FoxeraThe quiet bleed
What your systems actually cost.
Ask most operators what their software costs and you get a shrug, or the number they remember from whenever they last looked. So we added it up properly, from the suppliers’ own pricing pages, on 2 September 2026.
Six categories a single-site independent typically runs: till, bookings, rota, stock, payroll, accounting. We took one commonly used supplier in each, at the entry tier a small independent would actually be on, and read the price off the supplier’s own page rather than a comparison site.
The six lines
| What it does | Supplier and tier | Published price |
|---|---|---|
| Till / EPOS | Square for Restaurants Plus, per location | £69.00 / month |
| Bookings | OpenTable, restaurant solutions | no price published |
| Rota | RotaCloud Standard, 1–5 employees | £10.00 / month |
| Stock | MarketMan Starter | $249.00 / month |
| Payroll | BrightPay, up to 10 employees, annual licence | £119.00 / year |
| Payroll, cloud | BrightPay Connect, 5 employees | £2.94 / month |
| Accounting | Xero Ignite | £18.00 / month |
| The sterling lines, per month | £109.86 | |
Three things worth more than the total
One line is billed in dollars. MarketMan quotes $249 a month. We have deliberately not converted it, because the rate moves and any figure printed here would be wrong by the time you read it. Your card is charged in dollars and the sterling amount changes every month.
One line has no price at all. OpenTable does not publish one — you book a call. So an honest total for this basket cannot be written down, and that is not a gap in our research. It is what an operator faces.
The prices move under you. Xero’s entry plan went from £16 to £18 a month on 1 September 2026 — the day before we ran these numbers. Nobody rings to tell you.
And this is the cheap part
£109.86, plus a dollar bill, plus an unknown, is the subscription cost. It is not the real cost. The real cost is the person who takes a number out of the till system and types it into the accounting system, every week, forever, because none of these six talk to each other. That labour never appears on an invoice, so it never gets counted — and it is usually larger than all six subscriptions put together.
That is what the audit counts.
How to read this
These are not the only suppliers and they are not recommendations. They are representative of what a single-site independent is realistically running, priced at the entry tier. Your stack will differ. The shape — more than one currency, at least one price you cannot see, and nobody adding it up — almost never does.
Prices read from the suppliers’ own pages on 2 September 2026: Square · OpenTable · RotaCloud · MarketMan · BrightPay · BrightPay Connect · Xero. Prices exclude VAT where the supplier states it. Check them yourself before acting — that is rather the point.