If your agency builds restaurant websites, you've had this conversation:
"Hey, can you just add the new fall menu? I emailed you the PDF."
You add it. It takes 35 minutes — opening Photoshop or InDesign, retyping prices, recompositing, uploading, replacing the link, clearing the CDN cache, replying to confirm. You don't bill for it, or you bill 0.5 hours at your standard rate ($60–$120), and the restaurant gets annoyed when the bill arrives because it was "just a menu update."
A month later: the menu drops a dish, adds two specials, and changes a price. Same email, same 35 minutes. By the end of the year you've put 6 to 10 hours into menu updates per restaurant client. At eight clients, that's a full work week you've bled on something you didn't quote for.
Three pricing models work. One doesn't. Here's the field guide.
Hourly retainer
Charge a monthly retainer covering "small site changes" — menu updates, hours updates, holiday banners, the occasional new staff photo. Quote $300–$600 a month depending on how often the menu actually changes.
This works if the restaurant updates its menu fewer than about six times a year, or if you have so many clients on this retainer that the average smoothes out.
This fails if the chef rotates the menu weekly. You'll lose money every month and resent it. The retainer also obscures the cost, so the restaurant has no incentive to update less often.
Per-revision
Quote menu updates as a discrete service: $75–$150 per revision depending on how complex the change is. A single price change is $75. A full seasonal menu rotation is $200–$400.
This works if you're willing to send an invoice every time. Friction is the point — it makes the restaurant think before asking and pays you fairly when they do ask. It also works if you document scope clearly: what counts as one revision, how images get sourced, how fast turnaround is. Without that, every revision turns into "well, while you're in there, can you also…" and the bill never matches the work.
This fails if you hate sending small invoices. Most agencies do. Six $80 invoices in a month is more billing admin than one $480 retainer, and most of us pick the retainer.
Don't do it at all
The best-positioned agencies we've seen for restaurant work have stopped doing menu updates entirely. They hand the restaurant a tool — Square's online menu builder, a Squarespace site they can edit themselves, or a CMS with a custom menu type — and say "here's where you update it, takes you ten minutes."
This works if the restaurant is OK doing it themselves (some are; many aren't), if the tool is genuinely easy enough that it doesn't generate support tickets back to you, and if you're not depending on menu-update revenue to round out monthly billing.
This fails if the restaurant won't do it. Then the menu drifts and you get the angry call when a guest complains.
What actually doesn't work
Charging an hourly rate per update with no retainer. You'll never quote it right. Every update has a fixed setup cost — open the file, find the right section, save, upload, test — that hourly billing pretends doesn't exist. You'll either undercharge (because typing the change took eight minutes) or feel bad about the bill (because the setup took twenty-five minutes the client doesn't see). Per-revision pricing handles this; pure hourly doesn't.
A fourth option
We're building MenuPublish to be the "give the restaurant a tool" option that actually works. The chef texts a photo of the menu and it updates everywhere, including the website your agency built. It costs a flat fee per location, you don't have to retainer-cover menu updates anymore, and the restaurant doesn't have to learn a CMS.
If you run a restaurant-focused agency and you're tired of bleeding hours on menu PDFs, the agency tier is here and we offer referral revenue share for partners who bring clients on. Tell us about your current setup and we'll work out the math with you.