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The Trading Online Voucher is closed. Here is what a Dublin café can get instead
The Trading Online Voucher closed at 5pm on 13 December 2024. What replaced it is two steps: a Digital for Business consultancy with your Local Enterprise Office, then a Grow Digital Voucher worth 50% of eligible costs, minimum grant €500, maximum €5,000. Whether a café website qualifies depends on how it is bought.
What closed, and when
The Trading Online Voucher paid "a maximum value of €2,500 or 50% of eligible expenditure … whichever is the lesser", and it is gone. Local Enterprise Office Cork North & West still carries the notice: "Trading Online Voucher Scheme - Closing Date 5pm on Friday 13 December 2024."
If a web designer has quoted you on the basis that the €2,500 voucher will cover half of it, that quote is out of date. Check the date on whatever page you were shown.
What replaced it: two steps, in this order
Digital for Business.
A consultancy with a digital consultant arranged through your Local Enterprise Office. This comes first, and it is the gate: the voucher is "open to small enterprises who have completed a Digital for Business support Project within the previous two years".
The Grow Digital Voucher.
Money towards putting the recommendations in place, applied for "before any project expenditure is incurred or any project activity commences".
Digital for Business: who qualifies
The Local Enterprise Office portal puts the bar at small enterprises "with between 1 and 50 paid employees" that are "established and trading for at least 6 months", are not already clients of Enterprise Ireland or the IDA, are solvent and have current tax clearance. Note what the bar is: how many people are on the payroll and how long you have been trading, not what you sell. A café is in scope on size.
What you get is described as time with a consultant who provides "analysis of existing digital systems in the business to identify potential gaps in meeting business needs" and "recommendations for improving existing systems and integrating new solutions" (National Enterprise Hub).
Here is the part worth knowing before you ring anyone. I could not find a Local Enterprise Office page that publishes how many days of consultancy you get, or what, if anything, it costs you. The three official pages linked in this section, read on 14 September 2026, do not carry a number of days or a price. If you are quoted one somewhere else, ask your own office and take the number from them.
Grow Digital Voucher: the exact terms
From the Local Enterprise Office's own Grow Digital grant page, quoted:
| What it pays | "50% of eligible costs with minimum grant aid of €500 up to a maximum grant of €5,000" per application. A business may hold up to two vouchers, to a combined maximum of €5,000. |
|---|---|
| Who can apply | Small enterprises "who have completed a Digital for Business support Project within the previous two years". |
| When to apply | "An application must be submitted before any project expenditure is incurred or any project activity commences." |
| Software that counts | A subscription "that is NEW to the business for a maximum of one year subscription", off the shelf. Website development, e-commerce, booking systems, CRM, accounting and cybersecurity software are given as examples. |
| Software that does not | "Custom or bespoke software is not eligible for grant support." Neither are systems bought for regulatory compliance. |
| Training and configuration | "Training and Configuration amount combined can be no more than 50% of the overall project cost." |
The part that catches cafés out
Local Enterprise Offices run more than one pot of money, and the rules are not the same across them. Read the ineligible list on Local Enterprise Office Dublin City's Eligibility Criteria for Financial Supports and your own trade is named in it:
"Areas of enterprise which involve displacement of existing jobs or business e.g. Builders, Hairdressers, Cafes, Pubs, Hotels, General Printers, Construction, Trades, Cleaning Services, etc. Where there are a large number of operators within a sector, our independent evaluation committee has to have regard to the implications of grant aiding one or some, possibly putting the others at a competitive disadvantage."
That list governs Dublin City's Feasibility, Business Start Up (Priming) and Business Expansion grants. So "a grant for my business" and "a grant for this website" are not the same question, and the answer to the first tells you nothing about the second. The Grow Digital Voucher publishes its own ineligible-sector list, and the sectors named on it are coal, steel, primary agriculture, fishery and aquaculture, gambling, adult entertainment, tobacco and unauthorised cannabis products. A café is not on that one.
So the honest position is: you are looking at a different scheme from the grants a café is normally turned down for, and the question is worth asking rather than assuming either way. Ask about Digital for Business and the Grow Digital Voucher by name.
Does a €690 website qualify?
This is my arithmetic on the published terms, not a ruling from anybody, and your Local Enterprise Office decides.
A minimum grant of €500 at 50% only comes out of a project costing €1,000 or more. A €690 one-off payment does not reach that floor on its own, and a site built once for a single shop is close to what the line about custom software is written about. Bought the other way, €435 up front and thirteen four-week cycles of €79 is €1,462 across a first year, which clears the floor and reads much more like the off-the-shelf, one-year subscription the terms describe.
Where it gets genuinely arguable: the care plan is a person keeping your hours, menu and photos current, not a licence you log into. A Local Enterprise Office could reasonably read that as a service rather than software. I am not going to tell you it is a certainty, and you should be wary of anyone who does.
A worked example for a six-staff café
Nobody real, and no client of mine: say a Dublin café with six people on the payroll, open two years, no site worth the name. On the published terms for Digital for Business and the Grow Digital Voucher, the path looks like this.
- Ring the Local Enterprise Office and ask about Digital for Business. Six employees is inside "between 1 and 50"; two years' trading clears "at least 6 months".
- Complete that project. The voucher is open only to businesses that finished one "within the previous two years", so this is not a step you can skip or do afterwards.
- Apply for the Grow Digital Voucher before commissioning anything. Every euro spent first is a euro outside the application.
- Put the year-one cost of a care plan in as the project: €435 plus thirteen cycles of €79, €1,462. At 50%, that is a €731 grant, which clears the €500 minimum.
- If it is approved on those terms the café is out €731 in year one instead of €1,462. If it is refused, the site still costs what it costs and nothing was wasted except the phone call.
Numbers are the studio's published prices on 14 September 2026 (the full pricing), and what a café website costs in Ireland puts them beside every other Irish price I could find published. Approval is not mine to promise.
How long it takes
None of the Local Enterprise Office pages linked on this page publishes a turnaround, so treat a specific number of weeks quoted elsewhere as that writer's experience rather than a rule. What the terms do fix is the order: the Digital for Business project has to be finished first, and the voucher application has to be in before the work starts. Two steps with no published timescale between them is not a plan for a website you need live next month. Start the conversation before you need it, not after.
Your Dublin Local Enterprise Office
Four offices cover the county. Yours is the one for the local authority area your premises sits in, and their published contact details on 14 September 2026 were:
| Dublin City | 01 222 5611, info@leo.dublincity.ie. Civic Offices, Block 4, Floor 1, Dublin 8, D08 RF3F |
|---|---|
| Fingal | (01) 8900 800, info@leo.fingal.ie |
| Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown | (01) 204 7083, leo@dlrcoco.ie |
| South Dublin | 01 4149215, info@leo.sdublincoco.ie |
What else is there in 2026
For a café specifically, not much beyond the two above, and it is worth knowing that rather than going looking. Dublin City's other grants are Feasibility, Business Start Up (Priming) and Business Expansion: they are the ones the ineligible list above governs, and the published eligible cost for the last two is salary, not a website. None of the Local Enterprise Office pages linked on this page announces a return of the Trading Online Voucher or a third digital scheme for a business this size. If someone offers you one, ask them for the localenterprise.ie URL before you take it seriously.
Questions
- Should I take a trading online voucher?
- You cannot: applications closed at 5pm on Friday 13 December 2024. The question to ask your Local Enterprise Office now is about Digital for Business and the Grow Digital Voucher, by name.
- Can I get the Grow Digital Voucher for a website?
- Website development is named among the eligible software examples on the Local Enterprise Office's own Grow Digital grant page, so the category is in. Whether your particular quote fits depends on the one-year subscription wording, the custom-software exclusion and the €500 minimum grant, and the office decides.
- Do I really have to do Digital for Business first?
- Yes. The voucher is "open to small enterprises who have completed a Digital for Business support Project within the previous two years". There is no route that starts at the voucher.
- Can I apply after my website is built?
- No. "An application must be submitted before any project expenditure is incurred or any project activity commences." A site already commissioned is outside the scheme, and it is the easiest way to lose the grant without knowing you have.
- My café was turned down for a Local Enterprise Office grant before. Is this the same thing?
- Probably not the same pot. Dublin City's grant eligibility criteria name "Cafes, Pubs, Hotels" among ineligible areas of enterprise for its Feasibility, Priming and Expansion grants. The Grow Digital Voucher publishes a different ineligible-sector list, and cafés are not on it.
- How much would I actually get?
- Half of eligible costs, with a floor of €500 and a ceiling of €5,000 per application, and up to two vouchers to a combined €5,000. The floor is the one that bites a small café: half of a project under €1,000 does not reach €500.
- Does the grant cover the .ie domain and the hosting?
- Ask your office. The published eligible list is written around software subscriptions new to the business for a maximum of one year, and a domain registration is neither software nor a subscription you keep for a year only. Do not assume it is in the project value.
- Which Local Enterprise Office is mine?
- The one for the local authority area your premises is in: Dublin City, Fingal, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown or South Dublin. The four numbers and addresses are in the table above.
If you want the site itself
Cupán Studio, spelled Cupan Studio when the fada is a nuisance to type, builds the website for your Dublin coffee shop and sends you the live link before asking for anything: what that is and what it costs, or how it works.