ChowNow vs Owner.com, the Zayos breakdown
Published July 2026 · Updated July 26, 2026
ChowNow charges a flat monthly subscription plus published card processing, with no percentage of sales on top. Owner.com charges $249 a month plus a 5% fee per order, or $499 a month flat. Owner’s own guidance is that the flat plan wins above $5,000 a month online.
Free, no card, about 60 seconds.
What is the actual difference between these two?
Both put a commission free ordering page on your own domain, on top of the register you already own. Where they part company is the shape of the bill. One is a flat line that does not move when you have a good month. The other starts lower and rises with every order, until you switch to the plan that flattens it.
$229 to $449 a month depending on tier and billing cadence, and that number does not change if you sell twice as much. Card processing is published separately at 2.95% + $0.29, which is a real cost but the same kind of cost you pay on every platform.
Predictable. Gets cheaper per order as you grow.
$249 a month plus 5% of each order on the Flexible plan, so the bill rises with sales. Or $499 a month flat with no additional restaurant fees, which stops the rise. The two plans cross at exactly $5,000 a month in online sales.
Cheap to start. Needs one plan change at $5,000, or it quietly overcharges you.
At what point should I switch Owner plans?
$5,000 a month in online sales. The arithmetic is one line: the two Owner plans are $250 apart, and 5% of $5,000 is $250. Below that number the Flexible plan is cheaper. Above it, every extra dollar of online sales costs you five cents you would not pay on Flat Rate.
Owner says the same thing on its own pricing page, describing Flat Rate as best for restaurants at $5k+ a month in online sales. Credit where it is due: a vendor that tells you when to move to the plan that stops charging a percentage is being straight with you. The trap is not the pricing, it is inertia. A restaurant that signs on Flexible at $2,000 a month and grows to $15,000 without switching is paying $750 in restaurant fees where $250 would do.
If you sign up on Owner Flexible, put a calendar reminder to check your online sales total on the first of every month. The month you cross $5,000, switch to Flat Rate. That one reminder is worth $600 a year at $15,000 a month in online sales, and $2,000 a month at $45,000.
What does it cost at my size?
Three restaurants at a $30 average online ticket. ChowNow figures are all in, because ChowNow publishes its processing rate. Owner figures are subscription and restaurant fee only, because Owner does not publish a processing rate, so its true total is higher than the number shown by whatever that rate turns out to be.
$3,000 a month online
about 100 orders at a $30 ticketFlexible: $249 + 5% of $3,000 = $399 a month, before card processing. Flat Rate at $499 would cost you $100 more.
Launch: $229 a month on annual billing, plus 2.95% + $0.29 processing, which is $88.50 + $29 = $346.50 all in.
Owner Flexible is the right Owner plan at this size. Between the two vendors, ChowNow has the lower published all in number, but at 100 orders a month you are paying roughly $3.50 per order either way. The honest question is not which is cheaper. It is whether either one will grow the 100.
$12,000 a month online
about 400 orders at a $30 ticketFlexible would be $249 + $600 = $849. Flat Rate at $499 is the clear pick, saving $350 a month, before card processing.
Grow: $319 a month on annual billing, plus $354 + $116 processing = $789 all in.
Switch to Owner Flat Rate at this size or you are giving away $350 a month for nothing. Against ChowNow the comparison hangs on a number Owner does not publish: ask Owner for its card processing rate in writing, then compare $499 plus that rate against ChowNow at $789 all in.
$45,000 a month online
about 1,500 orders at a $30 ticketFlexible would be $249 + $2,250 = $2,499. Flat Rate at $499 saves $2,000 a month. Nobody at this volume should be on the 5% plan.
Elevate: $409 a month on annual billing, plus $1,327.50 + $435 processing = $2,171.50 all in.
At this size the processing line is bigger than the subscription line on both platforms, by a factor of three. Stop comparing $409 against $499 and start negotiating the percentage. A 0.3% difference on $45,000 is $135 a month, which is worth more than the entire subscription gap.
Does my customer pay a fee?
On Owner, yes. Guests pay a 5% order support fee at checkout. ChowNow does not publish a guest side fee on its pricing page.
Guest fees are normal in this category and they are not automatically a bad thing. Somebody has to pay for the software, and a small fee at checkout is often cheaper for the restaurant than eating the cost in the menu price. What matters is the shape. A percentage fee grows with the ticket: 5% is $0.90 on an $18 lunch order and $3.75 on a $75 family order. A flat fee does not move.
So the question to ask yourself is what your regulars order. If your average online ticket is $15 to $25, a 5% guest fee is small enough that nobody blinks. If you sell $80 family platters and $200 catering trays, look hard at what that fee reads like on the checkout screen, because the number your regular sees is the number they compare against the marketplace they came from.
Published, side by side
From each vendor's own site on July 26, 2026. Rows where a vendor does not publish a figure say so instead of guessing, because a guessed number in a comparison table is worse than no number.
Swipe the table sideways to see both columns.
So who wins?
Owner.com wins if demand is your problem
If your ordering page is fine and the issue is that not enough people find you, Owner is built around that. The product bundles the website, restaurant SEO, listings management, a reviews engine, the branded app, loyalty and automated marketing into one subscription, and it publishes named customer results rather than adjectives. It is month to month with no cancellation fees, so the downside of trying it is one month. Just be on the right plan: Flexible below $5,000 a month in online sales, Flat Rate above it.
ChowNow wins if predictability is what you are buying
If you already have the customers and you want them off the apps, ChowNow is the smaller, flatter purchase. No percentage of your sales at any volume, a published processing rate you can put in a spreadsheet, 20+ named point of sale integrations, and a marketplace app plus discovery network that brings some found demand along with it. The setup fee of $119 to $499 and the contact caps are the two things to check against your list size before you sign.
Neither wins on the number that is not printed
At $12,000 a month in online sales, the card processing line is $354 plus per order fees on ChowNow. Owner does not publish theirs. Until you have both rates in writing, any comparison you make between $499 and $319 is incomplete by several hundred dollars a month. Get the number, then decide.
Where does Zayos fit in this?
We wrote this page, so here is our own card face up. Zayos is a third option in the same category, at $499, $599 or $699 per month per location, month to month, no setup fee. Like Owner Flat Rate, there is no percentage of your sales. Like ChowNow, the number does not move when you have a good month.
Our diner side fee is flat rather than a percentage on the two channels most restaurants live on: $0.99 pickup, $2.99 delivery, $0 dine in. Catering is the exception at 10%. The restaurant never pays any of it and keeps 100% of food revenue and 100% of tips. The $599 tier adds marketplace ingestion through Otter, which pulls your Uber Eats, DoorDash and Grubhub tickets onto the same kitchen tablet as your direct orders so the line only watches one screen.
We have one restaurant live and taking orders today: Naya Grill, in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach, keeping $48k+ a year that used to leave as commission. Eight more storefronts are built with ordering opening at each launch. That is a smaller track record than either vendor on this page, and you should weigh it accordingly. If discovery is your problem, Owner has the deeper product for it. If a flat published bill is what you want, all three of us can do that, and the free report will show you what the choice is worth in your own numbers.
Questions owners ask before switching
Which plan should I be on if I do $4,000 a month in online sales?
Is Owner.com commission free?
Is ChowNow’s 2.95% a commission?
What does my customer pay at checkout on each one?
Which one is better if my problem is that nobody knows I exist?
Which one is better if I already have plenty of customers and just want them off the apps?
What is the one thing I should ask Owner.com before signing?
Sources
- Owner.com published pricing: Flexible $249 per month with a 5% restaurant fee per order, Flat Rate $499 per month with no additional restaurant fees, described as best for restaurants at $5k+ a month in online sales, month to month with no long term contracts and no cancellation fees, guests pay a 5% order support fee, and all features including the website, online ordering, branded mobile app, loyalty and rewards, marketing, setup and migration, chargeback protection and 24/7 support are listed as available on both plans. owner.com/pricing, accessed July 26, 2026.
- Owner.com product positioning and named features: restaurant SEO, listings management, reviews engine, email, SMS and push marketing, catering, smart upsells, kitchen tablet, point of sale integrations and reporting. owner.com, accessed July 26, 2026.
- ChowNow published pricing: Launch $249, Grow $349, Elevate $449 per month on monthly billing ($229 / $319 / $409 annual), $119 to $499 setup fee, 2.95% + $0.29 per transaction, Flex Delivery $7.98 per order, $99 annual Apple developer fee for branded mobile apps, printer $250 to $420, contact caps of 500 / 2,000 / 5,000. get.chownow.com/pricing, accessed July 26, 2026.
- ChowNow direct ordering: 0% commission on every direct order, 20+ point of sale integrations naming Toast, Square, Revel, Clover, Genius (Heartland) and SkyTab, the restaurant owns 100% of diner contact and ordering data, and order aggregation of DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub into one dashboard. get.chownow.com/products/direct-online-ordering, accessed July 26, 2026.
- Zayos pricing: zay-os.com/pricing.
Scenario totals are our arithmetic on the published rates above, not vendor claims. Owner totals exclude card processing because Owner does not publish a rate. Vendor pricing changes, so confirm on each vendor's own page before signing. If a number here is out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
Run your own numbers first.
The free report reads your real order mix and shows what the marketplaces are taking this month, so you walk into both demos knowing your own math. About 60 seconds, no card.