Ask what a digital menu costs and you get a range from free to several thousand a month, which is useless. The range is wide because three different things are being sold under one name. Here is what each of them is, and what the number should look like for a normal restaurant in India.
The three things sold as "digital menu"
A QR code pointing at a PDF. Genuinely free, and worth what it costs. You get a document on a phone screen that has to be pinched and dragged, and changing a price means making a new file and often a new code.
A menu page you can edit. A real page, with photographs, categories and prices you change from your phone. This is what most people mean, and it is usually a monthly plan in the low hundreds of rupees.
A full ordering system. The menu, plus orders reaching your kitchen, plus bills, plus staff screens. More expensive, and only worth it if you will actually take orders from the table.
What the monthly number should look like
For a single restaurant in India, a menu you can edit sits somewhere around ₹250 to ₹500 a month. Ordering and kitchen screens push it towards ₹1,000. MenuDekho's own plans run from ₹299 to ₹999 per restaurant per month, which is roughly the shape of the market.
Anything much above that is usually a point-of-sale system with a menu attached, sold to chains. Anything free is usually the PDF.
The charge to actually watch for
Not the monthly fee — the commission. Some services take a percentage of every order placed through the menu, or a flat fee per order. On a ₹600 table that is small; across a month of service it is the largest number on the invoice, and it grows precisely as your restaurant does.
Ask the question directly before you sign anything: is there any charge per order? A flat monthly price with no commission is a cost you can plan around. A percentage is a partner you did not ask for.
What you already spend on printing
This is the comparison nobody does. Count what a set of menu cards costs you — design, printing, lamination — and how often you replace them. Most restaurants reprint two or three times a year: a price change, a seasonal dish, a card that got ruined.
A modest set of laminated cards for twenty tables, reprinted twice a year, is comfortably in the low thousands annually. That is the same order of magnitude as a digital menu, except the digital one changes for free and the printed one is wrong the day a supplier raises a price.
The honest conclusion is not that digital is dramatically cheaper. It is that the cost is about the same and one of the two is out of date by lunchtime.
The costs that are not on the price list
- Your time entering the menu. An hour or so, once. Services that let you paste an existing menu cut this to minutes.
- Photographs. Free if you take them on a phone in daylight, which is what most restaurants should do anyway.
- Printing the codes. A few rupees per table for lamination.
- Staff learning it. Half a service, if orders come to a screen. Nothing at all if the QR is menu-only.
What to do before paying anything
Take the free trial and run it through one busy evening. Not a quiet Tuesday — a Saturday, when the floor is full and somebody is waiting to order. A digital menu that works on a quiet night and falls apart in a rush has told you nothing.
At the end of it you will know the only thing that matters: whether your own customers used it without being taught.
Questions people ask
Is there a genuinely free digital menu?
Yes, if you mean a QR code pointing at a PDF you host somewhere. It costs nothing and behaves like a document rather than a menu. For an editable menu page with photographs, expect a monthly plan.
Are there setup or one-time fees?
There should not be. Ask, because some services charge for onboarding or for designing your menu. Entering a menu is not skilled work and most services will help you do it at no cost.
Does it cost more if more customers scan it?
It should not. Scans are just page views. Be wary of anything priced per scan or per order — that is a bill that grows with your success rather than with your usage of the software.
What does MenuDekho cost?
Plans run from ₹299 to ₹999 per restaurant per month, with a free 30-day trial and no card required to start. There is no charge per order and no commission on what you sell. The plans differ in what diners can do — analytics, the call-a-waiter button, 3D and AR dishes, and ordering from the table.
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MenuDekho builds digital and QR code menus for restaurants across Gujarat — Ahmedabad, Surat, Rajkot, Vadodara and everywhere else. Every plan starts with a free 30-day trial.