The question always comes up, and it deserves a frank answer.
The platform model
A marketplace charges you per cover served. It brings you diners, and takes a cut each time. Two consequences:
- the fuller you are, the more you pay. A full Friday is expensive;
- the customers it brings you are its own. Their address, their history, their habits belong to it. The day you leave, they stay with it.
In return, it brings you something real: demand. An unknown restaurant on a busy street can benefit from it, at least at first.
The Klarr model
A fixed subscription, no commission per cover. A full Friday costs not a cent more than an empty Tuesday, and your guests remain yours — their contact details are in your dashboard, exportable.
It is not just a sales promise: Klarr is not a payment intermediary. Your guests' deposits go to your Stripe account, never to ours. Technically, we have no way to help ourselves along the way.
What Klarr does not give you
Demand. Klarr does not bring you diners. There is no Klarr directory.
If you depend entirely on a platform to fill up, switching to Klarr overnight will cost you covers. The sensible path is gradual: open your Klarr page, put it on your Google listing — that is where people search —, on your Instagram, on your business cards, and watch the share that moves over month after month.
The maths, plainly
At €70.80 incl. VAT per month for both modules, Klarr costs less than a platform as soon as you exceed around thirty covers a month brought by it, taking a commission of around €2.50 per cover.
Beyond that, every additional cover is free with Klarr. That is where the gap widens — and it widens all the more as you do well.