If you cater weddings and events, you have probably seen Curate — proposal, recipe, and order software that started in the floral world and now markets to caterers too. It is a capable product. But its pricing model meters the two things a busy caterer does most: take inquiries and send proposals. This page compares Curate with NXCatering for a catering-first business.
Disclosure: NXCatering is a competitor to Curate. Here is our reasoning and our sources — verify everything yourself. Curate does not publish prices on its own site, so every Curate figure below is attributed to a third-party source and dated.
TL;DR verdict. If your business is design-led and floral-heavy, Curate’s recipe engine and visual proposals are hard to beat. If you are a catering-first operation — especially one that fields a lot of inquiries and declines some — Curate’s per-inquiry and per-proposal quotas can turn “a great month for leads” into “time to pay for more slots.” NXCatering is a flat $79/month, with no quotas on inquiries or proposals, built specifically for caterers.
Who Curate is for, and who NXCatering is for
Curate is florist-first. Its heritage is Stemcounter, a floral recipe tool, and its deepest features — stem counting, wholesaler libraries, mood boards — are built for floral design. Capterra summarizes Curate as software “for florists who do weddings and events,” and its review base skews floral and events-services. Curate has since added catering features and now markets to caterers, florists, rental companies, and venues.
NXCatering is built only for independent caterers. There is no floral module, no rental catalog, and no venue-booking layer — just the catering workflow: leads, branded proposals, deposit and final invoices, one-click BEOs, reusable menu packages, food costing, and payments that go straight to your own account.
If flowers are half your business, Curate’s breadth is a real advantage. If food is your whole business, a catering-first tool fits the way you actually work.
Pricing: metered tiers vs one flat price
This is the core difference. Curate is tiered and metered; NXCatering is flat and unlimited.
Curate does not publish prices on curate.co — its pricing page shows three tiers (Basic, Growth, Partnership) with “Let’s Chat” buttons and no dollar figures. The only public numbers come from aggregators. As of July 2026, Software Advice and Capterra list Curate’s Growth tier at about $275/month, including 240 proposals per year, and the Scale tier at about $500/month for unlimited proposals. Inquiries are also metered by tier.
NXCatering is $79/month flat (or $790/year), with unlimited leads and proposals, no tiers, and no add-ons. Here is the total cost of ownership at three volumes a caterer might hit:
| Your volume | Curate (as of July 2026)¹ | NXCatering |
|---|---|---|
| ~5 events/month (~60 proposals/yr) | Growth, ~$275/mo → ~$3,300/yr | $79/mo → $948/yr |
| ~15 events/month (~180 proposals/yr) | Growth, ~$275/mo, approaching the 240/yr cap | $79/mo → $948/yr |
| ~40 events/month (~480 proposals/yr) | Scale, ~$500/mo (Growth’s 240/yr cap exceeded) → ~$6,000/yr | $79/mo → $948/yr |
¹ Illustrative, not a quote. Curate does not publish prices on curate.co; these figures are third-party, from Software Advice and Capterra, as of July 2026 (Growth ≈ $275/mo including 240 proposals/year; Scale ≈ $500/mo for unlimited proposals). Verify current pricing and limits directly with Curate.
The pattern: as your inquiry and proposal volume grows — the sign of a healthy catering business — Curate’s cost steps up, while NXCatering’s stays put. We wrote more about the reasoning behind a single price on why we use flat pricing, and the current plan is on our pricing page.
Features: where they overlap, where they differ
Curate is feature-rich, and it genuinely covers the catering essentials — proposals, back-of-house prints and BEOs, a product catalog with recipes, food costing that scales by guest count, invoicing, and Stripe payments. One caveat worth knowing: on Curate, several catering-relevant features (recipes, forms, shopping lists, purchase orders) start at the Growth tier, not the entry tier — so a caterer generally needs the metered-proposal plan to unlock real catering functionality.
NXCatering covers the same core catering workflow — proposals, invoicing and deposits, BEOs, menus and packages, food costing, and payments — with every feature included at the one flat price. The trade is honest: Curate offers floral depth NXCatering does not; NXCatering offers a catering-only tool with no quotas and nothing behind a higher tier.
What Curate users say
Reviewers consistently praise Curate’s visual proposals and floral recipe tools. The recurring friction for high-volume users is the metering. A caterer reviewing Curate on Software Advice reported: “Apparently, there’s an annual quota of inquiries they allow into your account” — an attributed opinion from one reviewer as of July 2026, not a statement of Curate’s current policy, which you should confirm with Curate directly.
We raise it only because it maps to a real structural difference: a plan that counts inquiries behaves differently in a busy season than a plan that does not.
You keep your payments — and your customers
On NXCatering, catering payments run through Stripe Connect straight to your own account: you are the merchant of record, and the platform never takes a percentage of your catering revenue. You pay the flat software fee and standard Stripe processing, and that is the whole story. When you send a deposit invoice, the money lands in your bank, not in a middleman’s balance that pays out later.
This matters for a comparison because “total cost” is not only the subscription line. A tool that meters your inquiries can quietly cap your growth in a strong season, and a tool that sits between you and your deposits changes your cash flow. NXCatering’s model is deliberately boring on both counts: unlimited inquiries and proposals, and deposits that go directly to you. There is nothing to reconcile at a higher tier and no revenue share to back out of your margins.
If you want the full reasoning behind charging one flat price instead of metering usage, we lay it out on why flat pricing.
Inquiries are not bookings
The deeper issue with metering inquiries is that a catering business’s inquiry-to-booking ratio is usually low — you might field ten inquiries to book three events. Pricing that counts inquiries taxes the top of your funnel, exactly where you want to say yes to every conversation and qualify later. Declining a bad-fit inquiry should cost you nothing; on a metered plan, as the reviewer sentiment above suggests, it may still consume a slot.
A flat plan removes that tension. You can answer every inquiry, quote aggressively, and let your close rate — not your software tier — decide your month. For a caterer who spends money on marketing to drive leads, the alignment matters: you do not want your software getting more expensive precisely because your lead generation is working. That is the structural reason we price on a flat rate rather than on volume.
When Curate is the better choice
We would genuinely recommend Curate over NXCatering in these cases:
- You are florist-first or design-led. Curate’s stem counting, wholesaler libraries, and mood-board proposals are purpose-built for floral design. Nothing catering-only will match that depth.
- Your proposals win on presentation. If the look of the proposal is your sales pitch — photo galleries, drag-and-drop layouts — Curate’s visual output is a real strength that multiple reviewers credit for booked business.
- You run a multi-discipline event studio. If florals, rentals, and catering live in one linked catalog with recipe-driven costing across categories, Curate’s model spans all of them in a way a catering-only tool does not.
If that is your business, Curate is a strong pick, and we would rather you choose the right tool than the one we sell.
Switching to NXCatering
If you are a catering-first operation and the metering is the thing pushing you to look, moving is straightforward: you can rebuild your menus and packages once, and every new inquiry and proposal after that is unlimited on the flat plan.
The most honest way to decide is to try it on your own events. You can explore the full demo with no signup, or start a workspace and send a real proposal today. Either way, verify the Curate figures above against Curate’s own team before you decide — that is the only way to compare on facts.