Restaurant openings: Track Openings vs. building it yourself with ChatGPT or Claude
Restaurant openings show up in public filings weeks before the doors open. That is when the owner is still choosing a POS system and a payment processor.
An AI chat tool can find a few restaurant openings when asked once. A daily, deduped, sourced territory file takes recurring tools, tokens and hours. Every weekday Track Openings checks liquor filings, health permits, city and county agendas and local news for your territory, dedupes the results against the running file, and flags what is new and what changed. Homemade: about $360 in tools and tokens plus 25 hours a month. Track Openings: $249 a month and ~0 hours building the file.
What a homemade restaurant lead file costs per state, per month
All figures are estimates.
| Item | Tools and tokens | Time |
|---|---|---|
| AI tokens: ~30M per month (about 1.5M per daily run) | $210 | |
| Web scraping service for permit portals and news | $100 | |
| Owner and contact lookup service | $50 | |
| Setup: finding which counties and cities publish restaurant records | 30 hours, one time | |
| Daily run plus review: 60 minutes, ~21 weekdays | 21 hours | |
| Fixing sources when portals change | 4 hours | |
| Total, homemade | $360 | 25 hours a month (plus the 30-hour setup) |
| Track Openings | $249 | ~0 hours building the file |
How the tokens were priced: about 27M input tokens and 3M output tokens a month, at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, current flagship API rates.
What a lead looks like
| Name | Address | City | Stage | Filing date | Owner | Contact | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nick & Nora's Oyster Dive | 560 Stokes Road, Suite 1 | Medford, NJ | Pre-opening (expected Nov to Dec 2026) | 2026-10-09 (liquor license transfer application to Medford Township Council) | Michael and Jeniphur Pasquarello | Not yet published | Legal notice, Oct 9, 2026 |
Example from a New Jersey file, October 2026.
What it works out to
Cost per lead: lead volume varies by state. A state that adds about 30 new restaurant leads a month works out to about $8 per lead.
Payback: assuming about $2,000 in hardware, install and first-year residual per new account, one account covers about 8 months of the subscription.
Where restaurant openings show up first
- Liquor license applications and transfers
- Health department plan reviews and food permits
- City and county agendas: beer boards, zoning, site plans
- Local news
What the daily file handles
- A baseline file of every current restaurant lead in the territory
- Dedupe across days, so a lead appears once
- New vs. updated flags: new leads yellow, updated leads green
- Filing dates, so leads arrive before the doors open
- A source link on every row
- Owner names only when a source names them
- Published owner phone or email on about 30% of leads; every contact comes from a cited source and is never guessed
- Corporate chain units left out; franchise units included when a source names the local franchisee
Why public records are hard to automate
Each jurisdiction publishes on its own schedule and in its own format. Some use form-only search portals. Some post Excel-only reports. Some block automated access. Every new territory means finding and testing these sources one by one, and retesting them when they change.
At $35 an hour, 25 hours a month is $875, more than three times the subscription.
FAQ
Can ChatGPT find new restaurant openings in my area?
An AI chat tool returns the openings it can find in one search session. Track Openings checks liquor filings, health permits, city and county agendas and local news every weekday, compares the results with the prior day, and sends a file with new leads in yellow and updated leads in green.
How do POS dealers find restaurants before they open?
The openings show up in public records first: liquor license applications and transfers, health department plan reviews and food permits, and city and county agendas. Dealers either check those sources themselves on a schedule, or subscribe to a file that checks them every weekday and flags what is new.
How much does it cost to build a restaurant lead list with AI?
About $360 a month in tools and tokens per state, plus about 25 hours a month of run and review time, after a one-time setup of about 30 hours. The table on this page breaks the estimate down line by line.
How fast do new restaurant openings show up?
It varies by jurisdiction, because each one publishes on its own schedule. Once a record is public, it lands in the next weekday file.
Does Track Openings cover chains?
Track Openings covers independent restaurants. Franchise units are included when a source names the local franchisee. Corporate chain units are left out.
Get the file instead
Pricing: $249/month for the first state, $149/month for each additional state, cancel anytime.
Territory protection, a capped number of subscribers in your states, is available at a premium.