Reservations for independent restaurants
Own the book.
Pay $1,000 once. No cover fees. No monthly rent. Your guests, your data, your booking page, for as long as you run the restaurant.
No card to start. Bring your guest list from OpenTable, Resy or a spreadsheet.
No toll on your own regulars
Per-cover platforms charge you when your own guests book you through them, including bookings that started on Google. Here, a cover costs nothing.
Your guests stay yours
Every name, note, allergy and visit lives in your book. Export all of it any day, in one click. No network sells your diners to the place down the street.
Built to last, not to flip
Open source under the AGPL, and being formed as a cooperative owned by the restaurants that use it. If we ever stopped, your data and the software would still be yours to keep running. How the co-op works
How it works
- Set up in an afternoon. Tables, hours, turn times and pacing. Import your guest list and upcoming bookings from a CSV export.
- Put your link where diners already look. One line of code on your website, your Google Business Profile reservation link, your Instagram bio.
- Run service from any tablet. A live book and floor timeline on every device, a texting waitlist, reminders, and no-show protection on your own Stripe account.
Booking page and widget
Fast, mobile first, embeddable, with deep links for Google and Instagram.
Smart seating
Best-fit table assignment, combinations, pacing per slot, and automatic re-seating to fit one more party.
Host stand
List and timeline views, drag to re-seat, live sync across devices, walk-ins in two taps.
Waitlist
Quotes from your live floor, "table ready" texts, and a page where guests see their place in line.
Guest book
Profiles, tags, allergies, visit and no-show history, spend from your POS.
POS connections
Toast, Square and Clover, read-only: spend per guest, and tables free up when checks close.
Fewer no-shows
Reminders, self-service changes, and optional card holds. Fees go straight to you.
Reports
Covers, no-show rate, channels, returning guests. Plain numbers, no guessing.
What it costs you today
Published plan prices, checked October 2026. Check each vendor for current pricing. Side by side: OpenTable, Resy, Tock, Yelp.
| Platform | Monthly | Per cover | Year one* |
|---|---|---|---|
| OpenTable Core | $299 | $1.00 on network covers, which include Google bookings | $8,388 |
| OpenTable Basic | $149 | $1.50 network, plus $0.25 per website cover | $8,988 + website covers |
| Resy Platform | $289 | None | $3,468 |
| Yelp Guest Manager Basic | $159 (500-cover cap) | None | $1,908 |
| Freeheld | $0 | None | $1,000 once |
*Assumes 400 network-rate covers a month where per-cover fees apply. Texting is the one variable cost: carriers charge per message, so texts are passed through at cost, about 1.3¢ each today.
Your payback
The honest answers
Will I lose diners who find me on OpenTable or Resy?
Some, possibly. Here is the plain version: most diners find a restaurant on Google Maps, Instagram or its own website, and OpenTable bills Google-sourced bookings at its network rate. Freeheld puts your Reserve button on all three at no per-cover cost. If a large share of your covers truly come from people browsing a marketplace app, compare the bills before you leave, or run both for a month.
How can one payment cover "lifetime"?
Because the software is built to be cheap to run: one modest server handles thousands of restaurants, there is no sales team, and nobody is waiting for a toll on every cover. Each license works like a small endowment for your share of hosting and upkeep. Texting is the exception, because carriers charge per message, so it is passed through at cost.
What exactly does "lifetime" mean?
One license per location, for as long as you operate it. It transfers if you sell the restaurant. Your data is exportable at any time, and the code is open source, so your book keeps working even in the worst case. The full definition
Do you take a cut of deposits or no-show fees?
No. Card holds run on your own Stripe account and the money goes straight to you. We never touch it.
Does it work with my POS?
Toast, Square and Clover connect read-only. We read closed checks to show spend per guest and to free tables when a check closes. We never write to your POS. Without a POS connection everything else works the same.
Can I bring my history?
Yes. Export guests and future reservations from your current system as CSV and import them. We map the columns automatically and never message your guests during an import. The switching guide walks through a cutover step by step.
Stop renting your own guests back.
30 days free. Then $1,000, once, per location.
Start your free trial