Know what every plate costs before the week eats the margin.
Muntin Digital builds the Cost Index, the free operator tools, and Muntin Ledger — the invoice ledger. I run front-of-house at a DMV restaurant; these are the numbers I check on my own shifts. The library below is free, no signup.
Just researching? Take the 60-minute guided tour →
- 150 glossary terms
- 13 free tools
- 36 articles
- All free
Three things most studios won’t say.
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Stance one
Most restaurants don’t need a rebuild. They need their hours visible.
When to rebuild your restaurant website — the seven questions that decide it. Most owners can fix the leak themselves; the article shows you which one yours is.
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Stance two
DoorDash is a margin tax. Your website is the cheapest way to stop paying it.
Margin Math — type your covers and your aggregator mix; see the dollar figure of a 30% take versus a $0 own-channel order. The number is usually larger than a website.
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Stance three
Templates have a profit ceiling. We built the math so you can see yours.
Side-by-side comparison — Wix, restaurant vendors, agencies, and the studio. Pricing, ownership, who’s at the keyboard, what year-two costs. Each row is a number you can verify.
Find the leak before you fix it.
Restaurant Website Audit
A real mobile Lighthouse audit plus ten restaurant-specific checks, in plain English. Drop your URL.
Run the audit 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.
Cost your menuNeed prime cost too? Margin Math runs in your browser — no spreadsheet, no signup.
- Reply within 4 hrs, Mon–Fri
- 2 active builds at a time
- No retainer required
- You own your site outright
- Maryland LLC · Silver Spring, MD
Three ways to put a restaurant
on the web.
A template you fight, an agency that bills the room you walk into, or one person who builds, ships, and stays. Each works for someone — this just helps you see where you are.
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Patchwork
Wix or Squarespace.
$23–39/mo · DIY, with templates
- Fast to start. Pick a template, swap photos, ship in a weekend.
- Hard ceiling. Mobile speed, menu structure, and SEO live inside the template’s limits.
- Rented. Stop paying and the site goes away.
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Agency
A full creative shop.
$15–60K+ build · multi-discipline team
- Real craft. Custom design, brand strategy, sometimes great work.
- Layered cost. The PM, the strategist, the AD, the dev — all billed.
- Slow follow-through. Edits route through three people; weeks become months.
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Where Muntin sits
Muntin Digital
One person, end to end.
$2,500–15,000+ build · Don ships, Don stays
- Real custom, no agency layer. Same person designs, builds, and replies.
- Owned outright. Yours from day one — code, copy, domain.
- Reply within 4 hrs. Care Plan optional; not the lock-in.
Start here. Everything’s free.
Every article, tool, research note, and glossary term is restaurant-specific and open to anyone. Same thinking that goes into client work — if you can apply it yourself, apply it yourself. When you’re ready for a partner, the studio is right here.
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 studio.
Real numbers, real tradeoffs. DoorDash math, menu pricing, platform comparisons — for an independent operator making a decision this week.
Browse articles → Free tools · no signup13 free tools across 8 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 eight most recent entries across the library — articles, research, tools, and checklists. Older entries live in the topic shelves below.
| Title | Section | Last updated | Contributor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Restaurant Website Technical SEO Checklist (2026): The Operator's Audit | Articles | Don Goldstein | |
| Restaurant Brand System (2026): Colors, Typography & the Logo That Travels | Articles | Don Goldstein | |
| Restaurant Menu Engineering (2026): The Math Behind Which Dishes Make Money | Articles | Don Goldstein | |
| Restaurant Website Legal & Trust Essentials (2026): ToS, Privacy, Cookies, SSL | Articles | Don Goldstein | |
| Muntin Bench | Tools | Don Goldstein | |
| I asked ChatGPT, Perplexity & Google AI which restaurant website platform to use. Here's what they said. | Articles | Don Goldstein | |
| Best Restaurant Website Platform (2026): Custom vs Wix, Squarespace, BentoBox, Popmenu, Owner.com & Toast | Articles | Don Goldstein | |
| Commission-Free Online Ordering for Restaurants (2026): Owner.com vs Toast vs Your Own Site | Articles | Don Goldstein |
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 on a weekly read. Free, no signup.
Read the index →The operator toolset
Plate costs, margin math, vendor benchmarks, site audits — 13 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.
I’m Don. I’m front-of-house manager at Tacombi in Bethesda — and Muntin came out of watching small businesses juggle four vendors who never talked to each other.
The library is what I wish had existed when I started. The studio is what I wish I’d had when I went to hire someone.
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 library is the marketing — it’s how restaurant owners find me. When you’re ready to hire, you already know how I think. When you’re not, you’ve got material worth applying yourself.
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.
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.
Why not just use Wix or Squarespace?
You can, and for some businesses it's enough. But when a template caps how fast your pages load, how customers find you, or how your brand feels, you're stuck. Muntin builds a real custom site without that ceiling.
Isn't a real developer expensive?
Not when one person handles design, build, and social. Essentials sites launch at $2,500 — roughly what a monthly agency retainer costs, for a site you own forever.
What happens after launch?
Every client is offered a Care Plan: hosting, backups, monitoring, security patches, and content edits, handled by the same person who built the site.
Do I own my site?
Yes — every line of code, every asset, every domain. No lock-in, no multi-year contract.
How long does a build take?
Essentials sites launch in 2–3 weeks, Full Service in 4–6, Premier in 6–10. Only two active builds run at a time.
Can you handle something more complex later?
Yes. The stack scales from marketing sites to e-commerce and custom web apps, so you don't outgrow your web partner six months in.
Why bundle social media with my web developer?
Because your website and your Instagram should sound like the same brand. One person building both keeps voice, visuals, and goals aligned — and coordinated campaigns convert better than siloed ones.
I already have a logo. Do I need Brand Identity?
If it works everywhere, no. But if your logo doesn't translate to your website, social avatars, and print, the Brand Identity package gives you a full system, not just a file.
Tell me about your business.
Fill out the form and I'll follow up within 24 hours to schedule a 20-minute Zoom call. No pitch, no pressure — just a conversation about what's possible.
Three required fields — name, email, what you’re trying to fix. The optional ones help me prep, but they don’t block sending.
Got it — thanks!
I'll review your info and follow up within 24 hours to schedule your consultation. In the meantime, feel free to reach out at don@muntin.digital.