Short answer: anywhere from about $20 a month to $15,000 up front, and the price tells you almost nothing about whether the site will bring in a single order. So here is the honest breakdown, tier by tier, the way we would say it across a table.
The three prices you will hear
- Do it yourself on a builder. Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy. Roughly $16 to $50 a month, plus your evenings. Fine if you enjoy it and your menu never changes. Most owners stop updating it within three months, and a stale menu costs more than the subscription.
- A freelancer. Usually $1,500 to $5,000 for a one-time build in the Dallas market. You get a site. You also get a person who moves on, so the first time the hours change or a photo needs swapping, you are back to searching for help.
- An agency. $5,000 to $15,000 and up, often with a monthly maintenance line on top. You are paying for a project manager, a designer, and a developer to attend meetings about your menu page.
None of those numbers are wrong. They are just answering the wrong question.
The cost nobody puts on the quote
If your orders come through a third-party app, that app is charging you a commission on every ticket. The widely published rates for the big delivery platforms run from about 15% to 30% per order. On a restaurant doing $30,000 a month through those apps, that is $4,500 to $9,000 a month leaving the building. Every month. The website was never your biggest technology expense. The commission was.
A restaurant site earns its keep when it moves even part of that volume to a channel you own: a phone call, a WhatsApp message, a catering inquiry form that lands in your pocket. That is the number to build around.
Open your own site on your phone right now. Can a hungry stranger find the menu, tonight's hours, and a way to order in under ten seconds? If not, the price you paid for it does not matter. It is not working.
What a restaurant page actually needs
- The menu as text, not a PDF. Google reads text. It does not read a scanned photo of a laminated card.
- Hours that match Google, including holiday hours.
- One obvious way to order or ask: a WhatsApp button, a phone number that dials, or both.
- A catering or private-event inquiry path, because those are your biggest tickets and they never come through a delivery app.
- Photos of your actual food, in your actual room. Stock photos of someone else's plate cost you trust.
- A page title and description written for the searches people in your part of Dallas actually type.
That is a short list. It does not need a $15,000 build. It needs someone who will keep it true week after week.
What we charge
One flat number: $1,000 a month, everything included, no setup fee, month to month. That covers the restaurant site, the menu updates, the Google Business Profile, the WhatsApp ordering path, and whatever else we run for you. If you would rather not pay a flat fee, the other option is 5% of the sales that run through the systems we set up, so we only earn when you do.
Before any of that, we do a free check of your current site and Google listing and tell you what is broken. Sometimes the answer is that you do not need a new website at all. We would rather tell you that and keep you for five years.
Do not shop for a website price. Work out what one order is worth to you, then ask what it would take to move ten more of them a week onto a channel you own. Buy that.