Toast
Restaurant-only, and the largest POS specialist in US restaurants. Hardware is purpose-built for kitchens (Flex handheld, kitchen display screens) and the product depth in restaurant-specific workflow (modifiers, voids and comps, tip pooling, kitchen routing) is deeper than the general-purpose systems in this table. Toast Inc listed publicly in 2021 on that restaurant focus. Toast does publish self-serve plan prices on its website, but we cannot retrieve them, so this table carries no Toast figures.
pos.toasttab.com returns a Cloudflare bot-verification wall to every automated request from our infrastructure, rechecked 3 October 2026. Toast's prices are visible to a person in a browser, so this is our limitation and not a gap in Toast's disclosure: open Toast's pricing page and read the plan fee and the card rate off it directly. We publish no Toast figures rather than substituting someone else's.
What this POS actually costs in Year 1.
*Representative buyer: 1 location · 2 terminals · $40K/mo card volume · ~600 transactions/mo.
No total. Toast publishes self-serve plan prices on its website, but its pricing page returns a bot-verification wall to every automated request we make, so we have no Toast figures to work from and will not substitute figures from POS review sites. Read the plan prices and the card rate off Toast's own pricing page, then use the formula on our methodology page with those numbers: hardware, plus software per terminal for twelve months, plus the card rate applied to your own volume and transaction count.
Why this POS is priced this way.
Toast is the restaurant-vertical specialist and the largest POS provider in US restaurants. The hardware is built for the environment rather than adapted to it: spill-resistant handhelds, kitchen screens specified for heat and grease. The depth in restaurant-specific workflow, modifiers, voids and comps, tip pooling, kitchen routing, is materially greater than in the general-purpose systems here. Toast Inc listed publicly in 2021 on exactly that focus, and the restaurant specialisation is the reason to look at it.
What first-time buyers miss.
Toast's entry tier historically traded a lower software fee for a higher locked card rate, which is the structure to interrogate: a $0 software plan with a worse rate is not free, it is a different payment schedule. Ask for the software fee and the card rate as a pair on every tier Toast offers you, then work out at what volume the cheaper software stops being cheaper. That is the same calculation that decides Square Free against Square Plus, and it has a definite answer once you have both numbers in writing.
Who this POS fits.
Full-service restaurants. Quick-service restaurants at meaningful volume. Multi-location restaurant groups where central reporting matters. Not a fit for retail, which has no first-party support here, and not for mobile vendors.