Restaurant websites built from the menu

The idea

Most independent restaurant websites are stale the week after launch, because the site was built once by a nephew or an agency and the menu changes weekly. Many are just a scanned PDF, invisible to Google and unreadable on phones. Website builders are proven demand — people pay $25/mo for Webflow — but a generic builder is exactly wrong here: the restaurant’s site is really the menu plus hours plus a phone number, and generic tools make the menu the hardest thing to maintain.

The wedge is menu-as-source-of-truth with photo ingestion. The owner already prints a new menu when prices change; photographing it is zero extra workflow, and vision models now extract structured menus reliably. Emit proper Menu and Restaurant schema markup and these sites win rich results that PDF menus and agency brochureware never get — a concrete Google-visibility argument that closes sales.

Who pays

Independent restaurant owners, sold at $15/mo — under Webflow and roughly one delivery order per month, versus agency retainers in the hundreds. Distribution: local-first — restaurant supplier reps and POS resellers as referral partners, restaurant owner groups, and cold outreach to restaurants whose current site is a PDF menu, which is trivially findable and self-qualifying.

MVP scope

• Photo/PDF menu ingestion to structured, editable menu data
• 5 restaurant-tuned templates with mobile-first hours and phone placement
• Instant deploy with subdomain, custom domains, and full Restaurant/Menu JSON-LD
• Diff-based menu re-ingest that preserves manual edits
• Links out to existing ordering, reservation, and social platforms
• Skip for v1: online ordering itself, table bookings, multi-location groups, email capture, photo galleries beyond a hero image

Build MenuSite, a website builder for restaurants where the menu is the source of truth. Stack: Next.js (App Router) with Postgres, Claude API vision for menu ingestion, Vercel for hosting generated sites on subdomains and custom domains, Stripe for billing.

Core flow: 1) Owner signs up, photographs their paper menu or uploads a PDF; Claude vision extracts a structured menu — sections, items, descriptions, prices, dietary tags — into an editable review screen. 2) Owner confirms, adds name, address, hours, phone, and links (Google Maps, Instagram, DoorDash/Toast/OpenTable ordering and reservation URLs), and picks one of 5 templates tuned for restaurants: menu-forward, photo hero optional, phone number and hours above the fold on mobile. 3) The site deploys instantly to name.menusite.app with custom domain support, emitting full Restaurant and Menu JSON-LD schema, per-item structured data, correct opening-hours markup, and a print-friendly menu page. 4) Updates happen the same way they started: snap the new menu, review the extracted diff (changed prices, added/removed items), approve, and the live site and schema update in one publish.

Pages (builder app): onboarding wizard, menu editor with photo re-ingest and diff view, site settings, template picker, domain setup, billing. Non-obvious details: the diff-based re-ingest is the retention feature — build it properly, matching items by fuzzy name to preserve edits; generate menus as server-rendered HTML, never PDF embeds or images. Pricing: free on a subdomain with badge, $15/mo with custom domain.