Know what every plate costs before the week eats the margin.
Muntin Digital is the restaurant numbers company that doesn’t rent your guests back to you — a primary-source Cost Index, free private tools, and Muntin Ledger, the invoice ledger. Every tool below is free, no signup.
Just researching? Take the 60-minute guided tour →
- 171 glossary terms
- 5 free tools
- 38 articles
- All free
A sample of what the Index shows — the basket barely moved; onions ran while proteins eased. Not your prices.
Every claim on this site carries its own receipt.
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The fact gate
An invented number here isn’t edited out. It fails the build.
Every figure on this site is registered in a public claim ledger — 47 sourced claims, each traced to its document. Sixty-plus check scripts run before every deploy, and the prose is read aloud in English and Spanish, so a fabrication would be spoken, not buried.
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The network tab
Free tools compute in your browser. The proof is the network tab.
Open DevTools and type — the request list does not grow. A named CI gate, check-tool-no-fetch, fails the build if any tool contacts any URL. Ten verifiable claims, each with an “inspect this” drawer.
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The public scorecard
The Cost Index grades its own forecasts in public.
Its nominal 80% band held 77% of the time across 79,086 scored weeks and 75 ingredients — misses included, published in the methodology. Unpriced items report absent, with the reason, before the Index reports a guess. The data is public domain (CC0), every number dated to USDA, BLS, or FRED.
Find the leak before you fix it.
Vendor Benchmark
Is your price moving wrong? Paste what you’ve paid and when, and Vendor Benchmark reads the trend — telling you whether a price is moving in line, or drifting out of line and worth a call to your vendor.
Your line drifting off the market’s — illustrative
Check a price Free · on your device · no signupKnow what your menu makes you
Upload your POS sales mix and see what each dish actually makes the house per year — on your real volume. Then a plain call when a price moves: raise, re-portion, or hold.
Dish margins, ranked — illustrative
Cost your menuNeed prime cost too? Margin Math runs in your browser — no spreadsheet, no signup.
- 47 sourced claims, each traced
- Free tools compute on your device — no account
- No language model reads a Ledger invoice
- Every deploy hashed — integrity.txt
- Five refusals, in writing
- Grounded in a working restaurant floor — Tacombi
Start here. Everything’s free.
Every article, tool, research note, and glossary term is restaurant-specific and open to anyone. The same numbers that run Muntin Ledger and the Cost Index — if you can apply them yourself, apply them yourself. No signup, no funnel.
The guided tour.
Four steps that take you from "what is this?" to "here's the first thing to fix." Designed for restaurant owners who landed here cold.
Begin the tour → Articles · honest essaysNotes from the floor.
Real numbers, real tradeoffs. DoorDash math, menu pricing, platform comparisons — for an independent operator making a decision this week.
Browse articles → Free tools · no signup5 free tools across 9 topics — pricing, SEO, brand, hours, content, ops.
Restaurant-aware audits, calculators, generators — pricing, menu mix, plate cost, brand palette, photo brief, hours, GBP grading, and more. Every tool runs in your browser, groups under the same six topics as the rest of the library, and links back to the research that justifies it.
Browse the toolkit → Research · the evidenceEvery claim, traced.
Muntin-authored summaries of the studies behind the advice — Google's mobile speed research, Fitts's Law, Baymard cart abandonment, and more.
Read the research →Recently added.
The 8 most recent entries across the library — articles, research, tools, and checklists. Older entries live in the topic shelves below.
| Title | Section | Last updated | Contributor |
|---|---|---|---|
| The 2026 restaurant cost storm: a tame average, five fronts squeezing | Articles | Don Goldstein | |
| A historic El Niño is forming — and your food invoices haven't noticed | Articles | Don Goldstein | |
| What Beef Prices Actually Mean for Your Restaurant | Articles | The Muntin Desk | |
| How to get your restaurant found for Father's Day weekend | Articles | Don Goldstein | |
| Restaurant prices are now rising faster than groceries — what May 2026's numbers mean for your menu | Articles | Don Goldstein | |
| Restaurant Website Technical SEO Checklist (2026): The Operator's Audit | Articles | The Muntin Desk | |
| Restaurant Brand System (2026): Colors, Typography & the Logo That Travels | Articles | The Muntin Desk | |
| Restaurant Menu Engineering (2026): The Math Behind Which Dishes Make Money | Articles | The Muntin Desk |
Be first when Muntin Ledger opens — November 13, 2026.
A deterministic engine reads your vendor invoices into a searchable ledger — no language model reads your numbers, no ads, no tracking. It shows what it measured and labels what it estimated. When a line can't be read, it holds the number back rather than print a guess. Founding members get three months free, then $19 a month per location for as long as they stay — the founding rate is for operators who join before launch, now 15 weeks out. Your numbers stay yours.
Want to see it first? Walk the mockup demo →
Your invoices, your plate costs, the market read — in one ledger.
Muntin Ledger reads vendor invoices and files them into a searchable ledger. The public Cost Index and the free tools stay free — they run on the same numbers.
The invoice ledger
Snap a photo of a vendor invoice; it lands read, filed, and searchable. Price-hike flags against your own history. Never read by a model.
See Muntin Ledger →The Cost Index
Wholesale ingredient prices from USDA, BLS, and FRED — dated, sourced, and refreshed Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Free, no signup — download the whole index, CC0, yours to keep.
Read the index →The operator toolset
Plate costs, margin math, vendor benchmarks, site audits — 5 tools that run in your browser and save to your Workshop.
Browse the tools →A muntin is the slender strip that holds a window together.
Small, quiet, and the reason the whole thing stands up.
Muntin came out of watching small businesses juggle four vendors who never talked to each other — and building the tools that make those numbers legible.
The library is the reference we wish every operator had. Muntin Ledger is the tool — your vendor numbers, read and filed, checked against your own history.
Straight answers.
Is the library really free? What’s the catch?
No catch. Every article, tool, research note, and glossary term is free to read, apply, and share. The free tools and the Cost Index run on the same numbers as the paid product — apply them yourself, or let Muntin Ledger do it.
Where should I start?
Two doors. If you want to understand the playing field first, take the 60-minute guided tour — what a restaurant website owes a diner, where the money leaks, the math of fixing it. If you want a tool in your hands now, run the five-question routing form and we’ll point you at the two or three calculators that match what’s actually leaking.
Didn’t Muntin Digital used to build websites?
It did. Muntin Digital started as a one-person web studio for restaurants. It’s now a product company: Muntin Ledger, the public Cost Index, and the free operator tools. The library and the tools stay free; the website-build service is retired.
What is Muntin Ledger?
Muntin Ledger reads your vendor invoices and files them into a searchable ledger. Snap a photo and it lands read, filed, and searchable, with price-hike flags against your own history.
Is my invoice data read by an AI model?
No. Muntin Ledger reads invoices with templates and rules — the bytes never go to a language model, and your data is never sold or pooled without your opt-in.
What’s the Cost Index?
A free, public read of wholesale ingredient prices from USDA, BLS, and FRED — dated, sourced, and refreshed Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. No signup. Every number traces back to the agency that published it.
What’s a “muntin”? And why “The window in.”?
A muntin is the slender wooden strip between panes in a real window — small, quiet, and the reason the whole thing stands up. The window in plays on two senses: the mark on the wall (the muntin/windowpane) and the way in — to understanding your restaurant’s web. Small focus, whole picture.
Run a free tool, read the index, or open the ledger.
Everything in the library is free, no signup. When the invoices pile up, Muntin Ledger reads and files them. Questions get a real answer — every message is read.Stuck on a number? Send it over — every message gets a same-day read, usually.