A Free Restaurant Booking System, and What Free Covers

"Free" is the most overused word in restaurant software. A lot of free booking systems are really a trial with no end date written on it, or a price that only appears once you are busy enough to depend on them.

A genuinely free plan is still worth having — especially for a small restaurant, a café that takes the odd booking, or a new venue that does not yet know how many bookings it will get. The trick is knowing what free should cover, and where the catches usually are.

What a free plan should include

At minimum, a free booking system worth using should let you:

• Take bookings online, from a link and from your own website
• Enter phone and walk-in bookings in the same diary
• Send reminders, because most no-shows are simply people forgetting
• Set your booking hours and party sizes, so it only offers tables you can seat
• Keep your guest information, and take it with you if you leave

If a free plan cannot do those five things, it is a demo, not a plan.

Where the catches usually hide

Before relying on any free system, check for these:

1. Per-cover or per-booking fees. "Free software" that charges for every diner is not free; it simply moves the price to your busiest nights.
2. A cap so low it is really a trial. A limit you will pass in your second week is a sales funnel.
3. Essential features held back. Reminders or manual bookings locked behind a paid plan make the free tier hard to run a restaurant on.
4. Your data held hostage. If you cannot export your bookings and guests, leaving becomes expensive.
5. Diners forced to sign up. A booking that requires an account loses you diners at the last step.

Mosey's free plan

Mosey's reservations are free up to 75 bookings a month, with no per-cover charge and no card required. The free plan includes:

• Online bookings from your link, your website widget and the Mosey app
• Manual bookings for phone calls and walk-ins
• A reminder 24 hours before every booking
• QR check-in and booking-source tracking
• The walk-in queue, which also works without reservations at all

Diners booking through your link or website widget do not need an account.

Who a free plan is right for

A free plan is not a compromise for every venue. It is genuinely the right answer for:

• A café that takes the odd booking for groups or weekend brunch
• A new restaurant that does not yet know its booking volume
• A seasonal venue busy for a few months and quiet for the rest
• A place that mostly runs on walk-ins, which may want the free queue more than bookings at all

For these, paying a monthly fee for capacity you do not use is money that would be better spent on the room.

When it is worth paying for more

The free plan is enough for many small venues. It is worth moving up when one of these becomes true:

• You regularly pass 75 bookings a month. Starter, at €79.99 a month, covers up to 200.
• No-shows are costing you. Deposits start on Starter, and Mosey takes 0% of them.
• You are fully booked and turning people away. Starter's waitlist gives a cancelled table to somebody who wanted it.
• You run a busy room with a floor plan. Host, at €169.99 a month, adds unlimited bookings, the floor plan and auto-assign, card holds and the trust score.

Every paid plan starts with a 14-day free trial, annual plans are eleven months for twelve, and moving back down never deletes what you set up.

Bookings and walk-ins together

A free booking plan pairs well with the free walk-in queue. Hold some tables back for walk-ins, take bookings for the rest, and let people who arrive without a booking join the queue from their phone rather than crowding the door. Neither costs anything, and together they cover both halves of a small restaurant's evening.

It is also worth deciding early what you will do on your busiest night of the week. If bookings for that night fill days in advance, that is the first sign the free plan is doing its job, and the moment to think about a waitlist, so the people you turn away can still get in when somebody cancels.

Setting it up in an afternoon

1. Turn on Reservations from your dashboard.
2. Set your booking hours — the last time you would really seat a table, not your closing time.
3. Set party sizes and turn times, by party size.
4. Set a covers-per-slot cap, so the kitchen is not hit by ten tables at once.
5. Put the booking link in your Instagram bio and Google listing, and the widget on your website.
6. Make a test booking and walk it through to seated.

What it connects to

• How to set up online reservations
• An alternative to OpenTable for Irish restaurants
• How to set up a walk-in queue
• How to reduce no-shows
• What Mosey costs — every rate on one page