If you run a restaurant in 2026, you’re likely paying for at least one online ordering system — and probably more than one. The choice between Toast, Square, DoorDash, or building your own ordering on your website affects more than just your monthly subscription. It shapes your margins on every order, your customer relationships, and how much control you have over your business.
This guide compares the four most common options small restaurants actually use, with current 2026 pricing and an honest assessment of where each one fits.
The four real options
The “online ordering” category is broader than it sounds. The four options below operate on fundamentally different business models — knowing which model fits your restaurant matters more than picking between specific brand names.
1. Restaurant-specific POS with online ordering built in (Toast). You pay Toast a monthly subscription plus payment processing on every transaction. Online orders flow into the same system as your in-house orders. Toast handles the technology; you control the customer relationship.
2. General-purpose POS with restaurant features (Square). Same shape as Toast — monthly fee plus processing — but built originally for retail and adapted for restaurants. Lower entry cost, more flexible hardware (works with iPads), but historically less restaurant-specific depth.
3. Marketplace / delivery app (DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub). Customers find you in their app, order, and the marketplace takes a commission per order (typically 15–30%). You don’t pay a monthly subscription, but you give up margin, customer data, and pricing control.
4. Your own website with custom online ordering. You pay upfront to build it (or a developer to build it for you), then pay payment processing on transactions and modest hosting fees. No monthly per-terminal subscription, no commissions to a marketplace, but you handle marketing yourself.
Most successful restaurants use a combination — typically one or two of these in parallel. The question is which one is your primary channel.
Toast in 2026
Toast is the largest restaurant-specific POS in the US, used by over 100,000 restaurants. The 2026 pricing as published on Toast’s website:
- Starter Kit: $0/month software — single-terminal only, hardware purchased separately, requires Toast Payments processing
- Point of Sale: $69/month per terminal — adds online ordering, basic reporting, and a branded ordering page
- Build Your Own: custom pricing starting around $110/month, scaling with add-on modules
Payment processing rates depend on plan: 3.09% + 15¢ per in-person transaction on the Starter Kit, 2.49% + 15¢ on Point of Sale. Online order processing is higher at 3.50% + 15¢.
The headline price isn’t the real cost. Once you add online ordering, kitchen display, loyalty, and a second terminal — features most full-service restaurants need — the all-in monthly bill for a small café typically runs $250–$500. A 30-seat full-service restaurant routinely hits $700–$1,200/month before processing fees, with multi-location operators clearing $2,000/month in software alone.
Where Toast fits well: Full-service restaurants doing $500K+/year that need integrated kitchen displays, offline reliability when the internet goes down, and restaurant-specific workflows like table management and tableside ordering.
Where Toast doesn’t fit: Single-terminal coffee shops, food trucks, and very small operations where processing fees and module add-ons disproportionately squeeze margin. Toast also requires using Toast Payments — you can’t bring your own processor, which removes negotiating leverage.
Square in 2026
Square overhauled its pricing in late 2025 and again in early 2026. The current tiers:
- Square Free: $0/month — full POS app, basic reporting, inventory tracking. Processing: 2.6% + 15¢ in-person, 3.3% + 30¢ online.
- Square Plus: $49/month per location — restaurant features (custom floor plans, course management, bulk menu edits), business-hours phone support. Processing: 2.5% + 15¢ in-person, 2.9% + 30¢ online.
- Square Premium: $149/month per location — adds seat-level reservations, advanced reporting, 24/7 phone support. Processing: 2.4% + 15¢ in-person, 2.9% + 30¢ online.
Square’s in-person rate (2.6% + 15¢) is competitive with Toast for restaurants on the free plan. The online order rate (3.3% + 30¢ on Free, 2.9% + 30¢ on paid) is meaningfully lower than Toast’s 3.50% + 15¢ — which matters if online ordering is a growing share of your sales.
No long-term contract. You can leave any time without an early termination fee, which is a significant advantage over Toast’s typical 2–3 year contract with cancellation penalties.
Where Square fits well: Cafés, food trucks, small restaurants under $20,000/month in revenue, and any restaurant where pricing transparency and contract flexibility matter more than restaurant-specific feature depth.
Where Square doesn’t fit: Large full-service operations with complex kitchen workflows, multi-station kitchens needing coordinated tickets, or any restaurant where deep tableside-ordering and course-firing features are essential to service.
DoorDash (and other marketplaces)
DoorDash isn’t really a POS — it’s a marketplace where customers find restaurants. The economics are very different from Toast or Square.
DoorDash takes a commission on every order it brings you, typically 15–30% depending on which tier you sign up for. There’s no monthly subscription. You don’t pay for hardware or software.
What you give up: a meaningful chunk of margin on every order, control over the customer relationship (the customer’s loyalty is to DoorDash, not to you), and pricing flexibility (DoorDash sets the customer-facing fees). You also receive limited data about who your customers are.
Where DoorDash fits well: Discovery. Customers who don’t know your restaurant exists can find it through the DoorDash app. For a new restaurant in a competitive market, that’s real value worth paying for. DoorDash also handles the delivery logistics — you don’t need to hire drivers or manage a delivery fleet.
Where DoorDash hurts you: When repeat customers — people who already know your restaurant — keep ordering through DoorDash instead of directly from you. You’re paying 15–30% commission for an order you would have received anyway. This is the largest source of avoidable cost in most restaurants’ online ordering setups.
A practical pattern many small restaurants are adopting in 2026: stay on DoorDash for discovery, but actively drive repeat customers to order directly through the restaurant’s own website using flyers in to-go orders, loyalty discounts for direct orders, and price differentials between channels.
Your own website with online ordering
Building online ordering into your own website is the option that gets least attention but often has the best long-term economics for established restaurants.
The setup: a WordPress or similar website with an online ordering plugin (WooCommerce, custom-built, or third-party integration), payment processing through Stripe or Square, and ordering pages designed specifically for your menu.
Costs: A solid setup costs $2,000–$8,000 to build depending on complexity. Ongoing costs are payment processing (typically 2.6–2.9% per transaction) and hosting ($30–$100/month). No per-order commission, no per-terminal subscription, no marketplace cut.
Where this fits well: Established restaurants with a steady base of repeat customers, where the savings on commissions and subscription fees over 12–24 months easily pay back the build cost. If you’re getting even 100 orders/month through DoorDash at an average $35 ticket, you’re paying $525–$1,050/month in commissions. A custom ordering site pays for itself in 6–12 months.
Where this doesn’t fit well: Brand-new restaurants with no existing customer base. Without marketing reach, “build it and they will come” doesn’t work — the marketplaces have the eyeballs you need at launch.
How to actually decide
The right choice depends less on which platform has the best features and more on the shape of your restaurant’s current sales.
Ask yourself three questions:
Where are your customers coming from right now? If most are discovering you through DoorDash or Uber Eats, you need marketplace presence and a long-term plan to migrate repeat customers to direct ordering. If most already know you (regulars, walk-ins, word of mouth), your own ordering channel matters more than marketplace presence.
What’s your monthly online order volume? Below $5,000/month in online sales, Square Free + DoorDash for discovery is usually the cheapest option. Above $15,000/month, Toast or your own site pays off because per-transaction savings exceed the subscription cost. Above $30,000/month, building your own site is almost always the cheapest long-term path.
How important is offline reliability? If your internet drops regularly or you operate in a basement with weak Wi-Fi, Toast’s offline mode is genuinely valuable. Square works offline too but less seamlessly. Marketplace apps and your own website both require an active internet connection.
Need Help with Your Restaurant’s Website?
If you’re a restaurant owner looking to reduce dependency on third-party delivery platforms or build a direct ordering experience on your own website, we’d be happy to discuss your specific needs. Monir Tech Solutions specializes in restaurant websites and POS integration for small businesses across the Boston area and beyond — including Clover POS, WooCommerce, and custom online ordering setups.
Reach out anytime at info@monirtechsolutions.com and we’ll respond within 24 hours.
The Bottom Line
The “best” online ordering system depends on where your restaurant is today — not on which platform has the longest feature list.
For most small restaurants, a sensible 2026 setup looks like this:
| Restaurant type | Primary channel | Secondary |
|---|---|---|
| Brand new, no customer base | DoorDash + Uber Eats for discovery | Add Square Free POS for in-house |
| Established, $5–15K online/mo | Square Free or Plus, in-house ordering | Keep DoorDash for marginal discovery |
| Established, $15–30K online/mo | Toast Point of Sale OR your own website | Reduce marketplace dependency |
| Multi-location or $30K+ online/mo | Your own website with custom ordering | Marketplaces as supplemental only |
Two things to take away regardless of which platform you choose:
The cheapest option on day one rarely stays cheapest at scale. Run the math on processing fees, commissions, and subscription costs against your actual monthly volume — not the volume in the platform’s marketing copy.
Owning your customer relationship is the most valuable asset a restaurant has, and it’s the asset marketplaces quietly take from you in exchange for discovery. Whichever combination of platforms you use, build a deliberate plan to bring repeat customers into direct relationship with your restaurant — through your own website, your own loyalty program, your own email list. That’s where the long-term margin lives.
