There are a dozen tools that will turn your menu into a page and hand you a code for nothing. Some of them have no item limit and put no branding on your menu. If what you want is your menu on a phone, they do that, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

What free is genuinely good at

Replacing the printed card. Type the dishes, get a code, glue it down, change a price whenever you like. For a place with one room, a short menu and a till that works, that is the whole problem solved and it costs nothing.

If that is where you are, stop reading and go and do it this afternoon.

The line, and it is a clear one

Free tools show a menu. The moment a guest wants to send something from the table, you are in different territory, because now there is a ticket that has to reach a person in a kitchen while food is on.

• Somewhere for the order to land that somebody is actually watching.
• A sold-out switch that reaches the guest menu, the kitchen and tonight’s numbers together.
• Table numbers that ride along with the order so nobody walks a tray around.
• Some idea of who on your staff can change a price and who cannot.
• A person to answer on a Saturday night when the screen goes blank.

That last one is most of what you are paying for and it never appears on a feature list.

The question that decides it

Are you trying to stop reprinting menus, or trying to stop a server walking to the table to write things down? The first is a printing problem and free solves it. The second is a staffing problem, and it is worth what an hour of wages costs.

What to check before you commit to anything

One thing matters more than any feature, free or paid: whose address the code points at. If your codes are printed and glued to forty tables, the web address they open is now part of your furniture. Make sure it is one you can keep — your own name, on a domain you control — so that changing tools later is a decision and not a reprint.

Free is the right answer to the menu. It is not an answer to the order.