Cheap restaurant reservation software with no per-cover fees
bavoli's Free plan costs $0 a month, and Plus is $30 a month when you want to text more guests and take card holds. $0.00 per-cover fees, no contract, no card to sign up. Your reservation bill stays flat whether you seat 50 covers or 5,000.
bavoli charges $0.00 per cover on every plan, so your reservation bill stays flat whether you seat 50 covers or 5,000. The Free plan is $0 a month with unlimited reservations and texts for the first 25 parties. Plus is $30 a month with texts for up to 500 parties, card holds, and no-show fees, and Pro is $60 with texts for up to 1,500. There is no contract and no credit card to sign up. Online ordering, if you turn it on, costs 50c per pickup order, $1 per delivery order, and 0.5% on dine-in QR orders.
How it works
Sign up, free
$0 a month on the Free plan. No per-cover fees and no card.
Take reservations
Online booking page, floor plan, guest profiles, and no-show tracking from day one.
Grow without penalty
Your busiest month costs the same as your slowest. $0.00 per cover on every plan.
The hidden cost of per-cover pricing: a 500-cover example
Run the math on a real month. Say you seat 500 covers through your reservation system, which is a modest week-plus-weekend pace for a small independent dining room.
On OpenTable's network pricing (as of June 2026), roughly $1 per seated cover adds about $500 in per-cover fees on top of the $299/mo Core subscription. That's around $799 for the month, and it climbs every time you get busier. At 1,000 covers it's closer to $1,299. Toast Tables starts at $50/mo but layers POS processing on top at 2.49% plus $0.15 per transaction. Yelp Guest Manager starts at $159/mo and up.
On bavoli, 500 covers costs $0 on the Free plan. If you want every one of those parties texted and card holds on the big tables, Plus covers it for $30 a month, and 500 covers is about 170 parties of three, well inside the 500 parties Plus texts each month. The per-cover fee is $0.00 on every plan, so the busy months don't punish you. That gap, $30 at most versus several hundred dollars, is the whole argument for flat pricing.
- 500 covers on OpenTable Core: about $299 + ~$500 in per-cover fees = roughly $799/mo.
- 500 covers on bavoli: $0 on Free, $30 on Plus. $0.00 per cover.
- The more you grow, the wider the gap gets.
What the Free plan includes
Floor plan and table management
Draw your room, assign tables, and see availability at a glance. Included on the Free plan.
No-show tracking included
Every booking builds a guest profile. No-shows are marked automatically so you can spot patterns.
Guest profiles and history
Regulars and their preferences follow them across visits. Unlimited profiles on every plan.
Waitlist and analytics
A waitlist for walk-ins and analytics to see what is happening at the door. Both on the Free plan.
What "cheap" really means for reservation software
Low-cost reservation software comes in two shapes, and they're not the same thing. The first is a low flat fee. The second is a low headline price that hides a per-cover charge. The second one is the one that gets expensive.
A per-cover fee means you pay every time the software seats a guest. It scales with your success: the busier your dining room, the bigger your bill. A flat fee does the opposite. It stays put, the number you pick is the number you pay, whether you have a quiet Tuesday or a packed Saturday.
bavoli is flat by design: a fixed monthly price and $0.00 per cover, always. On the Free plan that price is $0 and there is no invoice.
No contract, no card to start, no surprises
Cheap software that locks you into an annual contract is a commitment you can't undo. bavoli has no contract on any plan. Paid plans run month to month or yearly, and you can move back to Free at the end of any billing period. Leave anytime and take your data with you.
You don't need a credit card to sign up or to stay on the Free plan. That is a standing policy. A card only enters the picture if you choose a paid plan, or connect Stripe to get paid for online orders.
The point of transparent pricing is that you can predict it. Every plan price is on the pricing page, and none of them moves with your cover count.
Frequently asked questions
Keep reading
More honest comparisons and pricing breakdowns for independent restaurants.
- What each bavoli plan costs, from $0
- Compare bavoli vs OpenTable per-cover fees
- How no-show protection works
- A waitlist with no cap on parties
- Free restaurant reservation software with no card
- bavoli vs Resy pricing breakdown
- The free restaurant waitlist app for walk-ins
- The best OpenTable alternatives in 2026, ranked with prices