MenuTiger Charges $17/Month for a QR Code Menu. Here's What You Get for Free Instead.

Most restaurant owners assume a QR code menu is basically free to make — it's a QR code, how expensive can it be? MenuTiger's own free plan tells you the real answer: 49 items, roughly 200 orders a month, and their branding on every page, before you're pushed to a $17/month plan. Here's what's actually behind that pricing, and what a genuinely free alternative looks like.

How MenuTiger's model works

MenuTiger is a hosted QR ordering platform. Your menu lives on their servers, the QR code is just a pointer to it, and the product bundles menu display with dine-in cart, checkout and order routing. That's a real, useful product for a restaurant that wants ordering and payment handled end to end — but hosting a live, updatable menu with order infrastructure behind it costs money to run, and that cost is why the free tier is capped rather than open-ended.

The specifics: the free plan covers 1 store, about 10 tables, 7 categories × 7 items (49 items total), and roughly 200 QR orders a month, with MenuTiger's own logo shown throughout. A restaurant with a menu bigger than 49 items — which is most full-service restaurants — hits that ceiling almost immediately. From there, the Regular plan runs $17/month for 2 stores and unlimited items, Advanced is $46/month and adds a kitchen display, and Premium is $119/month with white-label branding and a custom domain.

How Setu's QR Menu Generator works instead

Setu's QR Menu Generator takes a structurally different approach: the entire menu is encoded directly into the QR code itself. There's no server rendering your menu when a customer scans, no hosting cost tied to your menu being live, and as a result, no item cap, no order cap, and no subscription tier gating features behind a monthly price. You build your menu once, generate the QR code, and it's print-ready — table tents, counter cards, packaging — with no ongoing dependency on Setu's servers staying up.

Feature-by-feature

Where MenuTiger genuinely wins

It would be dishonest to pretend this comparison only goes one way. If what you actually want is a single subscription that handles menu display, in-app ordering, payment collection and kitchen routing without stitching together separate tools, MenuTiger's paid tiers are a coherent, purpose-built product for that. The $46/month Advanced plan in particular is aimed squarely at a full-service restaurant that wants one vendor and one login for the whole QR-ordering workflow, and for a restaurant that values that consolidation over cost, it's a reasonable trade.

Where the free approach wins

For a restaurant that mainly needs the menu itself — a clean, unlimited, no-watermark QR code that customers scan to see what's on offer — paying a recurring fee for something that has near-zero marginal cost to serve doesn't hold up well. This is especially true for smaller operators, cloud kitchens, or multi-outlet chains where the $17–$119/month adds up per location. Setu's QR Menu Generator solves the actual menu-display problem for free, and if ordering and payment become a real need later, they're separate free tools rather than a forced upgrade.

The honest bottom line

These two products are not solving identical problems, even though they compete for the same first search: ‘QR menu for my restaurant.’ MenuTiger is an ordering platform that happens to include a menu. Setu's QR Menu Generator is a menu tool that happens to pair with separate ordering tools if you need them. If your bottleneck is checkout and kitchen routing, MenuTiger's bundle is worth the subscription. If your bottleneck is just getting a professional, unlimited menu QR code onto your tables without a monthly bill, there's no real reason to pay for it in 2026.