The AI phone-ordering ROI calculator.

Payback in tickets is how many tickets at your average contribution margin equal one month of the plan cost. It's a rough proxy for how fast the plan pays for itself. It excludes labor, rent, packaging, marketplace fees, and taxes.

Contribution margin is gross revenue minus food cost. It's the right number to compare against a fixed SaaS plan cost — but it overstates margin because it ignores labor, packaging, and every other variable cost. Use it as a directional signal, not a final number.

We don't invent a 'typical additional orders' number. We don't apply a conversion multiplier the operator can't see. We don't hide assumptions inside a black box. Every input is yours; every formula is on the page.

Plug these deterministic inputs into the calculator to reproduce the numbers on the page: 120 additional orders captured per month, $28 average ticket, 30% food cost, $799 Fire It plan, $0 other monthly costs. Gross revenue is 120 × $28 = $3,360. Food cost is $3,360 × 0.30 = $1,008. Contribution margin is $3,360 − $1,008 = $2,352. Net after SaaS is $2,352 − $799 − $0 = $1,553. Payback in tickets is ceil($799 / ($28 × 0.70)) = 41 tickets, which is the count of incremental tickets the plan needs before the month is net-positive.

If you don't yet have a defensible "additional orders captured" number, start with the missed-call revenue calculator and use a conservative fraction — 40% to 60% — of the modeled lost orders. That's a floor, not a promise; a two-week pilot is still the only way to know for your specific catchment.

The calculator uses a flat food-cost percentage against gross revenue, which is a standard restaurant convention but hides item-mix effects. A pizza-forward shop with a 25% food cost on incremental phone orders and a 40% food cost on dine-in shouldn't use the blended number here; enter the incremental-phone food cost specifically. Contribution margin also excludes labor, packaging, marketplace fees, and taxes — it's a directional signal, not a full P&L.

For plan-cost inputs, use the exact monthly figure from the pricing page or your Enterprise quote. For the operational plan that follows a positive ROI decision, walk the implementation checklist — the assumptions in this calculator only hold if the rollout is executed cleanly.

Contribution margin is a useful proxy for whether a fixed SaaS cost pays for itself, but it's not a full P&L. It ignores labor, packaging, marketplace fees, taxes, and every other variable cost. Use it as a directional signal — if contribution margin comfortably exceeds plan cost, the plan probably pays for itself. Don't use it as a final go/no-go number for a capital decision; for that you want a full P&L overlay. The calculator's output is deliberately labeled 'estimate' for that reason.

Payback in tickets is a rough proxy for how fast the plan pays for itself. It divides plan cost by contribution margin per ticket. If the number is fifteen tickets, the plan pays for itself in the first fifteen incremental tickets of the month. If the number is two hundred, the plan needs meaningful additional capture. The threshold worth acting on is roughly one hundred tickets — below that, the math is easy; above that, you want a pilot to confirm the additional capture is real.

The calculator doesn't model the operational lift of moving staff from phone to hospitality-focused work, the reduction in turnover cost as phone burnout drops, or the incremental revenue from a bartender who stays at the well. Those effects are real and often meaningful, but they're hard to quantify without a pilot. Treat the calculator output as a floor for expected value, not a ceiling. Most operators find the actual ROI beats the calculator estimate once operational lift is included, but that's not a number to promise up front.