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Key Takeaways
- Pricing isn’t transparent: Toast’s advertised $0 and $69 plans rarely reflect what restaurants actually pay once online ordering, processing fees, hardware, add-ons, and delivery charges are included.
- Hardware limits flexibility: Because Toast requires proprietary devices, any expansion, replacement, or multi-location rollout is tied to its hardware pricing and upgrade cycle.
- Processing costs add up: All online orders run as higher-cost CNP transactions, and you can’t bring an outside processor, so you’re negotiating only with Toast rather than shopping the wider payments market.
- Menus require heavy upkeep: Modifier-heavy menus, location-specific configurations, and sync issues create ongoing operational overhead, especially for multi-store brands.
- Delivery gets expensive: Toast’s limited dispatch radius and per-order courier fees can quickly inflate costs, particularly for restaurants with high delivery volume.
- Restolabs brings control: With open hardware, processor choice, unified menu management, and flexible delivery workflows, Restolabs provides predictable pricing and cost efficiency without lock-ins.
If you’ve ever tried to figure out what Toast actually costs, you already know it’s not as simple as the pricing page makes it look.
Yes, Toast advertises plans that “start at $0/ 0/month” or “from $69/month.” But the real number restaurant owners end up paying often looks very different once they factor in online ordering, payment processing, Toast-required hardware, add-ons, delivery fees, and per-location upgrades.
This doesn’t make Toast a bad system—far from it. It’s polished, powerful, and designed for restaurants that want an all-in-one POS ecosystem. The fact is calculating total online ordering cost on Toast requires more detail than what most owners expect.
That’s exactly what this blog post covers. We’ll walk you through the core Toast costs, the add-ons that quietly stack up, how the platform structures payment fees, and what restaurants typically overlook when trying to calculate their monthly or annual spend.
Understanding Toast’s Online Ordering Costs
Before we discuss its pricing, let’s get a few questions out of the way.
What Is Toast?
It’s a restaurant-focused point-of-sale and management platform combining purpose-built hardware, cloud-based software, and integrated payments. Toast offers modules for online ordering, menu management, reporting, kitchen display systems, payroll, marketing, and loyalty.
Why Understanding Costs Truly Matters
The reasons are clear:
1. Hardware lock-in is real
Toast runs on proprietary hardware. If device requirements change, you might need to upgrade even if your existing hardware still works.
2. Toast’s pricing is fully modular
Online ordering, marketing, loyalty, payroll, inventory, advanced reporting, delivery dispatch, catering, and multi-location tools, nearly every essential capability is a paid add-on.
3. Payment processing is mandatory
Toast is a payment facilitator (not the processor itself), and you must use Toast Payments. There’s no option to shop for a better rate.
4. True cost varies by restaurant model
High-volume QSRs, multi-location groups, and food trucks all experience Toast pricing differently, especially as online orders and add-ons stack up.
Toast Pricing Breakdown 2026: All Costs, Add-Ons, and What You Pay
Below is a clean, realistic breakdown of what Toast online ordering typically costs a restaurant, including the operational factors that drive the total cost above expectations.
1. Software subscription
Toast has three main plan structures:
If you want to avail the online ordering option on Toast, it's an add-on to all the 3 plans mentioned above and not included as part of the plans.
2. Toast-required hardware
Toast doesn’t allow restaurants to use their own devices. Only Toast-approved hardware is permitted, which may require upgrades from time to time or may be discontinued altogether. In practical terms, this means you’re incurring costs like:
- Toast Go 2 handheld → $494
- Flex terminal + tap → $719
- Flex + customer display → $944
- Kitchen display screens → $674 + $35/month
The Restolabs Advantage: With Restolabs, you can run your ordering, menu management, and delivery workflows on any combination of iPads, mobile phones, desktops, and integrate with partner POS systems without worrying about proprietary devices or forced upgrades.
This gives you the freedom to standardize your setup across locations or tailor the hardware mix to each store’s needs. And because you’re not tied to vendor-controlled hardware cycles, you retain complete control over your technology costs and your timeline for scaling.
3. Digital storefront suite (Toast direct online ordering software)
Based on recent market quotes and published add-on pricing ranges, Toast’s digital ordering tools are typically priced around $75/month.
What this generally covers:
- A Toast-hosted online ordering experience
- Menu syncing with your POS
- Pickup and delivery ordering through your own direct channels
- Optional visibility in the Toast TakeOut consumer app
Since Toast bundles this suite separately, restaurants that want direct online ordering will see this added on top of their base POS subscription.
4. Payment processing fees
Toast is a payment facilitator (PF), meaning it underwrites merchants and sets its own rates. But the underlying processor network, such as First Data or Fiserv, handles settlement. This matters because Toast applies different fees depending on how a payment is taken:
- Card-present (in-store) → Lower fee
- Card-not-present (CNP) → Higher fee
All online orders fall under CNP, so processing costs automatically rise with online ordering volume.
What’s more, Toast requires all restaurants to use Toast Payments, with no option to bring your own processor. Standard published rates are around 2.5% + $0.15 for in-person and ~3.5% + $0.15 for online or keyed-in orders, with actual contract pricing varying by plan and volume.
The Restolabs Advantage: Restolabs enables you to choose the payment processor that aligns with your business model, your rates, and your financial strategy. You decide whether to run payments through Stripe, Clover Payments, Square Payments, Authorize.net, Freedom Pay, or your preferred local gateway.
5. Delivery
Toast offers delivery fulfillment through partner networks like DoorDash Drive. If you want to bring these third-party delivery orders directly into Toast, you must enable the Third-Party Ordering Integration module, which costs $75/month.
The Restolabs Advantage: With Restolabs, you can deploy your own in-house drivers with full routing, GPS visibility, and radius control – ideal if you serve dense neighborhoods or want to strengthen loyalty with repeat customers.
When you need additional coverage, Restolabs connects you to multiple third-party dispatch providers, including Uber Direct, DoorDash Drive, and Shipday, so that you can compare courier costs, delivery times, and availability in real time.
You can set custom delivery zones with variable fees to stay profitable on longer-distance orders. And with dynamic handoff rules, you can automatically route catering jobs, peak-time orders, or out-of-area requests to the most economical delivery method.
6. Marketing suite
Marketing capabilities are spread across multiple add-ons, costing:
- Loyalty → ~$50/month
- Gift Cards → ~$50/month
- Email/SMS Marketing → ~$75/month
These features are essential for repeat ordering, but each is a separate subscription.
7. Payroll suite
Toast Payroll requires a custom quote, but the public bundles show: $69/month + $9 per employee/month for the payroll bundle. This is often one of Toast’s most expensive suites for multi-location or high-staff restaurants.
8. Management and analytics tools
Advanced reporting, multi-location insights, and enterprise analytics require higher-tier plans or add-ons and are quote-based.
The following Reddit threads highlight how restaurants often find Toast’s analytics and benchmarking useful but not always consistent with their own data, reinforcing the need for flexible external reporting or integration layers like Restolabs provides.
“Toast benchmark showed we were down 10–16% vs our peers. Our Y-to-Y report showed we were actually up, with a lowered average menu price.” – u/ledas21
“It’s so easy to program add-ons within Toast, I should be doing that more strategically... if my avg ticket is lower because customers get sticker shock, I have to change that.” – u/beeflife
Comparing Toast Costs with Competitors
How does Toast compare with other tools in the industry? Let’s find out.
Toast vs. Restolabs
Unlike Toast, which bundles online ordering into a hardware-dependent POS model, Restolabs gives restaurants a fully customizable, fully branded ordering system that:
- Runs on any device
- Works with the payment processor of your choice
- Supports both in-house and third-party delivery
- Offers flat, transparent pricing
Restolabs easily scales with multi-location brands and delivers advanced customization and menu control without forcing you to pay for expensive add-on features or custom quotes.
Toast vs Other Leading Platforms
Just for context, Toast doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Restaurants comparing online ordering systems almost always stack Toast against other well-known solutions like ChowNow, BentoBox, Square Online, and Owner.com.
And in nearly every case, the contrast comes down to the same three themes: pricing transparency, device flexibility, and delivery control. Let’s take a look:
Is Toast Worth the Investment?
Toast is one of the strongest restaurant-first POS platforms in the market, with tightly integrated hardware, payments, team management, and front-of-house tools consolidated into a single operating system. If what you want is a POS-led stack with one vendor responsible for terminals, tickets, and payments, Toast makes a lot of sense.
But Toast is still a POS-first product. Almost everything guests touch outside the four walls—online ordering, loyalty, marketing, gift cards, even payroll and team management—sits on top as paid software modules.
In practice, that means you start with a POS plan (for example, around $69/month for a standard software plan), then layer on Digital Storefront / online ordering (~$75/month) and a Marketing / loyalty bundle (~$185/month) just to get the core guest-facing tools most restaurants now consider “basic.”
That alone pushes you to roughly $330/month in software before you’ve added payroll, inventory, or advanced team management – exactly why many full-service Toast setups end up in the $400–$800/month software range for a single busy location.
This is where Restolabs pairs neatly with Toast POS instead of replacing it.
You can continue using Toast as the in-store operating system for tables, checks, and staff, while letting Restolabs power the entire direct-to-consumer online layer. That includes web ordering, branded apps, delivery orchestration, and guest loyalty—all for $69/month, compared to the roughly $330/month you’d pay to unlock similar guest-facing tools through Toast’s add-on modules.
Restolabs is a commission-free, device-agnostic online ordering platform that integrates natively with Toast POS. Menus and orders sync instantly, so online orders flow straight into your existing Toast workflow without changing how your team operates.
Talk to Restolabs team today!
Frequently Asked Questions
Toast’s online ordering is part of its custom-priced “Build Your Own” plan, so you won’t know the final cost until you speak with sales. It also requires Toast hardware and Toast’s payment processing, which adds to the total cost. Most standalone online ordering platforms like Restolabs offer more transparent pricing because they aren’t tied to a POS or proprietary hardware.
Yes. You can optimize your online ordering costs by shifting repeat customers from delivery to pickup, using throttling to eliminate kitchen bottlenecks, consolidating your menu to reduce operational waste, and auditing your Toast workflow quarterly to eliminate redundant processes. These optimizations reduce labor inefficiencies and refund-triggering errors.
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