Square for Restaurants scores highest for food trucks when total monthly cost including processing is the thing you care about most. The default answer for anyone who wants to be selling this afternoon.
This page is the cheapest to run cut of our full pos and payments comparison for food trucks. Same data, weighted differently. Change the weighting below and it re-scores in front of you.
Step 3
Pick one or two. Everything below re-scores instantly, and we show you the maths.
Winner on cheapest to run
The default answer for anyone who wants to be selling this afternoon.
The trade-off
Offline mode takes the card without knowing if it will clear, so a declined payment surfaces after the customer has gone.
| # | Product | From | Contract | Card rate | Score | Price checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | 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 | 0 | Pricing checked 10 Aug 2026 |
| 02 | SpotOn The one people actually praise for picking up the phone. | Free, then $55 | 2-year minimum on the $0 plan, month to month on Essentials | 2.79% + 20¢ on the $0 plan, 2.45% + 15¢ on Essentials | 0 | Pricing checked 10 Aug 2026 |
| 03 | Toast The one built for restaurants only, with the lock-in that implies. | Free, then $69 | multi-year is typical | 2.99% + 15¢ on the free Starter Kit, 2.49% + 15¢ on the $69 plan | 0 | Pricing checked 10 Aug 2026 |
| 04 | TouchBistro iPad-based, runs on a local network, keeps working when the internet does not. | From $69 | annual | through TouchBistro Payments, required for new customers | 0 | Pricing checked 10 Aug 2026 |
| 05 | Clover Sold through resellers, which is the single most important thing to know about it. | From $59.95 | 36 months is common when hardware is bundled | roughly 2.3% to 2.6% + 10¢ in person, varies by who sold it to you | 0 | Pricing checked 10 Aug 2026 |
Almost every "best restaurant POS" list is written for a building. A building has wifi, a power socket behind the till, and a router somebody else maintains. You have a 4G dongle, an inverter, and a lunch rush that starts the moment three office blocks empty out.
That changes the ranking completely. Offline behaviour stops being a footnote and becomes the first thing to check, and the way each system handles a dropped connection differs more than the marketing suggests. Square will take the card while offline but cannot confirm it will clear, so a declined payment shows up later, after the customer has walked off with their food. TouchBistro keeps running properly because the iPads talk to each other over a local network rather than to a data centre, which is architecturally the right answer, though it costs more and expects an annual contract. Toast holds up well on its own hardware but that hardware is the entire point of Toast, and it is not coming out of a service window at the end of the night without a plan.
The second thing that changes is what "cheap" means. Subscription price is the number vendors compete on, and it is the smaller number. At truck ticket sizes, the card processing rate is where the money actually goes: on $120,000 a year of card sales, the gap between 2.49% and 2.99% is around $600, which is most of a year of subscription on any plan here. So when you compare, add the two together or you will pick the wrong one.