Connect your own Stripe account and accept card payments online for bookings and orders — right on your website, with no redirect. You keep 100%. DineKit never takes a cut; the only fee is Stripe’s own standard processing rate, paid straight to Stripe.
If you run a restaurant, you are almost certainly paying for card acceptance in more places than you can count. There is the card machine you rent by the month whether it is busy or dead. There is the per-transaction cut on every tap. There is the POS or PSP contract — Toast, Square, SumUp and the rest — that ships you their proprietary hardware and then locks you into their terminals, their app and their rates. And when you finally want to take a payment online as well, you discover the machine on the counter does nothing for your website, so you sign up for a second gateway and start paying twice for the same job.
The deeper problem is not the pennies — it is who owns the relationship. When a platform sits between you and your customer, it is their account the money lands in first. They decide the payout schedule. They can hold funds while a dispute is worked out. In some cases they own the customer data outright, so the diner who paid at your table is, on paper, their customer and not yours. You did the cooking, the service and the marketing, and someone else banks the trust.
None of that is a law of nature. It is a business model — one built on renting you hardware and inserting a middleman into a transaction that could just as easily run through your own merchant account. DineKit takes the middleman out.
DineKit is a free, open-source WordPress plugin. When you want to accept cards, you connect your own Stripe account — the merchant account is yours, in your restaurant’s name, settling to your bank on Stripe’s normal schedule. DineKit is not a payment processor and does not sit in the flow of funds. It never charges you a platform fee, a monthly licence or a per-transaction slice. The only money that leaves the transaction is Stripe’s own standard processing fee, and that goes to Stripe, not to us.
Because it is your Stripe account, the customer relationship is yours too. The charge appears under your name on the diner’s statement. The payout lands in your bank. The data lives in your dashboard. There is no platform between you and the person who just ate at your restaurant — DineKit simply wires your website to the card rails you already control.
Payments happen right on your site through Stripe’s native Payment Element. There is no redirect to a third-party checkout and no jarring hand-off that makes diners hesitate. They enter their card on your page, on your domain, and stay there start to finish. The same on-site payment powers both booking deposits and online order payments, so you configure it once and it works everywhere money changes hands.
Built on Stripe’s own Payment Element, wired into DineKit’s bookings and ordering, and verified end-to-end on a real server with live test transactions.
DineKit takes no cut, ever. You pay Stripe’s standard rate directly to Stripe, and nothing to us. No monthly platform fee, no licence, no per-order slice.
Connect your own Stripe account with your own keys. The money settles to your bank, the charge shows your name, and the customer relationship stays yours.
Stripe’s native Payment Element mounts directly on your page. Diners enter their card and complete the payment without ever leaving your domain.
The Payment Element surfaces Apple Pay and Google Pay for one-tap checkout. DineKit auto-registers your domain with Stripe so wallets light up without manual setup.
One payment flow covers both taking a deposit against a reservation and charging for a takeaway or online order. Set it up once; it works across the whole platform.
Hold-and-accept orders authorise the card up front and only capture when you accept. Reject an order and the hold is released — no charge, no refund needed.
Your Stripe secret key is encrypted at rest with AES-256 and is never exposed to the browser. Card data never touches your WordPress site, keeping you at PCI SAQ A.
DineKit registers the Stripe webhook in your account automatically and captures the signing secret. Payments are confirmed server-side, idempotently, so a dropped connection never loses an order.
How connecting your own Stripe account through DineKit compares with renting a card machine or signing into a POS platform like Toast, Square or SumUp.
| What you need | DineKit + your Stripe | Typical POS / card machine |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly fee to accept cards | £0 to DineKit — the plugin is free | Machine rental and/or POS subscription every month |
| Proprietary hardware | None required online; a Stripe smart reader if you want card-present | Locked to the vendor’s terminals and dongles |
| Who takes a cut of the sale | Only Stripe’s standard fee, paid to Stripe. DineKit takes nothing | Platform margin on top of the processing cost |
| Apple Pay and Google Pay | Built in, domain auto-registered | Depends on the plan; often an add-on or unsupported online |
| Who owns the funds and the customer | You — your Stripe account, your bank, your data | The platform’s account first; they can hold funds and own the data |
| Online and in-person on one system | One flow for website orders, deposits and POS card-present | Often a separate online gateway — you pay twice |
| Contract and lock-in | None — open-source plugin, switch or leave any time | Fixed-term contracts and hardware you can’t repurpose |
Not every order should be charged the instant a customer taps pay. A kitchen that is slammed, out of a key ingredient, or closing soon needs the option to accept an order before the money moves. DineKit handles this with Stripe’s authorise-then-capture model, so you are never left refunding a charge you should not have taken in the first place.
When an order comes in on hold-and-accept, DineKit authorises the card up front — the funds are reserved but not taken. If you accept the order, the payment is captured at that moment and the sale is complete. If you reject it, the authorisation is simply released and the customer is never charged, so there is no refund to process and no negative balance to explain. If an order is cancelled after it has already been captured, DineKit issues a refund through Stripe and flags it if that refund ever needs a manual nudge. The same discipline applies to booking deposits: a deposit that confirms a reservation is captured cleanly, and a cancellation triggers the refund and notifies the guest.
Because fulfilment is driven by Stripe webhooks rather than the diner’s browser, a customer who closes the tab the second after paying still gets a confirmed order. The payment is verified on your server, the signature is checked against your endpoint secret, and the same event is never processed twice. It is the boring, robust plumbing that keeps money paths honest.
Most restaurants end up running two payment worlds that never talk to each other: a card machine on the counter for people standing in front of you, and a separate online gateway bolted onto the website for everyone else. Two contracts, two sets of fees, two dashboards to reconcile at the end of the night.
DineKit collapses that into one. The same Stripe account that takes an online order deposit or a takeaway payment on your website also drives card-present payments in person through a Stripe smart reader connected to the DineKit POS. A tap at the table and a payment on the website land in the same place, under the same account, on the same statement to the diner. You reconcile once, you pay one processor, and you stop paying twice for the privilege of accepting a card.
Everything is optional and everything degrades gracefully. Leave Stripe switched off and DineKit still runs your menus, bookings and orders — customers simply pay on collection. Switch it on when you are ready, connect your keys, and card payments light up across the whole platform without you rebuilding anything.
Card payments plug straight into the rest of DineKit: take deposits on your table booking widget, charge for online orders and takeaway, and run card-present payments in person through the free restaurant POS — all on your own Stripe account, all keeping 100%.
DineKit is free, self-contained and live in minutes. Own your menus, your bookings and your data.
Get DineKit — FreeWe use essential cookies to run this site and, with your consent, Google Analytics to see how it's used. See our Cookie Policy.