It's easy to look at SMS credits as one more line on the bill — a nice-to-have you'll switch on once everything else is paid for. We'd gently push back on that. A reminder text isn't a cost. On any normal week it's one of the cheapest things you can do to protect money you've already booked.
Here's the way we put it to restaurants who aren't sure it's worth it.
The maths
A pack of 250 SMS credits costs £20 — that's 8p a message. So picture the next 250 reminders you send going out across a few busy weekends.
Out of those 250 guests, how many do you think had genuinely forgotten? Booked three weeks ago, life got busy, the date slipped their mind entirely. And how many knew full well they weren't going to come, but were never going to pick up the phone to tell you?
It only takes one. If a single text in that batch of 250 turns a no-show into a guest who actually walks in — or prompts someone who can't make it to ring and cancel — that £20 has already paid for itself many times over. Everything after that first save is profit.
Why a text changes what people do
A reminder does something quietly powerful: it tells the guest you know who they are and you're expecting them. You have their name. You have their number. And if you hold a card against the booking, the text is a polite nudge that there may be a no-show charge if they simply don't appear.
That little jolt of accountability is usually all it takes. It splits your would-be no-shows neatly into two:
- The ones who forgot — they read the text, think "oh, that's tonight," and turn up. You'd have lost them completely; instead they're sitting at your table.
- The ones who can't make it — they read the text and, rather than ghosting you, they ring up or reply to their confirmation to cancel. Which brings us to the part that really matters.
A no-show isn't one empty seat — it's a dead table
This is the bit that's easy to under-count. When someone simply doesn't show, you don't just lose their covers. You lose the table — often for the whole sitting. A table for two that sits empty from 8pm could have turned two or three times by close. Nobody walking past gets seated there, because as far as your book is concerned, it's taken.
A reminder converts a silent no-show into an early cancellation — and an early cancellation is one you can do something about. A call at 4pm gives you all evening to give that table to someone else, take a walk-in, or move a waiting booking forward. A no-show at 8pm gives you nothing but a photo of an empty table on a night you turned people away.
Put a rough number on it. Say that table of two would have spent £60. Re-sell it once and that single table has paid for 750 reminders — three full packs — in a single evening. The £20 stops looking like a cost and starts looking like cheap insurance on a much bigger number.
What it actually costs
There's no subscription and no monthly fee — you buy credits as you need them, and they don't expire. Start with the 250-credit pack at £20 to see how it lands; the per-message price drops as the bundles get bigger:
- 250 credits — £20 (8p each)
- 500 credits — £35 (7p each)
- 1,000 credits — £60 (6p each)
- 2,500 credits — £137.50 (5.5p each)
- 5,000 credits — £250 (5p each)
You top up straight from the app through the same secure Stripe checkout you already use, and credits land on your balance as soon as the payment clears. You'll only ever spend what you choose to load.
How the reminders go out
Once it's switched on, NomNom does the work. A reminder lands on the guest's phone a few hours before they're due — at a civil time of day, never the middle of the night — and it comes from your name, not a random number, so it reads as coming from you. Cancelled and deleted bookings are skipped automatically, and the same guest will never get the same reminder twice. You don't have to remember to do anything; you just keep a few credits topped up.
Turning it on
Open Settings → SMS Service in the app:
- Set your Sender ID — the name guests see the text from (up to 11 characters, e.g. your venue's name).
- Switch Reminder SMS on and tweak the message template so it sounds like you.
- Top up your credits — the 250-credit pack at £20 is a good place to start.
That's it. There's a low-credit reminder built in too, so you'll get a heads-up before you run dry rather than discovering it after a quiet weekend.
Try it for a month. Send your first 250 texts, and keep half an eye on how many of those tables you'd otherwise have lost actually turn up — or call ahead instead of vanishing. We think you'll find the £20 was the easiest money you spent all month. And if you'd like a hand wording your reminder, just drop us a line.