What the free plan actually includes — and when you outgrow it

A “free plan” is one of the easiest claims in software, and one of the hardest to trust. The useful version is specific: what you can do, what you cannot, and what happens the day you cross a line.

What you get without paying

The Starter plan is assigned the moment you create an account. No card, no sales call, no setup fee. It is meant for a single location that needs to sell, count stock and cost dishes — and that is exactly what it covers:

Receipts on the free plan carry the product’s mark. That is the trade: you run a working till without paying, and the software is named on the paper.

The three walls, in the order you will hit them

Limits are not a trick. They are the moment the plan stops being the right size:

1. Five staff accounts. A cashier, a cook, you, an accountant and one spare. A second till on a Saturday night is usually the first thing that does not fit.
2. One branch. The second location is a different product problem — shared catalogue, separate stock, consolidated books — and it is a paid one.
3. Five hundred orders in a month. For a quiet café that is a long way off. For a busy counter it can arrive in the third week. The till does not vanish; the next order is the prompt to upgrade.

Storage sits at 500 MB. That is photos of the menu, not a film archive. Compress them, or you will spend the limit on images nobody needed at that size.

What a paid plan is for

Upgrade when you need a connected restaurant, not when a trial ends.

Basic is the first step up: the kitchen screen, unlimited orders and no product mark on the receipt, still for one branch. Growth is the working system: waiter and driver apps, card payments on your ordering site, customers and promotions, HR and payroll, accounting, tax reports and the reports you actually act on — sales by hour, discounts and voids, branch comparison. Up to two branches, and Pro takes the same set to ten.

Every plan also includes the AI restaurant assistant. Paid plans receive 50 free AI credits each month; Starter receives 50 once. Extra credits can be added when you need more analysis or a heavier menu-import workflow, and purchased credits stay on the account without expiring.

Enterprise is for a chain that has outgrown branch caps: unlimited locations, apps built under your own name, a custom domain for the public ordering site, and API access so another system can talk to this one. Loyalty points, referrals and the spin wheel come with it too.

The prices themselves are not a paragraph in an article. They live on the pricing page, in the currency that applies to your account, and they can change. Read them there.

What does not get taken away

A limit is not a hostage. Crossing 500 orders does not delete last month. Switching plans does not rewrite the books. If you stop paying, the honest questions are the same as in any other product: how long can you still read the data, and can you export it. Ask those before you need them — they belong with data, backups and ownership.

A sensible way to start

• Day one: free plan, one till, the menu, tax and a printer. Take real orders.
• When the kitchen is shouting: add the kitchen screen, which means a paid plan.
• When a second person needs a login you do not have: same.
• When regulars should stop paying aggregator commission: switch on the ordering website — it is already on the free plan; card payments on it come with Growth.

The free plan is not a demo with the interesting buttons greyed out. It is a smaller restaurant. Grow out of it the way you grow out of a one-room kitchen — because the room is full, not because the clock ran out.