Cover fee calculator: what a per-cover booking fee costs you
A fee of two pounds a cover does not feel like anything. It is the price of a coffee, on a bill of sixty. That is exactly why it is charged that way.
Put your own numbers into the calculator and it stops being two pounds.
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How to read the number
The percentage line is the honest one. A per-cover fee is not a software cost, it is a commission on revenue, and the only fair way to judge it is against the revenue it is taken from. Five or six per cent of the takings on a cover sounds survivable until you hold it against a restaurant's actual net margin, which in the UK independent sector is commonly in the low single digits. A fee of that size is not coming out of your takings. It is coming out of your profit, and it can be a meaningful share of it.
The yearly figure is the one to act on. Nobody cancels anything over £990 a month. People do notice £11,880 a year, because that is a sum with alternatives — a commis chef's wages for a season, a new oven, the deposit on a bigger lease.
The share through the platform is the number to go and check. Most people guess it high. Ask your provider for the report; it is usually smaller than it feels, and if it is small then the fee is small and this is not where your money is going.
What the fee is actually buying
Introductions. That is the deal, and it can be a good one.
A marketplace fee is worth paying when the covers it brings are genuinely incremental — people who would not otherwise have found you, ideally on a night you were not going to fill anyway. On those covers the fee is marketing spend with perfect attribution, which is rarer than it sounds and worth money.
It is worth much less when:
- the diner is a regular who happens to have the app on their phone. You are buying back a customer you already had.
- the booking is at 8pm on a Saturday, when you turn people away. You pay the fee and lose the table you would have filled for nothing.
- the diner searched for you by name, found the marketplace listing above your own website, and clicked the first booking button they saw. That is a fee charged on your own brand.
The last one is the one to fix first, and it does not require changing your booking system at all: put a booking link on your Google Business Profile so the first result for your own name books you directly. It costs nothing.
If the number bothers you
Two honest options, in order of effort.
Keep the marketplace, shrink its share. Make your own channels easier than theirs — booking link on your Google profile, a Book button above the fold on your own site, the link in your Instagram bio, a card on the table for next time. Every cover you move off the marketplace and onto your own page is the same cover without the fee. You do not have to leave to spend less.
Move to a flat fee. No commission at all, on any booking, from any channel. The published UK prices run from £0 to about £30 a month, and the trade is that none of the flat-fee systems bring you covers of their own. OpenTable alternatives for UK restaurants lays out who suits which, and what a booking system should cost has the whole grid.
Thezi is one of the flat-fee ones. It is £0 during early access and £20 a month planned, with no commission and no per-cover charge, ever — and no marketplace, which is exactly the trade described above. Start free, no card and no call.
Common questions
What is a cover fee?
A charge for each diner seated, rather than for each booking taken. A table of six on a £2-a-cover deal costs £12, not £2. Cover fees usually apply only to bookings that arrive through the platform's own app or website; bookings from your own site normally carry none.
Is a per-cover booking fee worth paying?
It is worth paying on covers you would not otherwise have had, and poor value on covers you would. The test is what share of those bookings are new faces, on quiet nights, rather than regulars at peak. Ask your provider for the split before deciding.
How much do UK restaurants pay in booking commission?
It depends entirely on how much of your business comes through a marketplace. The widely-reported UK rate has been around £2 a cover, with international rates quoted at roughly $1–3.50. A restaurant serving 1,500 covers a month with a third arriving through the marketplace is paying about £12,000 a year in fees alone, on top of any subscription.
What is the alternative to paying commission on bookings?
A flat monthly fee with no per-cover charge, which is what most UK-focused systems offer — you pay the same whether you serve fifty covers or five hundred. The trade is that a flat-fee system takes your bookings but does not go out and find diners for you; that job moves to your own website, your Google Business Profile and your regulars.
Written 2026-09-12, last checked 2026-09-12. Prices and terms change and most of these companies do not publish theirs — check before you sign. Something wrong here? hello@thezi.app reaches a person.