Own-Your-Guest Reservation Desk

The pain is real and documented in opened sources: per-cover fees consume the whole profit of an incremental table (a 2010 independent estimate of about $10.40 per 4-top against a roughly 5% net margin), platforms can create diner accounts without consent, and the free self-serve tiers are capped at 100 covers a month, which a busy single restaurant blows through in one service. Independent restaurant owners are the buyers, and the job is taking reservations and running the host stand without giving away per-cover fees or their guest list. The category clearly makes money (OpenTable sold for $2.6 billion, Resy serves 20,000+ venues) but the incumbents' real asset is the diner network, and flat-price tools like Tableo already start at about $58 a month, so this is a narrow low-end price gap, not an open field. The honest risks are that a standalone tool cannot deliver the bookings the network incumbents sell, that the free and near-free floor is brutal, and that whether a sub-$40 flat plan is profitable at small accounts is interpreted, not proven.