutique retail hub, where the groundwork is the same and the editorial register matches the restaurant voice. For community-driven concepts (a yoga studio cafe, a fitness-club juice bar), the fitness studios hub shares the warm-register playbook.