What a Restaurant POS Actually Costs in Canada
The price is published. The cost isn't. A line-by-line breakdown for quick-service and full-service operators, using only figures the vendors print on their own pages.
Every restaurant POS vendor in Canada leads with a monthly subscription. For a quick-service counter or a sixty-seat dining room, that number is one of the smallest lines on the bill. Below are the other lines.
Dashi sells restaurant software, so read this as a comparison published by an interested party. Every competitor figure below comes from the vendor's own pricing page, checked on August 20, 2026. Prices change. Get a written Canadian quote before you sign anything.
What the vendors actually publish
| Vendor | Published monthly software | Published processing rate |
|---|---|---|
| Toast (Canada) | Starter from CA$120, Essentials CA$220 | Not published; listed as "per transaction flat rate" |
| Lightspeed Restaurant | Starter $89, Essential $239, Premium $499 CAD | 2.6% + 10¢ |
| Square for Restaurants | Free $0, Plus $60 CAD per location | 2.5% in person; 2.8% + 30¢ online; 3.3% + 15¢ keyed |
| TouchBistro | POS from $89, Essentials bundle from $99 (currency not stated on the page) | Not published |
| Dashi Reserve (reservations, not POS) | $149 or $249 CAD per location | Card holds and deposits run through Moneris; rate quoted |
Toast's Canadian pricing page lists its card-present and card-not-present rates as “per transaction flat rate” without saying what the rate is. Lightspeed and Square print theirs. Processing is usually the largest software-related line on the bill, so on the published pages there is no way to compare these vendors on it. We looked at what Toast does and doesn't publish in more detail in Toast alternatives for Canadian restaurants.
TouchBistro's page shows “$89” with no currency marked, and prices thirteen add-ons as “get a quote”: kitchen display, reservations, online ordering, loyalty, inventory, gift cards, labour and the rest. The published number buys the point of sale. The stack costs more, and the page does not say how much more.
The lines that aren't in the subscription
- The second terminal. Toast's pricing footnote reads: pricing includes the first hardware terminal subscription, and additional charges apply for subsequent devices. The amount is not published. A three-terminal dining room is buying three subscriptions and one published price.
- Hardware and installation. Toast's own FAQ says upfront costs include hardware and implementation, and that both vary. TouchBistro requires hardware on its $89 tier and offers financing at two terminals or more.
- Kitchen screens. Lightspeed publishes $40 per screen per month. Toast and TouchBistro quote it.
- Foreign-issued cards. Square adds 1.5% on cards issued outside Canada, across every transaction type. Every processor has a version of this line. Most don't print it.
A quick-service example
The inputs below are illustrative, not survey data. Substitute your own. A counter-service restaurant doing $80,000 a month: $60,000 taken on cards in-house at an average cheque of $22, and $20,000 through the delivery marketplaces. One terminal, one kitchen screen.
| Line | Monthly |
|---|---|
| POS software, published entry tiers | CA$89 – $220 |
| Kitchen screen | $40 |
| Card processing on $60,000 | $1,500 at Square's 2.5%; $1,833 at Lightspeed's 2.6% + 10¢ |
| Delivery commission on $20,000 | $4,000 at DoorDash Basic's 20%; $6,000 at Uber Eats Premium's 30% |
| Total | roughly $5,600 – $8,100 |
The subscription you compared vendors on is under 3% of that.
On $60,000 in card sales, the gap between 2.5% and 2.6% + 10¢ is about $333 a month, or roughly $4,000 a year. Most operators never negotiate that line. It is also more than twice the annual gap between the two software tiers in this example, which is $1,572 at CA$89 and CA$220 a month.
The delivery line is larger than everything else combined. DoorDash publishes 20% delivery and 10% pickup on Basic, 25% and 8% on Plus, 29% and 8% on Premier, with no payment processing fee on any plan. Uber Eats publishes 20% on Lite, 25% on Plus with a further 5% on orders from Uber One members, 30% on Premium, and 15% for self-delivery. SkipTheDishes does not publish its rates at all. The figures circulating online are third-party estimates, so ask your account manager for your rate card in writing, and read the pickup rate as carefully as the delivery rate.
If that line is the one you want to shrink, we covered direct ordering separately in commission-free delivery in Ontario.
A full-service example
Sixty seats, $130,000 a month, $120,000 on cards at an average cheque of $65. Sixteen hundred seated covers, six hundred of them arriving through the reservation network. Three terminals, one kitchen screen.
| Line | Monthly |
|---|---|
| POS software, published tiers | CA$120 – $499 |
| Terminals two and three | Not published |
| Kitchen screen | $40 |
| Card processing on $120,000 | $3,000 at 2.5%; $3,305 at 2.6% + 10¢ |
| Reservations, OpenTable Core | US$299 + 600 network covers at US$1 = US$899 |
| Reservations, OpenTable Pro | US$499 + US$600 = US$1,099 |
| Reservations, Dashi Reserve | CA$149 or CA$249, no per-cover fee |
At six hundred network covers, the cover fee alone is US$600 a month, on top of the US$299 or US$499 subscription it attaches to. On Core that turns a US$299 line into US$899, and unlike rent it grows on your best nights.
OpenTable's plans page adds three qualifiers. Cover fees on Core and Pro apply only to diners who found you through OpenTable's site, app or affiliate network, so phone bookings and walk-ins are free, and you are charged only for seated diners rather than no-shows. Basic, at US$149 with a $1.50 cover fee, is available only in the United States. And the prices are in US dollars, so your Canadian cost moves with the exchange rate whether or not your covers do.
A network cover is only a cost if the network didn't source the guest. If OpenTable sent you a diner who would never have found you, US$1 is cheap. What matters is the share of your network covers that are regulars who would have phoned anyway, and that share is measurable. We wrote about how to measure it. For a platform-by-platform view, see our OpenTable alternatives comparison.
Get these in writing before you sign
- The processing rate, card-present and card-not-present, including the per-transaction cent charge and the surcharge on foreign-issued cards.
- What each terminal after the first one costs.
- Every module you actually need, priced. Reservations, kitchen display, online ordering, loyalty, gift cards, inventory.
- The contract term and the renewal notice. OpenTable's standard contract is one year, auto-renews annually, and requires 30 days' notice to stop.
- Which currency you're billed in.
- What happens to your guest list if you leave, and in what format.
Where Dashi sits
Dashi Reserve is $149 CAD per location per month for reservations, waitlist, floor plan and SMS, and $249 for deposits, card holds and advanced rules. No per-cover fee at any volume. SMS is included to 500 texts a month, with extras billed at cost.
One concession
We publish Reserve pricing and we do not publish POS pricing. On that line we are in the same position as Toast and TouchBistro, and you should put us through the six questions above the same way.
Sources and verification
Every competitor figure was checked against the vendor's own pricing page on August 20, 2026. SkipTheDishes does not publish partner commission rates, so no Skip figure is stated above. Public prices change, and Canadian availability, taxes, discounts, integrations and contract terms may differ from what a page advertises.