Square for Restaurants scores highest for takeaway and delivery-only kitchens 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 online ordering comparison for takeaway and delivery-only kitchens. 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 | 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 |
| 03 | Otter Pulls DoorDash, Uber Eats and the rest onto one screen, sold as a hardware bundle rather than a subscription. | From $198 | not published, sales-quoted | separate, plus a per-order transaction fee on every bundle | 0 | Pricing checked 11 Aug 2026 |
A restaurant with a dining room can treat a delivery app as incremental revenue and shrug at the commission. A takeaway kitchen with no other channel is paying that same roughly 30% cut on the majority of its sales, which turns a marketing decision into a margin decision fast.
Square's Plus plan at $49 a location a month and Toast's ordering module at around $75 both give you a branded ordering page with a materially lower cost than a marketplace commission, and both route the order into the same kitchen queue as everything else rather than a separate tablet. The trade-off is discovery: your own page only gets found by people who already know you, while a marketplace puts you in front of people who do not.
Most operators in this category end up running both, and the sensible way to think about the marketplace commission is as paid advertising with a very high cost per acquisition, worth it for new customers, worth actively discouraging for repeat ones you can move to your own page instead.