Take reservations on your own website, keep 100% of your covers and own every diner’s details. DineKit gives your restaurant a proper booking system — visual floor plan, live availability, deposits, waitlist and a booking diary — free, with nothing to pay per cover or per month.
OpenTable, ResDiary and the rest start at around £100–£150 a month, then charge you again for every cover that walks through your own door. You end up paying to fill your own tables.
Worse, most booking platforms are a marketplace first. Your diners land on the platform’s app, see your competitors alongside you, and the relationship — and the data — belongs to the platform, not to you. When you want to email your regulars a quiet-Tuesday offer, you can’t: that guest list isn’t yours.
The fallback most independents reach for is the phone and a paper diary. That means missed calls during service, double-bookings, no-shows you had no way to screen, and no record of who your regulars are or what they’re allergic to.
None of that is a technology problem. It’s a business-model problem: the big platforms make their money from your customers, so they were never built to hand those customers back to you.
DineKit turns your WordPress website into a complete reservation system. Diners book directly on your own site; the reservation lands in your diary; any deposit goes straight to your own Stripe account; and every guest detail stays in your database. No per-cover fee, no monthly fee, and no marketplace sitting between you and your customer. It’s a free, commission-free restaurant booking plugin that treats your covers — and your data — as yours.
A real availability engine and a proper floor plan, not a glorified contact form.
Lay out your rooms and tables by drag-and-drop, set covers per table, and join tables into combos for big parties. DineKit understands your real capacity.
Not a guess: turn times, buffers between sittings, party-size fit and a covers-per-hour cap, so you never seat more than the kitchen can actually cook.
Drop a branded booking form on any page with a block or shortcode. A honeypot and per-IP rate-limiting keep spam out; strict server-side checks keep double-bookings out.
Take a card deposit on bookings through your own Stripe — Apple Pay and Google Pay included — so quiet nights and no-shows stop costing you money.
Instead of turning diners away, DineKit pencils them in and waitlists them, so the moment a table cancels it becomes a covered table again.
See the whole day at a glance with a clear status lifecycle — pending, confirmed, seated, no-show — plus a full-service timeline view for the floor.
Diners get a confirmation, you and your staff get notified, and printable reservation slips are ready for the pass.
Repeat diners are recognised and their allergies carried across every visit, so a regular is treated like one — automatically.
Where a free, self-hosted booking system genuinely wins.
| What you need | DineKit | Typical booking SaaS |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly software fee | £0 — free forever | ~£100–£150+/mo |
| Fee per seated cover | None — keep 100% | Charged per cover |
| Who owns the diner data | You do, on your own site | The platform |
| Deposits / no-show protection | Yes — your own Stripe | Often a higher tier |
| Shows competitors to your diners | Never | Usually — it’s a marketplace |
| Runs on your own website | Yes | No — their app / widget |
| Contract / lock-in | None | Often annual |
A two-top that doesn’t show on a Friday isn’t just an empty table — it’s a table you turned other diners away for. DineKit lets you require a card deposit on bookings over a party size you choose, take it through your own Stripe account, and keep the funds with no platform taking a clip. For large parties and events you can ask for a set-menu pre-order at the same time, so the kitchen buys and preps for exactly who is coming.
Twelve tables all booked for 8pm looks wonderful until the pass falls over. DineKit’s availability engine spreads reservations using turn times and a covers-per-hour cap that you set, giving the kitchen a workable flow instead of a wall of tickets. Your staff can override on the floor when they know they can handle it; the public widget simply waitlists instead of overbooking.
Add the booking form with the DineKit Booking block or the [dinekit_booking] shortcode. It’s completely self-contained — no page builder, no WooCommerce, no jQuery — and inherits your brand with an accent colour, corner radius and light or dark style. Set your floor plan, turn times and opening hours once, and you’re taking reservations.
DineKit does far more than bookings: take commission-free online orders, run the whole service on a free POS, stay allergen-compliant, and keep regulars coming back with the built-in guest CRM — all in one free plugin.
DineKit is free, self-contained and live in minutes. Own your menus, your bookings and your data.
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