How much does restaurant marketing cost? Real prices for 2026

Restaurant marketing costs anywhere from $0 to several thousand dollars a month. Done yourself with free Google tools and a website builder, an independent restaurant can spend $0 to about $500 a month plus its own hours; the agency retainers we found published run from about $1,500 to $4,000 a month, before a cent of ad spend. Where you land depends less on the price list than on how much of the work you want to hand over.

Below is every line an owner usually pays for, with the price each seller publishes, read on 10 November 2026. Where we stand: Gigabit sells restaurant marketing too, so we are not neutral. Our prices are in their own section, and every other figure links to the page it came from.

Treat the agency figures as asking prices, not market data. The Ahrefs numbers come from a 2024 survey of 439 SEO providers, not restaurant agencies, apparently worldwide, and its averages assume every provider charges the top of its price band, so they read high. Most restaurant agencies don't publish prices at all; they quote after a call. The ones above are the restaurant-focused sellers whose pages we could open and read.

Whoever does the work, the money goes to the same handful of things. Here they are in the order most guests meet them.

Website and online ordering

A website builder is the cheapest route: Squarespace lists $12 to $25 a month paid yearly, or $19 to $36 paid monthly (Squarespace). Restaurant platforms cost more because they bundle ordering and marketing. Owner charges $249 a month plus a 5% fee on each order, or $499 a month flat, and guests pay a 5% fee on both plans (Owner). PricingSaaS's record of Popmenu's page, captured 9 November 2026, shows $179, $299 and $499 a month, or $159, $269 and $449 billed yearly (PricingSaaS); that is a third party's copy, because Popmenu's own page refused us.

Watch the per-order fees as closely as the monthly price. A 5% fee on every order grows with your sales. Which builder suits which restaurant, with eight compared side by side, is in our guide to the best restaurant website builders.

Google Business Profile and local SEO

The profile itself costs nothing: Google says "creating a Business Profile and listing your business on Google is free of cost" (Google). The cost is time: hours, menu, photos, posts and replies, every week. Paid local SEO is where prices spread out. In the Ahrefs survey, local SEO averaged $1,557 a month, with agencies at $1,819 and freelancers at about $1,150, while the most common SEO retainer of any kind was $501–$1,000 (Ahrefs). For what the work involves, see our restaurant SEO guide.

Paid search and social ads

Ads have two prices, and they should never be blurred together on an invoice:

Google sets budgets by the day. It estimates a month as your daily budget times 30.4, and on a busy day it can spend up to twice the daily amount, but not more (Google Ads Help). So $15 a day is about $456 a month. Restaurant clicks are cheap next to the all-industry average. LocaliQ's 2026 benchmarks, averaged from its customers' campaigns, put Restaurants & Food at $2.05 a click against $5.42 for all industries, and $30.57 per lead against $66.69 (LocaliQ). A "lead" there is whatever the advertiser counted, such as a call or a form, not a seated guest.

Most independents should fix their Google profile, website and ordering before paying for ads, because ads send people into whatever leaks you already have.

Reviews

Asking for reviews costs nothing but a habit and a one-tap link; our Google reviews guide has the scripts and Google's rules. Paying someone to answer them is cheap by comparison with ads. Spillover's $250 package includes review management and an AI agent that handles review responses, with publishing controls (Spillover), and some agencies fold replies into their lowest tier.

Email and text

If your point of sale already does it, start there. Square Plus is $49 a month per location and Premium $149 (Square). Plus includes unlimited email campaigns and 500 texts a month, then 3¢ a text; Premium includes 2,500, then 1.5¢ (Square). Owner includes email and text campaigns in both its plans (Owner). What to send, and the consent rules for texts, are in our email and text marketing guide.

Restaurant marketing software

Before you add a platform, check what your POS already includes. Many restaurants pay for the same email tool or ordering page twice.

Delivery apps

Delivery marketplaces are the most expensive marketing most restaurants buy, because the cost is a share of every order rather than a fee. DoorDash's US plans charge 15%, 25% or 30% on delivery and 6% on pickup, and its own Online Ordering for your website has no commission, only a card processing fee (DoorDash). What each plan includes and when a higher one pays is in DoorDash fees for restaurants, and the delivery commission calculator shows what moving regulars to direct ordering is worth on your own numbers.

Reservations and the phone

Reservation platforms charge their own fees. OpenTable's plan pages would not load for us on 10 November, so we quote no price. Whatever you use, ask three things: is there a fee per guest booked, does a booking made on your own website cost the same as one made in the platform's app, and is there a yearly contract? A phone nobody answers at the dinner rush is a cost too, and it never appears on an invoice.

There is no reliable benchmark. Lightspeed notes that some professionals suggest "as little as three percent of revenue, others as much as 30%" (Lightspeed), without data on what restaurants actually spend. Set that beside what restaurants keep: the National Restaurant Association's median income before taxes for 2024 was 2.8% of sales for full-service restaurants and 4.0% for limited-service (NRA).

So even the low end of that advice is about a typical full-service restaurant's whole profit. At an example $80,000 a month in sales, 3% is $2,400 a month. Spend like that has to bring in more than it costs, and quickly. That's why we budget from the jobs instead of a percentage: price each line you need, then ask how many extra orders it must bring to pay for itself. Our restaurant marketing plan guide works through that method with a free template.

Here is how the lines might add up for one example restaurant: one location, owner-run, doing most of the work itself and paying a freelancer for ads and posts. The two software prices are published; everything else is an example to replace with your own.

That example comes to 1.4% of sales. The total matters less than the last line: $24 for each new guest. Whether that is good depends on what a new guest is worth to you, which is the next figure.

In that example, a new guest who comes back a few times covers their marketing cost more than three times over, before labor and rent. If your guests rarely return, the same spend may not pay. Run your own margins through the profit margin calculator before you set a budget.

Our restaurant plans are flat monthly fees for one US location, month to month, with no fee or commission on your orders. See them in full on our restaurant pricing page.

The first 300 businesses keep $100 a month for as long as they stay. The published price after that is $149 a month or $1,490 a year. Restaurants Starter runs your Google Business Profile, answers every review and keeps your listings correct. Restaurants Scale adds a website with your menu as real text, local SEO and your own ordering and booking links first. Restaurants Full Service adds email and text campaigns to your own list, visibility in AI answers and a monthly campaign plan.

What the Growth Package leaves out includes ad spend and ads management, and none of the three plans above it lists paid ads either. If ads are what you need, the ad spend and management lines earlier on this page are the ones to price. Delivery apps, payment processors and text providers charge their own fees whoever runs your marketing.

Clicks, likes and impressions show activity, not results. The number that matters is cost per new guest, by channel: what you paid for that channel this month, divided by the first-time orders, bookings or catering jobs it brought in. Then compare it with what a guest is worth to you over a year, not on one visit.

1. Count new guests where they arrive. First direct orders from your ordering system, bookings from your reservation tool, catering inquiries from your inbox.
2. Ask where they heard of you on booking and catering forms. One question, three or four choices.
3. Track calls and direction requests in your Google profile's performance page, month on month.
4. Split ad spend from fees in your books, so you can see the cost of the clicks and the cost of the people separately.
5. Review monthly, judge at 90 days. If a channel's cost per new guest isn't falling after three months of real effort, change the tactic, not just the budget.

If you'd like a second pair of eyes first, the free restaurant marketing audit checks your Google profile, reviews, website and ordering against the restaurants near you. You can take the result to anyone, us included.