How Much Does a Printed Menu Really Cost You Per Year?

Ask most restaurant owners what their menu costs and they'll quote the price of the last print run. That's only one piece of it. Add up everything a printed menu actually costs across a year, and the total is usually a lot higher than the invoice from the print shop.

The obvious cost: printing itself

A modest run of laminated menus - say 30-50 copies for a small restaurant - typically runs somewhere in the $80-250 range depending on design complexity, paper stock, and local pricing. That's before a single price changes.

The cost you don't see: every change triggers a reprint

A supplier raises a price, a dish gets dropped, a seasonal item comes in - each of these should trigger a menu update. In practice, many owners batch changes and put off reprinting because it's a hassle, which means the menu is quietly wrong (and often underpriced) for weeks or months at a time. If you reprint even four times a year, that's $320-1,000 in printing alone.

The cost of wasted copies

Every reprint makes the old copies obsolete instantly. Whatever's left in the drawer - and there's almost always something left in the drawer - is money spent on paper nobody will use.

What a digital menu costs instead

A GetMenuHub Basic plan is $7/month - $84/year. That's often less than a single one-off print run, and it covers every price change, every new dish, every seasonal swap for the whole year, updated instantly with no reprint at all.

The real comparison

It's not "$7/month vs. free." It's $7/month vs. hundreds of dollars a year in printing, plus the ongoing cost of a menu that's out of date every time you're too busy to reprint it.