Food truck / mobile / Order-ready alerts
How to tell people their order is up
Scored and compared prices dated
The short answer
Physical pagers cost $40 to $80 each and get walked off with; SMS works but bills you per message; a browser-based buzzer triggered from a QR code costs nothing per customer and is what most trucks should use now. The exception is very short waits, where a number on a screen is faster than any of it.
Reviewed by the editorial team · updated 10 August 2026
Step 3
What matters most to you?
Pick one or two. Everything below re-scores instantly, and we show you the maths.
Winner overall
Bzz
Browser-based waitlist, buzzers, reservations and in-wait marketing, with no pagers and no SMS bill.
The trade-off
No offline mode. Guests track their place through a browser, so a dead signal at the door is a dead queue.
Why it won
- price
- ease of setup
- support
- volume
- integrations
Our scores, 1 to 5, defined on the methodology page.
Everything else, ranked the same way
| # | Product | From | Contract | Card rate | Score | Price checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Bzz Browser-based waitlist, buzzers, reservations and in-wait marketing, with no pagers and no SMS bill. | Free, then $11.99 | none, month to month | not applicable | 4.8 | Pricing checked 10 Aug 2026 |
| 02 | Square for Restaurants The default answer for anyone who wants to be selling this afternoon. | Free, then $49 | none | 2.6% + 10¢ in person on the free plan, 2.5% + 15¢ on Plus | 4.2 | Pricing checked 10 Aug 2026 |
What's different about buying this for food truck / mobiles
This is the least-discussed problem in mobile food and one of the most annoying to live with. You are one person, or two, the window is small, and the noise at a festival means the fifth time you call "order 42" nobody has heard any of them.
Pagers were the fix for twenty years and they still work, but the economics are bad at truck scale. Each unit is a real cost, they need charging, they get taken home by accident, and you have to collect them back through the same window you are serving from. For a restaurant with a waiting area that is fine. For a truck at an event where people wander off, it is a slow leak of hardware.
SMS solves the wandering-off problem and introduces a bill. Per-message pricing looks trivial until you multiply it by a busy weekend, and you also have to collect phone numbers, which slows the order down and drags you into data protection you did not ask for.
The browser approach has quietly become the sensible default: the customer scans a code at the window, a page opens showing their place and status, and when the order is up the page buzzes and vibrates their phone. Nothing to install, nothing to hand over, nothing to get back. It needs signal on the customer's phone, which at a rural event is a genuine caveat worth testing before you rely on it.
Questions people actually ask
- Does the customer have to download anything?
- With a browser-based system, no. The QR code opens a web page. Anything asking your customers to install an app at a food truck window is going to lose most of them.
- What about just using a number screen?
- For waits under about three minutes a screen is genuinely better, because nobody has moved yet. It stops working the moment your queue is long enough that people go and stand somewhere else.