How a price gets onto this site.

DineForLess holds 117,019 menu prices read from 17,004 restaurants in 1,238 areas, covering 768 named dishes. Every one is a price a menu listed on a particular day, and that day is printed beside it on every page it appears. They are not daily specials, not happy hour prices and not offers: a restaurant can change a menu price the day after we read it, which is why the date is there and why there is a page for telling us one is wrong.

Where a price is read from

A price comes from the menu a restaurant publishes for itself. 7,195 of the 17,004 restaurants we hold prices from publish that menu on their own website, and 9,809 publish it as an online ordering page on a platform, which is the only menu some kitchens put a price on at all. We do not treat a platform's listing as the restaurant's own website: the link on a page says which of the two it opens. 16,299 of them gave a street address, which is printed on the card so the cheapest price in town is also a place you can walk to.

When they were read

The prices on the site now were read between 25 Aug 2026 and 18 Oct 2026. A price is never averaged across dates and never carried forward: what you see is the figure from the day named next to it. The weeks below are the whole of it, so you can judge how fresh the site is rather than take our word for it.

What qualifies a dish to be compared

A price on its own says nothing. For a dish to appear on an area's list, at least 3 kitchens in that area have to price it and at least 2 of them have to be different restaurants rather than branches of one chain, because a chain compared against itself is one price repeated. Each area then keeps the 40 dishes with the widest gap between the cheapest price and the typical one, which is why our pages name how many restaurants an area has rather than how many dishes: every well stocked area stops at the same 40, so the dish count would only ever tell you where the limit is. A dish also has to beat the typical price by at least $1.00 to lead a card.

Prices under $4.00 or over $120.00 are left out: below the first a listing is a side, a child's portion or a topping rather than the plate, and above the second it is catering. A price more than 2.5 times the typical one is dropped for the same reason, which removed 0 listings that were party trays and fifty-piece orders sitting under an ordinary menu heading. Without that rule a dish page called a $110 tray of wings the dearest wings in town, against a $21 typical.

What the typical price means

The typical price beside every dish is the middle of every price we hold for that dish in that area, counted across every kitchen we read, not across the ones listed on the page. It is not a former price and nothing here is struck through: it is what the dish costs at most places in town today, which is the only honest thing to measure a cheap price against.

The two are counted over different groups on purpose, and the pages say which is which. A dish page lists the cheapest 40 prices in an area, while the typical price and the kitchen count come from all of them; the busiest dish we hold is served by 851 kitchens in one area. 159 of our dish pages have more kitchens than the 40 they list, and each of those says so in the heading above the list rather than claiming to show every price.

What we do not do

We do not take payment from a restaurant to appear, to rank higher, or to be called the cheapest: the order on every page is the price, lowest first. We hold no menu we have not read, so a restaurant missing from an area is one we have not got to rather than one that failed a test. We do not split an area into neighbourhoods, because the place names on our records are municipalities and labelling them as neighbourhoods would be a guess. And we do not photograph plates: a picture on a dish card shows the kind of dish, never the plate a particular kitchen serves.

If a price here is wrong, tell us and we will read that menu again. The other pages worth reading are what this site is and what it stores about you, which is almost nothing.