Ask Bob: Tableside · Last updated 19 October 2026
Your subscription includes everything the app does, from the first minute. It does not include an unlimited number of menu reads. Every time the app reads a menu, a bill or speaks a phrase aloud, it costs us real money, so those things have limits. They are listed on this page so that "fair use" is never a word we hide behind.
| What | Limit | Resets | What happens at the limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Menu reads — photographing a menu (or scanning its QR code) and having it read | 10 per day 30 per month |
Day: midnight, UTC Month: the 1st, UTC |
New menu reads pause until the reset. A menu you have already read stays open and readable. |
| Pages per menu read | Up to 10 | — | Photograph a long menu in more than one read. |
| Bill reads — photographing the bill to check it | 10 per day | Midnight, UTC | Bill reads pause until the reset. |
| 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. |
One menu read covers the whole meal: the translation, the recommendations and the wine notes all come from it, and none of them counts again. Opening a menu you have already read does not count either. Some menus the app has read recently open from a stored copy, and those do not count. Your taste profile and your meal log are not limited.
Thirty menus a month is a restaurant a day, every day. If you photograph menus far more often than you eat out, you will reach the limit, and that is what it is for.
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 at their own meals. Sharing one account between many people, photographing menus in bulk, scripting or automating reads, scraping the app's output, or working around a limit breaks the Terms of Use, and we may suspend an account that does it.
Every figure here is a setting on our server, not something built into the app, so we can change it without shipping an update. 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.