MarketMan is a strong tool for one job: purchasing. Purchase orders, supplier ordering, multi-vendor AP and COGS — it owns that link and does it well. But purchasing is where MarketMan stops; the number it produces still has to travel to the recipe, the dish and the plan. Lowboy connects the whole chain — purchasing to recipe cost to dish margin to prep — and aims the result at the chef, for $149/mo, month-to-month.
The point of any of these tools is to spend less time on inventory math and more on the food. Lowboy is built to get out of your way and hand those hours back.
MarketMan is deep where purchasing lives. Lowboy carries that data the rest of the way — into recipe cost, margin and prep — and does it month-to-month with no setup instead of an annual contract.
| Lowboy | MarketMan | |
|---|---|---|
| Recipe costing & food-cost % | ✓ | ~ |
| Purchasing & ordering | ✓ | ✓ |
| Invoice capture — line item | ✓ | ✓ |
| Inventory & variance | ✓ | ✓ |
| Forecasts prep & pars from your history | ✓ | ~ |
| Connected chef-facing insights (leak → fix → receipt) | ✓ | – |
| Stays current from a photo | ✓ | ~ |
| Price / month | $149 | $199+ |
| Setup & contract | none · monthly | setup + annual |
✓ full · ~ partial · – none. Representative 2026 starting prices; verify current figures with each vendor.
MarketMan is built around purchasing and inventory control, and it's good at it: purchase orders, multi-vendor ordering, supplier catalogs, invoice matching and accounts-payable workflow. For an operation where buying and AP are the daily battle — lots of vendors, tight inventory, a dedicated purchaser — that depth is genuinely useful. If ordering is your center of gravity, MarketMan owns that link with real maturity.
Owning purchasing answers what did I buy and what did it cost — but not which dish is now underwater, and what do I do about it. Lowboy takes the same purchasing and invoice data and keeps going: it re-costs the recipes those ingredients touch, moves each dish's margin, and surfaces the fix to the chef — plus a costed, shareable recipe book and prep forecasting MarketMan doesn't aim at.
And it's simpler to own: $149/mo, no setup, month-to-month — below MarketMan's monthly price and without an annual commitment — with no per-seat fees, so the whole crew is in. Start with a free food-cost audit and see your real number before you decide.
Do the math: a kitchen spending about $50,000 a month on food that trims that by just 1% saves roughly $500 a month — about 3.4× the $149 plan. One caught price hike or one re-priced dish usually clears it. MarketMan starts around $199+/mo — typically an annual contract with setup; Lowboy is $149, no setup, month-to-month.
Add the hours back, too — no spreadsheet nights, no manual invoice entry, no rebuilding the prep list when the menu changes.
Less time on the back office, more time on the food, your crew, and the reason you opened.
Get your free audit →