Where the prices come from.

DineForLess is a price comparison for restaurant food. For each of the 1,238 areas we cover in Canada and the United States, it shows the dishes the most restaurants there put on their menus, the lowest price in town for each one, and every other kitchen serving it, cheapest first. 20,503 dishes are compared today, built from 117,019 menu prices read from 17,004 restaurants.

The prices are read from each restaurant's published menu, which is its own website where it has one and otherwise the online ordering page where it lists its menu. Each listing says which, and the link on a dish page is labelled accordingly. We do not accept prices sent in by restaurants or readers. Each price carries the date it was read, and the menus behind the site today were read between 25 Aug 2026 and 18 Oct 2026. Restaurants change prices without telling anyone, so a price here is a starting point, not a promise, and the restaurant's own menu is the final word.

A dish earns a place on an area's list only when at least three restaurants there serve it, because with two prices the typical price is simply the other restaurant's price and a saving stops meaning anything. The typical price is the middle of the range across every kitchen in that area. The best price is the lowest, but it has to be a believable one: a plate priced far below everything else in town is more often a side portion or a misread menu than a bargain, so it is dropped rather than headlined. A card is only shown where the saving against the typical price is at least a dollar.

Items are grouped by what a person would call the dish, so a menu's Classic Caesar and another's Caesar Salad sit on the same list, and the name each restaurant uses is printed beside its price. Drinks, condiments, sides sold as add-ons and anything that reads like a measure rather than a dish are left out. Restaurants listed twice under slightly different names or addresses are folded into one.

Dish photographs show the kind of dish, never a particular restaurant's plate. Where no honest photograph of a dish exists in our library, the card names the dish on a plain tile instead of borrowing a picture of something else. Photographs come from openly licensed sources that permit commercial use, and the credits for them are kept with the image library.

The site has no accounts. Saving a dish keeps it in your own browser and nowhere else. We do not sell prices, do not take payment from restaurants for placement, and do not change a price for anyone. If you run a restaurant and a price shown here is wrong, the quickest fix is to update your own menu, since that is what we read; you can also write to us.