✦Pricing
One plan. $39/month. Cancel from your settings.
DishCost costs $39/month and focuses on recipe costing for one kitchen. MarketMan, MarginEdge, and xtraCHEF include recipe costing inside broader back-office products. Choose DishCost when you do not need inventory counts, POS sales sync, or invoice OCR.
No credit card to start. Free tier has no time limit. Upgrade to Pro when you're ready.
For operators who want every dish accounted for.
- Unlimited recipes
- Menu engineering matrix
- Cost change alerts
- PDF & CSV export
- Menu cost dashboard
- Priority support
Less than the cost of one mispriced dish per month.
No setup fee. No annual contract. Cancel anytime in 30 seconds.
✦What's included
Everything in Pro for $39.
No upsells, no add-on modules, no per-seat fees. The whole product, one price.
- Unlimited recipes and ingredients
- Food cost % on every dish, updated as you edit
- Suggested menu pricing from a target food cost %
- Per-ingredient price history
- Cost-change alerts when ingredients move
- Menu engineering matrix (Stars, Plowhorses, Puzzles, Dogs)
- Prep items and sub-recipes
- Recipe scaling for catering and events
- Bulk CSV import for ingredients
- Distributor order guide import (Sysco, US Foods, BEK, any vendor)
- PDF and CSV export
- Email support
✦The free tier
Not ready to commit? Use the free tools.
A lot of what other tools charge for, you can do here for free. Cost a single recipe, generate a nutrition label, work out food cost percentage. No account needed.
Browse free tools- Free food cost calculator
- Free recipe nutrition calculator
- Free FDA nutrition label generator
- 25+ other restaurant calculators — no signup
✦Stacked up
Recipe costing, compared by scope.
All four products cost recipes. The difference is how much back-office software comes with it.
Competitor details checked August 31, 2026. Sources: MarketMan pricing, MarginEdge pricing, and xtraCHEF by Toast.
✦The honest list
What $39 doesn't get you.
DishCost is intentionally narrower than enterprise tools. Here's what's not in the box, so nothing surprises you in week two.
Multi-location dashboards
DishCost is built for single-location restaurants. If you run multiple kitchens with separate inventories and rolled-up reporting, MarketMan or MarginEdge handle that and we do not — yet.
POS-driven inventory variance
No live POS sync. We do not pull sales data from Toast or Square to compute theoretical-vs-actual usage. That is a separate problem and a different product.
Invoice OCR
You upload your distributor order guide as a CSV. We do not photograph or scan paper invoices. Your rep already emails you the file; we use that.
Allergen tagging and FDA labels in-app
We have a free FDA nutrition label generator, but per-recipe nutrition and allergens inside the app are on the roadmap, not shipped. If FDA panel printing is non-negotiable for your menu, this is the gap to know about.
✦FAQ
Pricing and billing questions.
Real questions we've been asked, answered straight.
Is there a free trial?
You don't need one. Sign up free, build a couple of recipes, see if DishCost actually does what you need. Upgrade to Pro from your settings when you're ready. No credit card to start.
How does billing work?
Pro is $39/month, billed monthly through Stripe. You enter your card when you upgrade, you get charged on the same date each month, you can cancel any time from your settings.
Can I cancel anytime?
Yes. Cancel from your settings page in 30 seconds. No phone call, no retention rep, no notice period. Your account stays active until the end of the period you've already paid for.
Do you offer annual billing or a discount?
Not yet. The math at $39/mo is honest — that is the price. If you operate multiple locations or you want to commit to a year, email us and we will work something out.
Is there a setup fee?
No. DishCost does not charge an onboarding or data-entry fee. Sign up and start building recipes yourself.
What happens to my data if I cancel?
Your account drops back to the free tier and your recipes stay accessible. Most of the Pro features (cost alerts, distributor imports, menu engineering matrix) become read-only. You can export everything to CSV from your settings before or after cancellation.
Do you offer refunds?
If you cancel within 14 days of your first charge and have not done significant work in the app, email us and we will refund you. After that, you keep using Pro until the end of the period you have paid for, then it stops. We do not keep charging you to make refunds awkward.
What if my distributor wants to sponsor my account?
DishCost has a partner program where distributors bulk-license seats and handle onboarding for their customers. If your distributor was paying for your old MenuMax or BEK MenuMax license, point them at the partner page.
Can I change plans later?
There is one paid plan. You upgrade from free to Pro, or you cancel back to free. If we add a higher tier later, existing customers stay on whatever they signed up at unless they choose to move.
Do you charge per location or per user?
No. $39/mo covers your whole single-location restaurant — owner, chef, sous chef, manager, all on the same account. Multi-location is on the roadmap; today, DishCost is built for independent restaurants running a single kitchen.
For distributors
Want to sponsor your customers' accounts?
DishCost has a partner program for distributors who want to bulk-license seats, push their order guide into customer accounts, and handle onboarding. Same shape as the BEK / MenuMax model, fewer zeros.
$39 covers it.
Sign up free, build a couple of recipes, see if it does the job. If it does, upgrade. If it doesn't, you've spent zero dollars and you've still got working numbers on the dishes you tested.