The Cheapest Pizza Franchises to Buy, Ranked by Investment

The phrase cheapest pizza franchise hides three different questions, and answering the wrong one is how buyers end up disappointed. Do you mean the lowest total investment from a big, established brand? The simplest model to build and run? Or the genuinely lowest-cost format, period? This guide answers all three with verified figures, ranks the options by total investment, and makes the reason clear: format drives cost more than the brand name does.

Every total-investment figure in the ranking is a reported FDD Item 7 number to confirm in each brand’s current Franchise Disclosure Document; where a franchise fee is mentioned, it is labeled as a fee, not an investment total. Cheapest means lowest verified investment, not the franchise fee, and never a promise of low cost in your specific market. None of it is an earnings figure.

The cheapest major pizza franchises, ranked by total investment

This ranking uses each brand’s own or a directly-sourced total-investment low end, and it includes only brands that actively franchise to new outside operators. Brands that are closed to new buyers, like Domino’s, or whose figures are too conflicting to trust, like Jet’s, are left off on purpose.

Rank	Brand	Total investment (Item 7)	Format	Why it lands here
1	Hungry Howie’s	from $238,982	Delivery and carryout, no dine-in	Lowest published floor of the recruiting majors; lean format
2	Marco’s Pizza	from $286,727	Carryout and delivery, small dine-in	Low fee and floor; growing carryout brand
3	Mountain Mike’s	from $356,000 (excludes real estate)	Dine-in family restaurant	Low end excludes buying land; multi-unit fee discounts
4	Papa Murphy’s	from $367,428	Take-and-bake, no cook line	Simplest model to build and run, see below
5	Little Caesars	from $376,500	Carryout Hot-N-Ready	Low fee, veteran discounts; floor reflects smaller formats
6	Donatos	from $546,637	Fast-casual with dine-in	Lowest royalty here (4%), but the highest floor of the six

Why take-and-bake is the low-complexity champion

Papa Murphy’s is the brand most often called the cheapest pizza franchise, and the reason is structural, not promotional. A take-and-bake shop assembles fresh pizzas that the customer bakes at home, which removes the single most expensive parts of a pizza operation: there are no ovens, no commercial exhaust hood and fire-suppression system, no dine-in room to build and maintain, and no delivery drivers or vehicles. Those are exactly the line items that drive a traditional pizza restaurant’s buildout into the high hundreds of thousands and load its ongoing labor and utility costs. Strip them out and both the upfront investment and the day-to-day overhead drop.

That is why take-and-bake earns its reputation even though its published floor is not literally the lowest number on the table. The delivery-and-carryout brands above it, Hungry Howie’s and Marco’s, have lower floors on paper, but they still run ovens and a delivery model. If your goal is the simplest, leanest pizza operation to run, take-and-bake is the format; if your goal is purely the lowest entry number from a national brand, a lean carryout brand may edge it.

Genuinely lower-cost formats: mobile and small-footprint

If you are chasing the absolute lowest entry cost and are open to a smaller or newer brand, two formats go below the majors, with a caveat: these are smaller franchisors whose figures often come from third-party trackers, so verify each one’s current FDD before you trust the number.

• Mobile pizza. A mobile wood-fired pizza trailer skips retail rent and buildout entirely. Nelly Belly franchises a mobile wood-fired pizza and piadina concept and states no prior experience is required; third-party franchise directories report a franchise fee around $49,000, a figure that is not published on its official site, so confirm the current number in its FDD. A truck or trailer is not free, but it avoids the leasehold-improvement and hood costs that dominate a storefront buildout.
• Small-footprint carryout. Compact carryout-and-delivery concepts on the order of 1,000 to 1,250 square feet report the lowest total-investment floors in the category, sometimes well under $100,000 per third-party trackers. Those figures are tracker-sourced rather than franchisor-published, and the brands are regional, so treat the numbers as a starting point and confirm them in the FDD.

Cheapest is a filter, not the answer

The trap with a cheapest list is treating the lowest number as the decision. A lower total investment almost always means a leaner format with a different revenue model and ceiling, and the ongoing costs, royalty, ad fund, and required purchases, can matter more than the entry price over the years you operate. Our guide on why a low or no royalty does not mean low ongoing cost covers that trap directly.

So use this ranking to narrow the field, then do the real work: request the FDD, read Item 7 for the true investment and Item 6 for the recurring fees with a franchise attorney, and confirm the brand is accepting new franchisees in your area. For the full side-by-side of pizza costs including the bigger brands, see our pizza franchise cost comparison, and for other low-cost concepts, our food franchises under $25K and under $100K guides.