Toast software starts at $0 or $69 per month, but that number is a small part of your bill. Processing fees, hardware, and extras set the final total. Our Toast POS Cost Calculator turns your card sales, average ticket, and hardware picks into a monthly cost, an effective rate, and a multiyear total.
Below, you will find Toast’s published starting prices, the rates and prices behind the calculator, and three worked examples. We also explain how Toast processing works and when a processor agnostic POS costs less.
Key Takeaways:
- Provide monthly card sales, typical ticket size, and device choices, and the calculator returns your monthly cost, effective rate, and 24 and 36 month totals.
- The cheapest plans run $0 per month (Starter Kit) and $69 per month (Point of Sale). Processing and equipment drive the remainder.
- Count card sales only, because cash carries no processing fee.
- Toast gives no processing percentages, so use the rates from your own agreement.
- A $0.15 fixed fee adds 0.75 points to your effective rate at a $20 average ticket.
Toast POS Cost Calculator
The Toast POS cost calculator that follows estimates what Toast will cost each month, based on your plan, sales, ticket size, and equipment.
Toast Total Cost Calculator
Pick a plan, enter your card sales, choose your hardware, and see your monthly cost, your effective rate, and your total over the agreement. Last verified October 19, 2026.
Card payments only. Leave out cash.
Average card sale before tax and tips.
Add the devices you plan to buy. Prices tagged Reported come from NerdWallet. Toast publishes no device prices, so enter the amount from your quote where a price box is empty.
Toast publishes neither. Enter the monthly amounts from your quote.
Processors usually charge the percentage on the full amount, including tax and tips. Add yours for a truer number.
Toast does not publish these. Enter the amount from your quote.
Starting price from Toast’s pricing page.
Reported by NerdWallet.
Reported by NerdWallet.
Plan prices come from Toast’s pricing page (updated August 20, 2026). Processing rates and hardware prices tagged Reported come from NerdWallet (review updated August 6, 2026), because Toast does not publish them. Published prices apply to new customers and single locations, and Build Your Own is quoted individually. The calculator gives an estimate only, and your written Toast quote controls.
How to Use The Toast POS Cost Calculator
- Choose your business type and Toast plan.
- Enter your monthly card sales and average ticket.
- Add the devices you plan to buy, entering a price wherever a device carries none.
- Fill in your online share, sales tax, tips, add-ons, and setup fees.
- Swap each default rate for the figure on your Toast proposal.
What The Results Show
- Estimated monthly cost: software, processing, per-transaction charges, and add-ons combined
- Effective processing rate: total processing fees divided by your card sales
- Upfront cost: your hardware picks plus any setup fees, itemized
- 24 and 36 month totals: upfront cost plus the monthly cost over two and three years
- Break-even volume (restaurant plans): the sales level at which buying hardware beats Pay As You Go
Toast’s advertised prices cover new customers at single locations only, and Build Your Own is quoted case by case, so treat results for those situations as rough guides. Checked against Toast’s pages on October 20, 2026.
Toast POS Pricing at a Glance
Toast sells three restaurant plans, a payroll bundle, and a retail plan: Starter Kit from $0 per month, Point of Sale from $69, Build Your Own at custom pricing, the payroll bundle from $69 plus $9 per employee, and Retail Point of Sale from $90.
We compared these numbers with Toast’s pricing page on October 20, 2026; Toast dates its own update August 20, 2026. Plan features and hardware details live in our Toast POS overview.
| Plan | Starting price | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Starter Kit | From $0 per month | Single-location restaurants needing one or two terminals |
| Point of Sale | From $69 per month | Operators who want core features with flat-rate processing |
| Build Your Own | Custom pricing | Restaurants that want the full Toast platform |
| Payroll And POS Bundle | $69 per month plus $9 per employee (promotional price for new restaurants, regularly $90) | New openings adding payroll tools |
| Retail Point of Sale | From $90 per month | Convenience, grocery, and liquor stores |
Toast cautions that added devices, products, installation work, and processing terms can move the final price.
Starter Kit Versus Point of Sale: Break-Even Math
The Starter Kit asks for less cash at the start, yet at the rates NerdWallet reports it takes a bigger cut of each sale. Monthly volume therefore decides the better plan. Toast’s pricing FAQ describes Pay As You Go as a way to trim upfront hardware and installation costs in exchange for an all-in platform fee.
The break-even formula locates the crossover:
Break-even monthly card sales = (plan fee + monthly hardware cost) ÷ rate gap
A worked calculation illustrates the mechanics. The 0.60-point rate spread is hypothetical, and the $1,203 kit price comes from NerdWallet’s countertop listing. A $69 plan fee plus $33.42 per month for a $1,203 kit divided across 36 months totals $102.42.
At that difference, the two options cross once monthly card sales reach $17,070 (rounded to the nearest ten dollars). Under that level the $0 plan is cheaper, and above it the paid plan wins. Get both quotes from Toast, then run each through the calculator.
Rates And Prices The Calculator Uses
Toast lists the entry price of each plan and leaves out processing percentages and device-by-device figures. The calculator’s defaults for those two items come from NerdWallet’s review, updated August 6, 2026; swap any default for the numbers on your own proposal.
| Calculator default | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Starter Kit software fee | $0 per month | Toast pricing page |
| Point of Sale software fee | $69 per month | Toast pricing page |
| Retail Point of Sale software fee | $90 per month | Toast pricing page |
| In-person rate, pay as you go | 3.09% + $0.15 (reported range 3.09% to 3.69%) | NerdWallet |
| In-person rate, hardware bought upfront | 2.49% + $0.15 | NerdWallet |
| Online or keyed-in rate | 3.50% + $0.15 | NerdWallet |
| Countertop Starter Kit | $1,203 | NerdWallet |
| Handheld Starter Kit | $1,113 | NerdWallet |
| Guest Self-Service Starter Kit | $1,454 | NerdWallet |
| Toast Go 3 handheld | $599 | NerdWallet |
| Toast Tap card reader | $149 | NerdWallet |
Kitchen displays, printers, and similar gear have no published price, which is why those boxes stay blank. Toast omits retail processing rates and retail hardware prices as well, so the Retail plan borrows the Point of Sale rates and the restaurant kit prices until you supply your own.
Some review sites cite different pay-as-you-go rates, 2.99% among them. Rates have moved before: Toast raised its credit card processing rates by up to 0.23% in September 2024, as our coverage of Toast’s 2024 rate increase explains, so a number heard last year may not hold today.
How Toast Payment Processing Works
Toast prices payment processing as a flat rate and, per its own FAQ, acts as a payments facilitator that partners with processors; it is not a processor itself.
In the three setups that follow, processing accounts for most of the monthly bill, so the structure is the first thing to study.
New to the mechanics? Our walkthrough of how card processing works covers who handles each step of a payment.
Flat-Rate Pricing or Interchange-Plus
A flat rate rolls card network fees, issuing bank fees, and the provider’s margin into one percentage plus a per-transaction add-on.
Interchange-plus passes network and bank charges through at cost and adds a stated markup, which itemizes the statement.
Flat rates are easier to forecast, while interchange-plus makes cost changes visible. To read those statement lines with confidence, begin with our explainer on interchange fees.
What Toast Requires
According to NerdWallet, any business on Toast’s POS must also use Toast’s payment processing, and Toast’s FAQ limits its services to Toast-approved devices.
A lower rate from a competing provider therefore cannot be attached to a Toast terminal. Owners who prefer to keep their current processor can compare POS systems that keep your processor.
How The Fixed Fee Changes Your Effective Rate
Your effective rate is the quoted percentage plus the per-transaction fee divided by your average ticket. That fee carries less weight as tickets grow:
| Average ticket | Points added by a $0.15 fixed fee |
|---|---|
| $12 | 1.25 |
| $20 | 0.75 |
| $35 | 0.43 |
| $60 | 0.25 |
| $100 | 0.15 |
A model rate of 2.50% + $0.15 behaves like 3.25% once the average ticket is $20. Add the matching points from the table to the rate on your own contract.
Why Tax And Tips Raise The Fee
Processors normally apply the rate to the full amount charged to the card, so sales tax and tips enlarge the fee base.
Verify that treatment in your agreement. A $100 sale with 8% sales tax and a 20% tip becomes a $128 charge.
Assume a 2.50% + $0.15 rate, and the fee is $3.35, or 3.35% of the $100 sale. Retail shops rarely take tips; sales tax still raises the total.
Card-Present And Online Payments
Toast’s cost guide notes that card-present payments can cost less than online or manually entered transactions, and that the per-sale fee weighs more on low-dollar checks.
Request separate rates by channel. Then enter your own mix of in-person and online sales into the calculator so the result mirrors how your customers pay.
Three Worked Cost Examples
Three hypothetical setups demonstrate how one pricing structure behaves at different volumes. The rates and sales levels are assumptions, not figures from Toast.
The $69 and $90 plan fees come from Toast’s plan details; the $1,203 kit is the countertop price in NerdWallet’s review.
Assumptions:
- Pay As You Go option: $0 plan fee, 3.10% + $0.15, no hardware cost
- Upfront hardware option: $69 plan fee, 2.50% + $0.15, $1,203 kit spread over 36 months ($33.42 per month)
- Retail scenario: 2.50% + $0.15 with a $90 plan fee, and a $1,203 hardware assumption borrowed from the restaurant countertop kit, since Toast has not released retail hardware prices
Example 1: Small Café at $15,000 in Monthly Card Sales
At a $12 average ticket, the café rings up 1,250 card payments monthly.
| Line | Pay as you go | Upfront hardware |
|---|---|---|
| Software | $0.00 | $69.00 |
| Percentage fee | $465.00 | $375.00 |
| Fixed fees (1,250 × $0.15) | $187.50 | $187.50 |
| Hardware over 36 months | $0.00 | $33.42 |
| Total per month | $652.50 | $664.92 |
Pay As You Go saves $12.42 per month, since $15,000 sits under the $17,070 figure calculated earlier.
Example 2: Counter-Service Restaurant at $40,000 in Monthly Card Sales
A $20 average ticket translates to 2,000 transactions each month.
| Line | Pay as you go | Upfront hardware |
|---|---|---|
| Software | $0.00 | $69.00 |
| Percentage fee | $1,240.00 | $1,000.00 |
| Fixed fees (2,000 × $0.15) | $300.00 | $300.00 |
| Hardware over 36 months | $0.00 | $33.42 |
| Total per month | $1,540.00 | $1,402.42 |
Upfront hardware trims $137.58 off the monthly total, which adds up to $4,953 over 36 months. Total cost lands at 3.85% of card sales under Pay As You Go and 3.51% with upfront hardware.
Example 3: Liquor Store on Toast Retail at $60,000 in Monthly Card Sales
At a $35 average ticket, the store processes 1,714 sales per month (rounded down).
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Software (Retail Point of Sale starting price) | $90.00 |
| Percentage fee (2.50% of $60,000) | $1,500.00 |
| Fixed fees (1,714 × $0.15) | $257.10 |
| Hardware over 36 months | $33.42 |
| Total per month | $1,880.52 |
Total cost comes to 3.13% of card sales (rounded). Each 0.10 point of rate difference on $60,000 amounts to $60 per month, or $2,160 over 36 months. A narrow spread, therefore, calls for the same scrutiny as the software fee.
When a Processor-Agnostic POS Costs Less
A processor-agnostic POS comes out ahead when a rival provider’s rate undercuts Toast’s bundled rate by more than the gap in software and hardware fees.
KORONA POS is processing agnostic: you keep or choose your own processor, and KORONA never takes a percentage of your sales. If software and processing still blur together for you, our primer on POS versus payment processor separates the two.
The arithmetic mirrors the examples above: a 0.10-point cut on $60,000 of monthly card volume saves $60 per month.
Ask another provider for a written proposal, work out its effective rate with the formula from earlier in the post, and set it beside the effective rate the calculator shows for Toast. Our processing rate comparison lines up processors next to each other, which offers concrete rates to test.
KORONA plans run $59, $79, and $99 per terminal per month, billed month to month. KORONA suits retail-first businesses such as liquor stores, convenience stores, smoke and vape shops, and CBD retailers, as well as small cafés and wineries. KORONA does not cater to kiosk or drive-thru coffee businesses or to full cafés with food.
Ready to see your own numbers? Schedule a demo or start a free trial to see KORONA POS alongside the processor rates you are weighing.
Speak with a product specialist and learn how KORONA POS can power your business.
Frequently Asked Questions
How Much Does Toast POS Cost Per Month?
Entry pricing is $0 per month on the Starter Kit and $69 on Point of Sale; Build Your Own is individually priced. Card processing, hardware, and add-on packages sit on top, so the monthly total follows your sales volume and the gear you choose.
How Does a Toast POS Cost Calculator Work?
It applies the processing rate to your card sales, tacks on the per-payment fee, and then layers in software, add-on, and hardware expenses. The output covers a monthly total, a multi-year projection, and the effective rate. Accurate inputs narrow the margin of error.
Does The Toast Starter Kit Cost Anything?
Yes, though not at signup. The software has no subscription fee and the hardware kit ships without an initial charge. Pay As You Go offsets that with a platform fee and, per NerdWallet, higher processing rates, so compare written offers first.
What Are Toast’s Processing Rates?
NerdWallet cites 2.49% + $0.15 for in-person payments when hardware is bought upfront and 3.09% to 3.69% + $0.15 on Pay As You Go. Toast itself names no percentages, so get the rate in writing, online and keyed-in payments included.
How Accurate is a Toast POS Cost Calculator?
Good enough for budgeting, yet no substitute for Toast’s own written pricing. Results hinge on the rates you input, and gratuities, sales tax, optional modules, and installation fees all shift the total, so include them. Check the output against Toast’s documents before relying on it.
How Much Does Toast Hardware Cost?
NerdWallet puts a Tap card reader at $149, a Go 3 handheld at $599, and the three Starter Kits between $1,113 and $1,454. Toast’s website gives no per-device prices, so request an itemized breakdown ahead of signing.
