WebEatery vs. ChowNow

ChowNow is one of the oldest commission-free ordering platforms, and it does the fundamentals well—direct orders, branded apps, no cut of your sales. If you're comparing it to WebEatery, the decision comes down to three things: the total you pay to get started, whether your marketing is metered, and how much the storefront looks like yours instead of theirs.

What ChowNow Costs

ChowNow runs $229–$449/month across its Launch, Grow, and Elevate tiers ($229–$409 billed annually), plus a $119–$499 setup fee and 2.95% + $0.29 processing on every transaction. Direct orders are commission-free with no diner fee, branded apps are included with the restaurant paying Apple's $99/year developer fee, and ChowNow publishes integrations with more than 20 point-of-sale systems. Each tier caps how many customer contacts you can hold—500, 2,000, or 5,000—so the marketing you can do is priced by the size of your list.

What WebEatery Costs

$165/month for the first location

No setup fee, no tier to move up when your list grows, and no separate charge for the app.

Your Customer List Shouldn't Have a Price Per Head

ChowNow's tiers are built around how many customer contacts you can hold: 500 on Launch, 2,000 on Grow, 5,000 on Elevate. That's a reasonable way to build a price list, and it has a consequence worth seeing clearly—the better your marketing works, the more it costs you. Sign up your 501st regular and you've outgrown the entry plan.

WebEatery doesn't meter your contacts. Your customer list is yours, it can grow as large as you can make it, and the rate doesn't move.

The restaurant owns its customer data. WebEatery processes that data on the restaurant's behalf to provide and improve the service, and never sells it or uses it to market to the restaurant's customers.

The App and the Apple Account

ChowNow includes branded apps and builds and maintains them for you, which is genuinely useful. It also asks you to hold your own Apple Developer account and pay Apple's $99 a year directly.

WebEatery publishes your apps on our account by default, so there's nothing for you to register, renew, or remember. If you'd rather own the listings outright, you can hold your own accounts instead:

Each restaurant's branded mobile apps are published by WebEatery on the restaurant's behalf—the brand, the content, and the customer data are the restaurant's. Restaurants can optionally hold their own Apple and Google developer accounts.

How Much it Looks Like Yours

ChowNow brands your storefront and apps with your logo, your colors, and your menu photos. Underneath that, the ordering experience is ChowNow's—reviewers describe the apps as recognizably consistent from restaurant to restaurant, which is what you'd expect from a platform running one experience across thousands of them.

Customization across your storefront and apps. Your brand colors, your choice of theme and icon style, and options for how the app itself looks and behaves—not just a logo on a stock template.

Whether that matters depends entirely on whether your brand is a reason people choose you. For a lot of restaurants it isn't, and ChowNow's consistency is a feature. If yours is, it's the whole argument.

Where ChowNow is the Better Choice

ChowNow integrates with more than 20 point-of-sale systems. We integrate with two. If you run Lightspeed, Revel, Aloha, or anything else and native POS integration is non-negotiable for you, that's a real gap and we won't talk you out of it—everything outside Clover and Square runs on our order tablet instead.

Their opt-in marketplace also puts you in front of diners who don't know you yet. WebEatery is a direct channel only; we don't have a discovery surface to offer you.

The Short Version