The free alternative to the paid restaurant systems

POS, bookings, ordering, kitchen display and QR pay each solve one piece — and each sends you an invoice, a per-cover charge or a commission cut. DineKit is the own-everything, zero-commission restaurant OS for independents: the whole front- and back-of-house in one free, self-hosted WordPress plugin, on your own site, used by restaurants worldwide. Here is how it compares.

The others bill you four ways: a monthly SaaS subscription, per-cover reservation fees, per-order payment commission, and delivery-marketplace commission. DineKit removes all four. Payments run through your own Stripe account at raw processing rates — DineKit takes nothing per transaction and nothing per cover.

The platform is complete and restaurant-tested: menus with region-aware allergens (the UK-14 / Natasha’s Law list ships built-in as one example — set your own currency and allergen rules for your region), commission-free online ordering, a full booking engine with floor plan and diary, a real POS with tabs, coursing, splits and refunds, QR order-and-pay at the table, a Kitchen Display System, an installable staff app (PWA) with multi-tablet live sync, and built-in support right inside the dashboard.

Honest by design: it’s an own-channel system, so there’s no third-party marketplace demand, no live GPS delivery tracking, payments are Stripe-only, and card capture is GBP today. Everything lives in your own WordPress as standard posts and meta — no custom tables, no lock-in, nothing a vendor can freeze.