Loman Review: Price, Fit, and Where It Stops
Loman closes the whole restaurant phone call, card included, from $199 a month. A fair review of what it does well, what it costs, and who should not buy it.
On this page
Loman is the product most restaurant operators end up comparing everything else to. It answers the phone, takes the order with modifiers, charges the card inside the call, books the table, and writes the ticket into the POS. From $199 a month, with no per-minute fees.
That combination is rare. Most competitors pick two of those four and stop.
TL;DR:
- Loman publishes $199 a month and up, with no per-minute fees, nine named POS and ecosystem integrations, and card payment inside the call.
- The card-in-call path is the real differentiator: any card, a first call included, finishes before the caller hangs up, and the ticket lands prepaid.
- The headline 99.6% accuracy and 20M+ call claims are the vendor's, not an audit. Ask for the definition before you quote the number.
- At four-minute calls and 900 calls a month, a flat $199 is cheaper than a $299 metered plan. At 250 short calls, the metered plan is cheaper.
- Kovo takes the order, reads it back, and prints the ticket from $99, and it charges a card the shop already holds while the caller is on the line. The gap left is a first-time caller's card and a booking written into OpenTable.
What Loman actually is
A voice agent built only for restaurants. It answers every call, takes pickup and delivery orders with modifiers (its published product still offers both), takes payment during the call, and writes the finished order into the POS and kitchen display. It also books reservations through OpenTable and resells the whole thing to single sites, multi-unit groups, and enterprise brands.
The published integration list is the longest in the category: Toast, Square, Clover, SpotOn, SkyTab, Aloha by NCR, Olo, Stream, and OpenTable, sold as "30+ POS" once middleware partners are counted. It lists unlimited simultaneous calls and a go-live window under 24 hours.
Two things are worth separating in that paragraph. The capability list is verifiable on a demo: call it, order, watch the ticket. The outcome numbers are marketing: up to 22% higher phone revenue and up to 17% lower labor costs, which are operator-reported and not audited.
Where it is genuinely good
The card. This is the whole ballgame for a busy takeout line. A caller orders, pays, and hangs up. The kitchen sees a prepaid ticket, and the counter does not chase a payment when the food is bagged. Kovo has moved on this too: it charges a card the shop already holds, off-session, while the caller is still talking, and hands a first-time caller a Stripe link with the line held open. The difference left is the stranger on the first call, who is prepaid here and a link away there.
The breadth. Nine named integrations means a shop is less likely to hear "we do not support that POS". For a group running Toast in one store and Clover in another, that matters more than any feature comparison.
The reservation path. Two-way OpenTable booking, with Loman appearing on OpenTable's own voice AI partner list. A caller asking for a table gets a booking, not a message.
The simplicity of the bill. No per-minute fee means a five-minute call costs the same as a two-minute one. For a shop whose calls run long, that is worth more than it looks.
Where it stops
It is expensive at low volume. $199 a month is cheap against 900 calls and expensive against 150. A café taking a dozen short calls a day is paying for capacity it does not use, and no feature list changes that arithmetic.
The accuracy claim needs a definition. Loman's published 99.6% sounds conclusive until you ask what counts as an error. An item with the wrong modifier is not an accuracy hit if you only score items. Ask, then test with the order your kitchen gets wrong.
Unlimited is concurrency, not minutes. The phrase "unlimited calls" is doing a lot of work. It means simultaneous calls are not capped, which is real, and it does not mean the plan is dimensionless. Confirm what is included: recording, transcripts, SMS, and onboarding time are the usual line items.
Setup is a project, not a signup. Under 24 hours is the published promise, and it depends on the POS, the menu, and who is available to test. Ask what the vendor needs from you and who writes the modifier rules.
The price at your own volume
The flat fee is the argument, so run it against your calls.
| Calls a month | Average length | Connected minutes | Loman at $199 | Kovo at $99 / $299 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 150 | 2.5 min | 375 | $199 | $99 |
| 300 | 2.5 min | 750 | $199 | $99 |
| 600 | 3 min | 1,800 | $199 | $299 |
| 900 | 4 min | 3,600 | $199 | $299 |
| 1,500 | 4 min | 6,000 | $199 | $299, then forward to your phone |
Kovo is a metered plan: $99 for 750 connected minutes, $299 for 5,000, and calls forward to the shop's own phone at the cap instead of billing an overage. Loman is a flat fee.
At 600 calls of three minutes, Loman is $100 cheaper. At 300 short calls, Kovo is $100 cheaper.
Neither number includes the calls you are not answering. Industry estimates put a missed call at $35 to $85, and what missed calls cost a restaurant walks through the monthly arithmetic. Against that, the $100 gap between the two plans is noise.
The five questions to ask on the demo
- "Take my card, then show me the POS ticket." The payment must land on the ticket, not in a separate dashboard.
- "What counts as an accuracy error?" Item, modifier, price, or all three. Then test with your worst order.
- "Read back the order after I change one item." A read-back that is skipped after an edit is the failure that costs a Friday.
- "What is 86'd right now, and how does the agent know?" Menu freshness is the quiet killer. The menu sync walkthrough explains what to look for.
- "What is the contract term, and what happens to my number if I leave?" Number portability is the question nobody asks until it matters.
Who should buy Loman
Buy it if the card has to be charged before the caller hangs up, if callers ask for tables and the booking has to land in OpenTable, if you run a group that needs one vendor across several POS systems, or if the caller's card has to be captured on the first call. Delivery is not the difference: both take a delivery order, and Kovo runs it on the shop's own drivers. Buy it if your calls routinely run past four minutes at volume, where the flat fee wins.
A shop taking deposits for Friday nights, or one whose phone is the only ordering channel during a snowstorm, is buying a payment and reservation system more than a voice.
Who should not
Do not buy it for a 12-table café taking fifteen short calls a day. The math does not support $199, and the reservation path is not the problem you have.
Do not buy it expecting an accuracy guarantee. The number is the vendor's, and your menu is not their corpus.
And do not buy it if a $99 product covers the line and your card flow already works at the counter. That is the honest case for Kovo: $99 or $299, a read-back, a ticket on the POS, and the card you already hold charged while the caller is on the line, with an order limit the shop sets. The remaining gap is a first-time caller's card and a booking written into your OpenTable book, and for a shop whose calls are mostly regulars that gap is small.
FAQ
Is Loman worth $199 a month?
For a shop that takes enough phone orders to miss some, yes. A single missed call is estimated to cost $35 to $85, and $199 is covered by three to six recovered orders a month. It is harder to justify for a shop taking 150 short calls a month, where a metered plan at $99 can cover the same line and the difference is capacity you do not use.
Does Loman really take the card during the call?
That is the vendor's published capability, and it is the one row where Loman still has no equal: any card, including a first-time caller's, captured inside the call. Do not take it on faith: ask for a live call, pay with your own card, and confirm the charge lands on the POS ticket rather than a separate processor dashboard. A payment flow that works but does not reach the ticket is a second reconciliation job.
What does the 99.6% order accuracy figure mean?
It is a vendor claim from a corpus the vendor says is over 20 million calls, and it is not independently audited. Ask how accuracy is defined (item, modifier, price, or an order scored correct only if all three match), what the sample was, and whether the number includes calls the agent handed to a person. A definition that excludes handoffs flatters any product.
Can Loman book an OpenTable table?
Loman publishes two-way OpenTable booking, and OpenTable maintains a list of voice AI partners for its reservation products. Verify the restaurant's specific plan and market, because partner listings change and a booking integration is worth nothing if it is not switched on for your account. Kovo takes a table in its own reservation book and does not write into OpenTable or Resy, so if the booking has to land in the platform you already run, this is the reason to choose Loman.
What is the catch with unlimited calls?
Unlimited concurrency means simultaneous calls, not unlimited minutes, and the two are easy to conflate. A flat monthly fee with no per-minute charge is genuinely simpler than a metered plan, but ask what happens at 3 a.m. to a call that needs a person, and whether recording, transcripts, and SMS are included or billed as add-ons.
Final Thoughts
Loman earns its position. It closes the call the way a counter closes a sale: the order, any card paid before the caller hangs up, the ticket in the POS, and the table booked into the OpenTable book when the caller wants one. Kovo now closes most of that call too, with a card the shop already holds and a table in its own book. What Loman alone still does is take a stranger's card inside the conversation and write the booking into the platform you already run. If those are the job, $199 a month is a fair price for it.
If the job is narrower, the bill should be too. Run the volume table above with your own calls, then take one demo call with your own worst order. Kovo is $99 for 750 minutes, needs no card for 14 days, and prints the ticket to Toast, Square, Clover, Olo, or a printer. Take a test call with your own menu and compare the two tickets yourself.