“Square is free though.”

Square’s free plan has higher card rates than its paid tiers. The KDS app is a paid add-on and only available from Square Plus, so a real restaurant setup is Square Plus "$49/mo. per location" + Square KDS app "$30/mo. per device" (one device); online ordering included at $0 — $79/mo before processing, and Square Payments is non-negotiable. Published pricing as of August 2026.

“Toast already has my data.”

Your menu comes with you: our team loads it with you during onboarding, from a CSV or by hand, rather than handing you a template and wishing you luck. That is all we bring across. There is no automatic import from Toast, and customer lists, inventory, modifier setups and order history are not migrated, so keep your own exports from Toast for your records. We’ll scope the timeline against your specific menu on the call.

“Multi-location is a hard requirement.”

Today, FoodyOS is one restaurant per account. Native multi-location ownership (one login managing several restaurants with consolidated reporting) is on our roadmap. If you run 6+ locations and need that today, we’re not the right fit yet — and we’ll tell you that on the call.

“What about the AI ordering you advertise on the home page?”

The WhatsApp + AI ordering channel we ship in our LATAM and Brazil markets isn’t part of the $149 US plan. US operators have a different ordering culture; the US plan focuses on the branded ordering site + KDS + delivery dispatch. If your operation specifically wants AI ordering, we can scope a custom variant.

Can I keep the iPads I already own?

Yes — bring your own hardware. FoodyOS runs on the iPads and Android tablets you already have, so there’s no proprietary hardware to buy, and your devices stay yours if you ever switch away.

How current are the competitor numbers?

They reflect each vendor’s published pricing as of August 2026, and every row in the comparison table links to its source — the vendor’s own pricing page. We update the table when a vendor changes its published pricing.

Compare

Restaurant POS comparison, side by side.

Pick up to 2 competitors. We’ll line up real numbers, real bundles, real contracts — every cell sourced to the vendor’s own pricing page. Built for restaurant operators evaluating a switch, and for our sales team to walk through on a live call. For the marketplace commissions and card rates each company publishes, see our State of Restaurant Tech 2026 report.

At a glance: published monthly cost

What each vendor publishes for a single full-service location, and what that price actually covers. Only Square and Lightspeed publish a price for the whole set FoodyOS bundles — POS, kitchen display and online ordering. Where a vendor doesn’t, we show its cheapest published figure and say what it leaves out, rather than guessing at a bundle. Same data as the interactive tool below.

FoodyOS vs Toast, Square, Clover, Lightspeed and TouchBistro — published monthly software cost, what it covers, and payment processing.
Platform	Published / month	What that covers	Payment processing
FoodyOS	$149/mo	One plan, everything included — POS, KDS, online ordering, delivery dispatch, hostess, loyalty, inventoryPublished pricing as of August 2026. Source	Your own Stripe account — 2.9% + 30¢ online, paid to Stripe, not to us
Toast	$69/mo (floor)	Point Of Sale — "Starting at $69 /month" (POS only; bring your own hardware) POS only. Toast publishes no price for online ordering or kitchen display — both are add-ons quoted on request, so a comparable bundle costs more than this floor.Published pricing as of August 2026. Source	Toast does not publish a card rate; modelled at standard Stripe online rates so we do not overstate it
Square for Restaurants	$79/mo	Square Plus "$49/mo. per location" + Square KDS app "$30/mo. per device" (one device); online ordering included at $0Published pricing as of August 2026. Source	Square Payments — 2.9% + 30¢ online on Square Plus, the same tier as the monthly above
Clover	$179/mo	Restaurant Growth — Starter, $179/mo on a 36-month term Clover publishes its pricing only through a script-rendered page we could not retrieve on our last pass. This figure is from 6 August 2026 and has not been re-confirmed since — check Clover's own page before relying on it.Not re-confirmed since 6 August 2026. Source	Clover does not publish a card rate; modelled at standard Stripe online rates so we do not overstate it
Lightspeed Restaurant	$219/mo	Essential $189/mo (cheapest tier including online ordering) + Kitchen Display System "$30/screen per month"Published pricing as of August 2026. Source	Lightspeed does not publish a card rate; modelled at standard Stripe online rates so we do not overstate it
TouchBistro	$69/mo (floor)	Point of Sale — "starting at $69 /month" (POS only; hardware required) POS only, and hardware is required. TouchBistro publishes no price for its Kitchen Display System or Online Ordering — both are quote-only — so a comparable bundle costs more than this floor.Published pricing as of August 2026. Source	TouchBistro does not publish a card rate; modelled at standard Stripe online rates so we do not overstate it

FoodyOS is a flat $149/mo with every module included and 0% platform commission on direct orders. Rows marked “floor” are a vendor’s cheapest published price for part of that set only — they understate what a comparable setup costs on that platform, because the vendor doesn’t publish a price for the rest. Every figure carries the date we last retrieved it from the vendor’s own page.

For the conversation

The three things to remember.

When a prospect is choosing between us and Toast, Square, Clover, Lightspeed, or TouchBistro, these are the three angles that win — straight, defensible, no overstating.

The number is the number.

$149/mo per restaurant covers every module we ship today. Other vendors’ sticker prices look great until you add KDS, online ordering, and loyalty — then the bill more than doubles. Our flat fee is the bill. There’s no Phase 2 invoice waiting in the mail.

We don’t profit from your processing.

Toast’s own checkout prices the trade in the open: $0/month software at 3.09% + 15¢ per card transaction, or $69/month at 2.49% + 15¢ (pos.toasttab.com, August 2026). A low sticker price gets paid for somewhere. Our $149 is software-only. No per-order kickback, no opaque interchange-plus markup. The processor you choose is between you and them.

Month-to-month, BYO hardware.

Toast’s online checkout signs you up for a “subscription to Toast software with a 2 year agreement,” and Toast states its software “may only be used on approved Toast hardware” (pos.toasttab.com, August 2026). Clover publishes its restaurant systems as 36-month bundles (clover.com, August 2026). We don’t. If we stop earning your business this month, you cancel next month. Your iPads stay iPads — they don’t turn into paperweights when you switch.

Beyond the price table

How to run a restaurant POS comparison.

The table and the calculator above compare what each vendor publishes. The rest of a restaurant POS comparison is what to weigh, what to ask, and what a switch really costs.

The four levers that actually matter

Forget feature checklists for a second. Every POS decision comes down to four levers, and most operators ignore at least two of them until it’s too late:

Hardware lock-in. Does the software run on off-the-shelf iPads and Android tablets, or on proprietary terminals you can only buy from the vendor? Lock-in means a device that is a doorstop the day you switch.
Payment processor flexibility. Are you forced to use their processor, and is its card rate published? On $1M in card volume, a 0.3% rate difference is $3,000 a year.
Online ordering economics. Per-order commission, flat monthly fee, or hybrid? On $20K/month online, 2% vs 5% is $7,200/year.
Contract length. Month-to-month, 12 months, or 36+ months? Long contracts protect bad vendors from competition.

The 12 questions to ask every vendor

What’s the total monthly cost for my exact location count?
Is the contract month-to-month or multi-year?
Can I bring my own payment processor, or am I locked in?
What’s the all-in card processing rate, in writing?
Does the hardware work if I cancel, or is it a doorstop?
What’s the per-order fee on direct online orders?
Is the KDS included or sold separately, and on what hardware?
Do you have native WhatsApp / SMS ordering, or only third-party integrations?
What happens to my menu and customer data if I cancel?
How long does new-location onboarding take, end to end?
What’s the SLA on support? Live chat, phone, response time?
Show me a real customer running 5+ locations on you. Reference call this week?

If a vendor dodges any of those, that’s your answer. The good ones answer all twelve in a 30-minute call. Run that test on us. Two of our own answers up front, so you don’t have to ask: FoodyOS is one restaurant per account today, so we have no reference running five or more locations, and we do not publish a support SLA. Pricing is on the pricing page if you want the number before the call, and the FAQ covers contract length, hardware and Stripe in plain English.

Total cost of ownership: the math nobody runs

Sticker price is a trap. The number that matters is the all-in monthly cost across software, hardware, payment processing and add-on modules, for the next three years and not just month one. Take a restaurant doing $80,000 a month in card volume. At Stripe’s published online rate of 2.9% (stripe.com/pricing, August 2026), processing alone is about $2,320 a month before per-transaction fees. The published software prices in the table above run from $69 to $219 a month. A change of 0.2 points in the card rate is $160 a month on that volume, and the whole gap between the cheapest and the most expensive published software price is $150.

So when you sit down with a sales rep, ask them to model your actual volume, spread the hardware over 36 months, and add the per-screen KDS fees, the online-ordering tier and any loyalty or marketing module you need. The one-page summary a rep walks in with is rarely complete on all four.

Pay particular attention to processing-rate floors. A “custom rate” for higher volume is set inside a private merchant agreement, so there is no published number to hold anyone to. Negotiate against a published rate instead. Square prints its card rates by plan on its fee schedule, and Stripe prints its own: fixed numbers, available without a sales call.

Switching cost is the silent killer

The reason operators stay on a POS contract they dislike is usually not loyalty. It is the cost of getting their data out. Menus and customer lists generally export. Loyalty point balances, gift card liabilities, saved online-ordering accounts and the mappings to delivery apps and accounting tools often do not come along cleanly. Before you sign with anyone, ask what exports, in what format, and what does not, and plan for a stretch of a manager’s time and a period of running two systems side by side.

One last thing operators forget: the renewal clock. A multi-year contract may renew automatically unless you give notice inside a set window before the anniversary. Find that clause, put a reminder on the calendar 90 days ahead, and renegotiate every year whether or not you plan to switch.

Go deeper

Every comparison, in full.

The calculator above is the fast answer. These are the long ones — each with the vendor’s own pricing page cited on every claim.

Head to head

FoodyOS vs Grubhub / DoorDashMarketplace commission vs direct orders on your own domain.
FoodyOS vs ChowNowCommission-free ordering compared on total monthly cost.
FoodyOS vs PopmenuMarketing-led website tooling vs an operations backend.
FoodyOS vs Owner.comDirect-ordering growth stack compared feature by feature.
FoodyOS vs GloriaFoodFree online ordering vs an all-in-one restaurant platform.

Roundups

Toast alternativesSourced roundup of what operators actually switch to.
Square alternativesWhere Square's per-module pricing stops making sense.
Restaurant website builder alternativesOrdering-first alternatives to generic site builders.
Apple Wallet loyalty alternativesPunch-card apps vs a pass that lives in the wallet.

Run your own numbers

Stack cost calculatorAdd up what your current tools cost together.
Marketplace savings calculatorWhat third-party commission costs you per month.
Restaurant margin calculatorWhere margin actually goes, line by line.

Comparison FAQ

“Square is free though.”: Square’s free plan has higher card rates than its paid tiers. The KDS app is a paid add-on and only available from Square Plus, so a real restaurant setup is Square Plus "$49/mo. per location" + Square KDS app "$30/mo. per device" (one device); online ordering included at $0 — $79/mo before processing, and Square Payments is non-negotiable. Published pricing as of August 2026.
“Toast already has my data.”: Your menu comes with you: our team loads it with you during onboarding, from a CSV or by hand, rather than handing you a template and wishing you luck. That is all we bring across. There is no automatic import from Toast, and customer lists, inventory, modifier setups and order history are not migrated, so keep your own exports from Toast for your records. We’ll scope the timeline against your specific menu on the call.
“Multi-location is a hard requirement.”: Today, FoodyOS is one restaurant per account. Native multi-location ownership (one login managing several restaurants with consolidated reporting) is on our roadmap. If you run 6+ locations and need that today, we’re not the right fit yet — and we’ll tell you that on the call.
“What about the AI ordering you advertise on the home page?”: The WhatsApp + AI ordering channel we ship in our LATAM and Brazil markets isn’t part of the $149 US plan. US operators have a different ordering culture; the US plan focuses on the branded ordering site + KDS + delivery dispatch. If your operation specifically wants AI ordering, we can scope a custom variant.
Can I keep the iPads I already own?: Yes — bring your own hardware. FoodyOS runs on the iPads and Android tablets you already have, so there’s no proprietary hardware to buy, and your devices stay yours if you ever switch away.
How current are the competitor numbers?: They reflect each vendor’s published pricing as of August 2026, and every row in the comparison table links to its source — the vendor’s own pricing page. We update the table when a vendor changes its published pricing.

Ready to see FoodyOS in your restaurant?

Book a 30-minute demo. We’ll walk through your real menu, your real volume, and your real switch plan.

Book a demo See pricing

All competitor pricing reflects publicly disclosed terms as of August 2026, sourced from each vendor’s own pricing page. Specific deals vary — check the source URL on each row before quoting numbers in a contract negotiation.