The Restaurant Stack

Toast vs. Square for Restaurants — Pricing & Positioning Teardown

Version: v1.0 (sample deliverable). Completed 2026-09-24. Status: Sections 1 (pricing), 3 (recent moves) and 4 (latest results) complete from live reads and a live news rail on 2026-09-24. Section 2 (feature matrix) and section 5 (dated customer sentiment) are PENDING with fill plans below — deliberately not padded. This document doubles as the product template: every paid teardown ($500–2,000) follows this exact structure.

Masthead rule: every figure dated and sourced. Inferences labeled INFERENCE inline. Desk research only — no phone interviews, no insider data. Paywalled sources are skipped and the gap is stated, never papered over.

1. Pricing structures (live page reads, 2026-09-24)

Toast (pos.toasttab.com/pricing, read 2026-09-24): - Starter Kit — $0/month, single location, up to 2 terminals, hardware kit with no upfront cost. (Live page.) - Point of Sale — $69/month, software subscription, choose-your-own hardware, flat-rate processing. (Live page.) - Build Your Own — custom pricing. (Live page.) - New-restaurant bundle (POS + Payroll) — $69/month + $9 per employee/month, displayed against a struck-through "Original price: $90." (Live page, 2026-09-24.) A visible live price action: the bundle price moved from $90 to $69 + $9/employee/mo. - Toast also sells the same Point of Sale plan to retail at $90/month — restaurants price below retail. (Live page.) - Toast's exact processing rate is not exposed in the page's readable text ("simple, flat rate" only); the footnote marker ¹ links to terms we could not capture on this read. Processing rates: pending verified read — not quoted here.

Square (squareup.com/us/en/pricing, read 2026-09-24): - Free — "only pay when you take a payment"; POS app, online site, invoicing, booking, checking/savings. (Live page.) - Plus — "best value"; advanced POS features per industry, lower processing fees, loyalty, marketing, staff management. (Live page. Dollar figure renders dynamically and did not appear in our readable capture — monthly price: pending verified read.) - Premium — everything in Plus, 24/7 priority support, lowest processing fees. (Live page. Custom/negotiated — consistent with its positioning.) - Square Pro — custom pricing, offered where a business processes over $250,000/year. (Live page.) This is Square's mid-market on-ramp: custom economics start at a quarter-million in volume. - The restaurants marketing page (squareup.com/us/en/restaurants, read 2026-09-24) carries no rate card — "transparent rates" is asserted, not shown. Per-swipe processing rates: pending verified read; an earlier retrieval flagged a conflicting "+10¢" figure on Square's pricing page which we could not resolve on re-read and therefore do not quote.

Structural comparison (INFERENCE, clearly labeled): Toast monetizes a software subscription on top of processing; Square monetizes processing with free-to-cheap software as the hook. But the entry points have converged at $0 — Toast's Starter Kit matches Square's Free tier as a customer-acquisition wedge, and both push custom pricing to mid-market (Toast "Build Your Own"; Square Pro at >$250K/yr). INFERENCE: the fight has moved from entry price to who gets the processing margin and the attached financial services.

2. Feature comparison matrix — PENDING (fill plan: Toast + Square help centers and product docs; POS core, payroll, loyalty, online ordering, inventory, KDS, marketing, API openness; ~4–6 page reads, ~2¢)

3. Recent moves (last 6 weeks, from live news rail, 2026-09-24)

4. Latest results (what each company chose to disclose)

Toast (Q2 2026, quarter ended June 30, 2026): - Revenue $1.91B → profit $154M (The Motley Fool, Sep 16 2026). - EPS nearly doubled YoY; Q3 adjusted-EBITDA guidance raised to $220M; record 9,500 net location adds (The Motley Fool, Aug 27 2026; Sep 12 2026). - Stock $30.11, market cap ~$17B, gross margin 26.68% as of Aug 27 2026 (The Motley Fool). Analysts note steady insider selling, including by the CEO (The Motley Fool, Aug 27 2026).

Block / Square (Q2 2026, quarter ended June 30, 2026): - Revenue $6.62B; GAAP earnings $88.52M (1.34% margin); diluted EPS $1.02 vs $0.87 consensus (+16.71% surprise); second consecutive beat (Q1 2026: $0.85 vs $0.68); TTM revenue $25.0B; shares ~$84, market cap ~$49.5B (earnings overview via ad-hoc-news.de, Aug 29 2026). - Direction of travel: EPS $0.54 (Q3 2025) → $0.65 (Q4 2025) → $0.85 (Q1 2026) → $1.02 (Q2 2026) (same source). - Analyst lens: Scotiabank calls Cash App growth strong but "increasingly credit-led" and Square the "missing second engine" (Yahoo Finance, Sep 2 2026).

The asymmetry, stated honestly: Toast reports restaurant metrics directly (net location adds, restaurant GPV). Block does not break out restaurant GTV in its disclosures — the "+20% YoY food-and-beverage GPV" figure in circulation comes from a third-party summary of the shareholder letter (Axis Intelligence, Sep 3 2026, single-source). The comparison is structurally uneven, and this teardown will not pretend otherwise.

INFERENCE (from these figures only): on revenue scale Block is ~3.5× Toast, but Toast is worth ~1/3 of Block's market cap while growing locations at a record pace — the market is paying for restaurant-specific depth at Toast and for Cash App at Block. For a restaurant buyer, this means Toast's roadmap is theirs by definition; Square's restaurant stack is one business among several. INFERENCE — derived from the cited figures, not a company disclosure.

5. Customer sentiment — PENDING (fill plan: dated quotes from G2/Capterra/Trustpilot and r/restaurateur, r/KitchenConfidential; reviewer quoted verbatim with platform and date; pattern-level conclusions only, labeled INFERENCE; ~4–8 page reads, est. $0.03–0.05)

6. The verdict

Who each is right for (INFERENCE, built on the sourced material above): Square wins the seller that wants zero fixed cost, fast self-serve setup, and lives fine with processing-based pricing — food trucks, cafés, single-location QSRs. Toast wins the operator whose volume justifies a software subscription — full-service, multi-terminal, and anyone who wants payroll/inventory/marketing from one vendor with restaurant-grade hardware. The live pricing shows both courting the other's base: Toast's $0 Starter Kit is a Square-style entry offer, and Square Pro's >$250K custom pricing is a Toast-style mid-market motion.

What to watch next: whether Square's restaurant GPV growth (single-sourced at +20% YoY) survives into disclosed segment data; whether Toast's Google/Adyen partnerships (Aug 27 2026) turn into checkout or ordering surface advantages; whether the POS demand networks (Local by Toast, Square Neighborhoods ⚠, GoTo Place) begin charging.

Open gaps, stated plainly: Square's per-swipe rates (live fee table renders dynamically; dedicated fees page 404s on our reader); Toast's exact processing percentages (footnote not captured); sections 2 and 5 above. None of these are papered over; each has a fill plan and an estimated cost.

Honesty rules baked in (and applied above): desk research only; contract-level/negotiated pricing inferred and labeled; paywalled sources skipped and the gap stated; figures from training data never presented as current — every number above was read live on 2026-09-24 or cites its publisher date.