Toast POS fees: what the quote is made of.

Straight out: I resell Clover, Square, Valor, PAX and Dejavoo. I do not sell Toast, I earn nothing whether you buy one or not, and I will not publish numbers for a product I have no verified source for. Plenty of pages will quote you a Toast price scraped from somebody's blog two years ago. That number gets repeated until it looks like a fact.

So why does this page exist? Because owners bring me Toast quotes. They want to know whether it is a fair deal, and they want it compared against a Clover or against a terminal plus a merchant account. I can help with that without pretending to know the price. Reading a quote is the part that decides whether the deal is good.

Two rules for everything below. Get the numbers from Toast in a written quote for your restaurant, not from any website including this one. And confirm current pricing on Toast's own pricing page, linked at the bottom — vendor pricing changes without notice.

Owners compare systems on one number, usually the monthly, and that is how a quote wins on the page and loses on the statement. There are five parts and they move independently: the hardware, the software subscription, the payment processing, the add-on modules, and the agreement binding the first four together.

Hardware is the terminals, kitchen display, printers, handhelds and cash drawer. The question is not only price but ownership: at the end of this, is the equipment mine, or have I been renting it? Software is a monthly, and in restaurant systems it is very commonly charged per terminal rather than per restaurant — the line that changes the shape of the whole deal the moment you add a second station.

Payment processing is where the money actually is. A POS company can be relaxed about the software price because the rate on every sale you will ever ring is attached to it. Ask for that rate in the same shape as your current statement, and whether it is a bundled flat rate or interchange plus a disclosed markup. Add-on modules — online ordering, loyalty, gift cards, payroll — are the fifth part, and the question is which sit inside the quoted monthly.

If software is charged per terminal, the monthly you were quoted is a function of how many stations the salesperson assumed. Two stations and a handheld is a different bill from one counter terminal, and busy dining rooms add stations over time rather than removing them. Ask what the monthly becomes when you add one, and ask before you sign rather than in month nine.

For a sense of the range this kind of subscription lives in, here are published figures from a system I do sell and do have a vetted source for. Clover's published 2026 plans run from about $14.95/month for Essentials, through about $49.95/month for Register and about $54.95/month for Counter Service Restaurant, up to about $84.95/month for Table Service Restaurant — charged per device, so two Stations generally means paying twice. Those are Clover numbers, not Toast numbers. Confirm any current figure with the provider.

I am not going to tell you what Toast's agreement says, because I have no current source for it and a guess about somebody's contract is the worst kind of guess. What I will say is that the term length and the early-termination clause are the two lines that decide how expensive a wrong decision turns out to be, and they are the two lines owners skim. Whether a specific quote runs on a multi-year agreement, and on what terms, is a question for the person selling it and an answer you should have in writing.

For what that can look like elsewhere in the category: this site's Clover article notes that a large share of Clover systems are sold through banks and resellers on agreements that often run 36 to 48 months with early-termination fees of $500 or more, even though buying direct is typically month-to-month. Same hardware, different paperwork. The device is rarely the problem.