How Much Does It Cost to Build a Restaurant Ordering System?

The headline range is wide because two ordering systems can share the same name and have nothing else in common. A few specific decisions account for most of the swing:

• Menu logic. A flat list of dishes is fast. The moment you add modifiers (extra cheese, no onions), combos, time-of-day availability, and allergen flags, you are building a small rules engine. That alone can move a build a few thousand euros.
• Order routing. One kitchen screen is straightforward. Splitting orders across stations (grill, bar, dessert), or syncing to thermal printers and a separate KDS, adds integration work that is hard to estimate until you have the exact hardware in front of you.
• Dine-in flow. QR-per-table, table assignment, and split billing each add real surface area. A pickup-only menu skips all of it.
• Payments. Card-present terminals, tips, and refunds are heavier than a single Stripe checkout link.

If you can describe your system in one sentence and it has no and, you are near the low end. Every and pushes you up the range.

Landing near €4,500 is mostly a matter of saying no early.

Low-end build: QR or web menu, one kitchen dashboard, Stripe payment, basic sales reporting, and a menu admin panel. That is the included scope on this page and it covers a single-location restaurant that wants to stop paying delivery-app commissions.

What pushes you toward €15,000: multi-station kitchen routing, printer/KDS hardware integration, split billing, complex modifier trees, and staff role permissions. None of these are exotic — they are just more screens, more states, and more edge cases to test.

The expensive mistake is scoping the high-end version when the low-end version would have paid for itself. Things explicitly out of scope here — delivery driver logistics, a loyalty programme, reservations, and multi-branch central management — are each their own project. Bundling them into v1 is the fastest way to turn a €5,000 build into a €15,000 one before a single order has been placed.

The build price is the part you negotiate. The recurring costs are the part that actually decides whether the system pays off:

• Payment fees. Stripe and most card processors take roughly 1.5–3% per transaction plus a small fixed fee. This is per order, forever — but it is far below the 20–30% that third-party delivery apps take, which is the whole reason a custom system pays for itself within months.
• Hosting and database. A custom ordering app needs a backend and a database. Plan for a modest monthly hosting bill that scales with order volume.
• App-store fees only apply if you ship a native mobile app. A QR/web ordering flow avoids the stores entirely — no review, no 15–30% platform cut, no annual developer fee.
• Maintenance. Menus change, prices change, OS and library updates land. Budget for ongoing maintenance rather than assuming the system is frozen at launch.

A cheap build with a forgotten 25% delivery-app dependency is more expensive than a slightly higher build that removes that fee for good.

For a restaurant ordering system, fixed-scope pricing fits best — the feature set is well understood and the included scope above can be specified up front. Fixed scope puts the estimation risk on the developer, not on you, and that is the right place for it. Hourly billing only makes sense for the genuinely open-ended parts: integrating an unusual printer, or building features that are still being figured out as you go.

The practical pattern is fixed-price for the core ordering system, with a clearly separated hourly or change-order budget for hardware integration you cannot fully spec in advance.

Timeline: expect 4 to 10 weeks depending on scope. A pickup/QR menu with one kitchen dashboard lands at the short end; multi-station routing, printer integration, and split billing push toward 10. Working with one developer rather than an agency removes the internal handoffs between designer, backend, and frontend that bloat typical agency timelines.

For reference, Pizzeria Bestek is a live ordering system built on React + Supabase with real-time order subscriptions, Stripe payments, and a kitchen dashboard — the same stack and scope described here.