Know the moment a dish stops making money.
DishCost turns your supplier invoices into live dish costs. When a price moves, every affected recipe reprices itself — so a margin problem surfaces the day it starts, not at quarter-end.
This is what you see two minutes after signing up.
A working kitchen with real numbers — before you've typed a thing. Like what you see? Add your own menu.
Set up once. Then it watches your margins for you.
Add what you buy
Your ingredients, straight off the supplier invoice — pack size, unit, price. Ten minutes for a typical café pantry.
Build your menu
Recipes and sub-recipes — sauces, stocks, the lot — costed down to the gram. Every dish gets a live cost and a green, amber or red band.
Let the invoices do the work
Save an invoice and every affected dish reprices itself, sub-recipes included. Twenty minutes a week from then on.
Three questions, answered before your flat white cools.
Which dishes are losing me money?
Every dish carries a live food-cost band — green under 28%, amber to 35%, red beyond. Scan the menu in seconds and see exactly where margin is leaking, in dollars per plate.
What should I push, fix, or cut?
Sales data meets dish cost: winners to protect, busy-but-thin dishes to reprice, hidden gems to promote. Your menu, sorted into decisions — not a spreadsheet.
What did that invoice just do to my menu?
The moment an invoice is saved, every product price updates and every affected recipe — including sub-recipes — recalculates. You know your margin moved before the truck leaves the loading dock.
- +14.2%Free Range Chicken Thigh$16.20 → $18.50
- +12.8%Tasmanian Salmon Fillet$39.00 → $44.00
- −11.6%Brioche Bun$11.20 → $9.90
Runs Square? Your sales walk in by themselves.
Connect your Square account once and every day's completed sales sync overnight — matched to your dishes, feeding your menu numbers. On another till? CSV and Excel imports handle the rest.
- Nightly sync of completed orders — nothing to export, ever
- Map an item to a dish once; it remembers from then on
- Read-only access — DishCost never touches your till
Illustrative sync summary. Sales totals import GST-inclusive, as Square records them.
Being built alongside working kitchens.
DishCost is in pilot with independent Sydney venues — owners who check our maths against their own. No paid reviews, no invented quotes. Just software shaped by people who actually plate food.
A real save from the pilot
A pilot venue's costing looked fine — until DishCost's pack-size guardrail flagged eggs entered at $0.70 a tray instead of $21.00. Every egg dish was costed 30× low. Caught before the menu was repriced around it.
Checked to the cent
When a pilot chef hand-calculated his brioche bun at $7.05 and DishCost said otherwise, we traced it together — the engine reproduced his figure exactly once the data-entry trap above was fixed. That guardrail exists because he pushed.
Want to shape it?
Founding pricing — $199 lifetime — is limited to our first 50venues, and pilot feedback goes straight onto the roadmap. When we publish testimonials, they'll have names on them.
The maths haven't been on your side.
You can't control supplier prices. You can control how fast you find out.
Pay once. Own it forever.
No subscription meter running while you're on the pans. Every feature, every future update, one payment.
One payment · no subscription · GST inc
- Unlimited recipes, ingredients, and invoices
- Automatic cost calculations
- Square sales sync + CSV/Excel import
- Menu engineering and profitability reports
- Unlimited team members
- All future features included
No credit card required to explore. See real data before you pay.
Asked by every operator we talk to.
I don't have time to set this up.
You don't set anything up to start — you land in a working demo kitchen with dishes already costed. Adding your own menu is a ten-minute pantry, then recipes as you go. From there it's twenty minutes a week, mostly typing in invoices.
I already do this in a spreadsheet.
So did most of our pilots. The difference: a spreadsheet doesn't re-cost itself when your supplier raises prices. DishCost does — every affected dish, including sub-recipes, the moment the invoice is saved.
My sales data is a mess.
If you're on Square, sales sync nightly with no exports. Otherwise, upload whatever CSV or Excel your till produces — map each item to a dish once and it's remembered for every future import.
Does it handle GST properly?
Yes — built for Australia from day one. Invoices carry correct GST splits, GST-free basics like eggs and milk are pre-flagged, and totals show ex- and inc-GST.
What happens after the first 50 lifetime spots?
Pricing moves to a standard model for new customers. If you're in the first 50, your $199 covers everything, forever — including features that ship later.
What happens to my data if I leave?
It's yours. Export your recipes, costs and sales any time. The Square connection is read-only and you can disconnect it with one click.
Stop guessing. Start knowing.
Open the demo now — real dishes, real numbers, nothing to install. Your first menu costed in under twenty minutes.