Ask Bob: Tableside · Last updated 3 September 2026
Your subscription is unlimited in the way that matters — everything the app does is included, from the first minute. But reading a menu and speaking it aloud costs us real money every time, so those two things carry a number. This page is that list, in public, so "fair use" is never a word we hide behind.
| What | Limit | Resets | What happens at the limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Menu captures — photographing and reading a menu | 25 per day | Midnight, UTC | New captures pause until the reset. A menu you have already read stays open and readable. |
| Pages per capture | Up to 10 | — | Photograph a long menu in more than one capture. |
| Read aloud — speaking your order in the local language | 20 per day | Midnight, UTC | The written phrase still appears; only the spoken version pauses. You can always show the screen to the waiter. |
| Recommendations, wine notes, your taste profile, your meal log | No limit | — | — |
Twenty-five menus a day is more restaurants than anyone eats in. It is a fuse, not a ration.
A menu you capture — the photo and the reading we make from it — is deleted automatically within 24 hours. That is a privacy decision, not a usage cap: the menu is for that meal. Your taste profile and your meal log are not on that clock and stay until you delete them. The Privacy Policy has the detail.
The app also has a whole-service daily spending ceiling on the systems that read menus and write the recommendations. If the service as a whole reaches it, the app goes quiet for everyone until the next day and says so rather than failing silently. This has nothing to do with your account or your usage, and you are never charged for it. It exists so a runaway bug or an attack can't take the app down for a week.
The limits above assume one person using the app the way it was meant to be used. Sharing one account between many people, scripting or automating captures, scraping the app's output, or working around a limit are covered by the Terms of Use instead, not by this page.
Every figure here is a setting on our server, not something baked into the app, so we can move it without shipping an update — which is the point: it means a limit that is too tight can be loosened the same day. They may change. When one does, we update this page and the date at the top. If we ever reduce a limit in a way that would affect normal use, we will give notice in the app before it takes effect.
Questions about any of this: info@askbob.guide.