What online bookings actually cost
The monthly subscription is not the number that matters. The per-cover fee is, because it grows when the room is full. What follows is the monthly total rather than the list price: set the slider to the number of covers you actually book.
How many covers a month arrive from a booking rather than off the street. A 45-seat restaurant working six dinners and four lunches does roughly 300. Put your own number in and the totals recalculate.
FlashWeb
Market: ItaliaThe complete website plus the Bookings plugin. We run no marketplace, so there are no “network” covers for a commission to sit on: you pay nothing per cover, on any channel.
Included: the site on your own domain with hosting, your menu entered for you, the WhatsApp button, the contact form, a compliant privacy page, unlimited edits and support. With Bookings, guests book from your own site and the requests land in your inbox.
- €6,768 less per year than OpenTable Core
- €7,320 less per year than TheFork
- €8,568 less per year than OpenTable Pro
OpenTable Core
Market: ItaliaThe cheapest plan OpenTable sells in Italy. The per-cover fee applies to diners arriving through the OpenTable marketplace; bookings from your own site are free.
published list price
OpenTable Pro
Market: ItaliaSame per-cover fee as Core. The extra two hundred euro a month buys automated email campaigns and guest data, not booking capability.
published list price
TheFork
Market: Italia€300 one-off activation
TheFork publishes no prices: the fee and the commission are negotiated per restaurant. The range below is what operators report paying, lower at lunch and higher at dinner. The fee is charged on every visit, including a regular who would have come anyway.
price not published, reported by operators
Who is not in the table, and why
Several Italian competitors advertise “zero commission” without stating a price anywhere on their site. We leave them out: inventing a figure for them would be the same offence we criticise in others. If you are considering one, ask for the price in writing and redo the arithmetic with your own cover count.
What we are not claiming
We are not claiming to be the only ones who take no commission on bookings from your own site. That would be false: the marketplaces give that away too. The real difference is elsewhere. With them you buy booking software and buy the website from somebody else. Here it is one thing, on one bill, and the number does not move in August when the room is full.
Where these numbers come from
- OpenTable Core www.opentable.it (read on 2026-08-29) published list price
- OpenTable Pro www.opentable.it (read on 2026-08-29) published list price
- TheFork www.menumal.it (read on 2026-08-29) price not published, reported by operators
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