OpenTable Cost Per Month: $149 to $499 Plus Cover Fees

I get asked about OpenTable's pricing a lot. Usually by restaurant owners who are either considering signing up or staring at a bill that's higher than they expected. The pricing page doesn't make it easy to figure out the real number, so I'll do it here.

I should be transparent: I built bavoli, which competes with OpenTable. I have a clear bias. I'm going to use OpenTable's own published rates and work through the math step by step so you can verify everything yourself.

The base plans

As of October 2026, OpenTable publishes three plans for restaurants:

OpenTable Basic (US only): $149 per month, plus $1.50 per cover for guests who book through OpenTable's network (their website, app, and partner sites) once a 30-day intro period ends. Guests who book through your own website cost $0.25 each, or a flat $49 a month.

OpenTable Core: $299 per month, plus $1.00 per network cover. Bookings from your own website are included.

OpenTable Pro: $499 per month, plus the same $1.00 per network cover, with website bookings included. Pro adds deeper guest profiles, automated email campaigns, and custom surveys.

All three plans add a 2% service fee on prepaid experiences, and the standard contract is one year with automatic renewal. Cover fees only apply to seated diners, so no-shows and cancellations aren't billed.

The real monthly cost

Here's where it gets real. Let's look at three restaurant sizes, assuming 60% of covers come through OpenTable's network and 40% through your own website. Basic uses whichever website option is cheaper.

Small restaurant (200 covers/month)

Mid-size restaurant (500 covers/month)

Busy restaurant (1,000 covers/month)

Notice that Basic stops being the cheap plan somewhere around 200 network covers a month, because its $1.50 cover fee catches up with the bigger base fees. The split between network and website covers varies by restaurant. Some get most bookings through the marketplace. Others get 80% through their own site. Your split matters because it changes the per-cover math. But on every plan, you're paying for each network cover.

The costs that don't show up on the pricing page

Marketing and promotions. OpenTable offers "Boost" campaigns that give your restaurant higher placement in search results, for an additional per-cover fee on top of the standard rate. Restaurant Business has reported these can add $3 to $7.50 per cover for promoted bookings. If you're using Boost to fill slow nights, those seats aren't cheap.

The ad network. In early 2026, OpenTable launched an advertising network built on reservation data. Restaurants pay per-cover fees, OpenTable collects the data, and now they sell advertising against it. Your guest data is the product. I wrote about what this means for data ownership in a separate post.

Opportunity cost of the diner relationship. When a guest books through OpenTable's marketplace, OpenTable owns that initial touchpoint. They can (and do) market other restaurants to that guest. Your reservation generated the data. Their platform uses it to send your guest somewhere else next Friday. That's not a line item on your invoice, but it's a real cost.

When OpenTable is worth it

I'd be dishonest if I didn't say this: for some restaurants, OpenTable's pricing makes sense.

If your restaurant is new and you need discovery (actual new diners who wouldn't have found you otherwise), OpenTable's marketplace has real value. They're the largest reservation network in the world. For restaurants in competitive markets where you're fighting for attention, paying $1 per cover for a brand-new customer can be a reasonable acquisition cost.

If you're a large operation doing thousands of covers per month, you may be able to negotiate custom pricing. The published rates aren't the final word for high-volume restaurants.

And if you need deep POS integrations with systems like Toast or Square, OpenTable's ecosystem is more mature than most alternatives, including ours.

When it's not

For an established independent restaurant where most bookings come from regulars, your website, Google, and walk-ins, the per-cover model doesn't align with how you operate. You're paying acquisition costs for guests you already have.

If your monthly cover count is under 1,000 and you don't depend on marketplace discovery, you're likely paying $4,000 to $13,000 a year for features you could get for a fraction of that.

I built bavoli around flat pricing because I think that's how business tools should work. The Free plan is $0 a month, Plus is $30 a month for restaurants that want every guest texted and card holds, and neither has per-cover fees at any volume. On online ordering, bavoli earns 50c when a guest orders pickup from your ordering page, $1 on a delivery order, and 0.5% on a dine-in QR order. You can run the numbers yourself on our savings calculator.

I'm not pretending bavoli does everything OpenTable does. We don't have a diner marketplace. We don't have deep POS integrations yet. Those are real gaps. But if the features you actually use (reservations, guest profiles, no-show protection, a waitlist) are available for $0 to $300 a year instead of $9,600, it's worth asking what that $9,600 is buying you.

Pull up your last OpenTable invoice. Add up the base fee, the per-cover charges, and any Boost spending. Compare that to bavoli's plans, which start at $0. The math is the pitch.