We’ve simplified TypeMenu’s pricing to two plans. Free is for getting your menu in order: products, variants, modifiers, recipes, ingredient costs, gross profit per dish, and the allergen matrix with its public page. It’s free with no card and no time limit. Operate switches on selling: online ordering with zero commission, your branded storefront, customer accounts, order management, the kitchen screen, scheduling, delivery zones, deals, charges, purchasing, reports and webhooks. It’s £79 per location per month, with a 14-day trial and no card to start it.
That’s the whole price list. Here’s the reasoning.
Why the menu is free
Every food business needs its menu, costs and allergens in order before it sells anything, and most do that work in a spreadsheet, a notebook, or not at all. We used to charge for it as part of a tier, which meant a business that just wanted its allergen matrix right was paying for ordering features it didn’t use, and a business that wasn’t sure about online ordering never got as far as putting its menu in.
Making it free fixes both. You can build the menu, cost every dish and publish your allergen page without ever deciding whether you want to take orders through us. If you later do, the menu is already there and ordering switches on over the top of it. If you never do, you’ve still got a properly costed menu and a compliant allergen page, and we’re glad to have been useful.
To be clear about what “free” means: it isn’t a trial. There’s no 30-day clock, no card, no product cap, no location cap. Three staff users. It stays free.
Why one paid plan
We had tiers. Tiers mean that the feature you need is always on the next one up, and that every conversation about price becomes a conversation about which plan has what. The flat alternative is simpler for everyone: if you’re taking orders, you’re on Operate, and Operate has everything.
That includes the things that used to sit behind higher tiers, like purchasing with suppliers and purchase orders, the four reports, SMS notifications, webhooks and the Square POS sync. There’s no feature we’re holding back for an “enterprise” conversation. If you run several sites, you pay per location and the plan is the same.
What it costs, exactly
- Operate: £79 per location per month, or £659 a year, which is about 30% less. Also priced in euros (€79 / €659) and US dollars ($99 / $829).
- Commission: none. Not on any order, not on any payment method.
- Card processing: payments go straight to your own Stripe account, and Stripe’s processing fee is the only per-order cost. We never hold your money.
- SMS: 100 messages a month included on Operate, with bundles of 250, 500 or 1,000 at £20, £35 or £60 a month if you need more. Email notifications are included.
- Users: unlimited on Operate, three on Free.
The maths against an aggregator is the same as it always was. At 25% commission, a business doing £4,000 a month of orders through an app pays £1,000 a month. At £79 flat, the break-even is a little over £300 a month of direct orders. Most businesses pass that in the first week.
The trial
Operate comes with a 14-day trial. No card, full access, five SMS to test notifications with. If you subscribe during the trial you keep the remaining days and pay when they end, so there’s no reason to wait until day fourteen to decide.
If you don’t subscribe, your account returns to Free. Ordering, customers, the kitchen screen and reports switch off; your menu, recipes and allergen pages stay exactly as you left them. Nothing is deleted, and you can switch Operate back on whenever you’re ready.
What this means if you’re already a customer
Existing subscriptions have been moved onto Operate, with every feature of your old tier and the ones that used to sit above it. You don’t need to do anything, and your billing page shows the new plan. If anything there doesn’t look right, email support and we’ll sort it.
What we’re not doing
We’re not selling a mobile app, and we’ve written before about why. We’re not offering coupon codes; deals apply themselves at checkout. There’s no public REST API; webhooks are the integration surface, and they cover most of what people ask for. And there’s no hidden tier for bigger businesses. If you’re a multi-site operator and want to talk, we’re happy to, but the price is the price.
Why the change matters to us
A flat, transparent subscription with no commission is the only pricing model that lines our interests up with yours. We don’t earn more when you sell more; we earn when you keep using us because it works. That was always the idea. The new plans just make it easier to see from the outside.
See the pricing page for the full feature comparison, or start free and build your menu today.