Three invoices hit my inbox this week, the same as every month. Software for the restaurant: $985.29. Software for the Hop City truck: $572.84. Software for the mobile truck: $458.60. They autopay on the 14th whether I open them or not.
That’s $2,016.73 a month. $24,200.76 a year. For the software that rings up pizza.
None of it is card processing. Toast sends those statements separately, one per location, in their own emails, and processing is a cost you keep no matter whose logo is on the register. The $2,016.73 is just the subscription: the monthly rent on my own counter.
The bill that never changes is the one to open
I read my food invoices line by line. When cheese moves a few points in a month, I know before the delivery driver has left the lot. But for a long time I didn’t open the POS invoice, and the reason I didn’t is the reason I should have: it never changed.
A grocery bill that jumps gets attention. A software bill that sits perfectly still on autopay gets none, and it is priced accordingly. Nobody budgets a fight over a number they never see.
Mine turned out to be less quiet than I thought. When I finally lined up the invoices, the Hop City truck’s software had moved four times in six months: $587.60 in February, $437.60 in March, $487.60 in April, back to $587.60 in May, $572.84 by June. I’d have to go dig through the line items to tell you why. That’s the point: a bill can move four times before the person paying it notices.
I did the responsible thing first
Before anyone writes this off as a rant: Toast is good software. I run it every day, and I’ve written a whole post on setting it up right on a truck. The terminals survive flour and heat, the reporting is real, and when something dies on a Friday night there’s a number to call. So no, this is not a hit piece. The product is fine. The arithmetic is the problem.
And I did what a responsible operator is supposed to do: I audited the stack. The restaurant’s invoice ran $1,209.25 every single month from February through June. In July I went through it and cut what we weren’t using, and it dropped to $985.29. That’s 18% off one invoice, which is real money, and I’ll take it.
But that was the whole prize. The trimmed, audited, nothing-wasted version of my POS stack still costs two grand a month. Trimming gets you 18%. It cannot get you out of the pricing model.
The $985.29, line by line
Open one of them up. The restaurant’s invoice, #INV10281558. And be clear about what this is: none of it is hardware. The terminals, the screens, the handhelds are bought separately, once, and I own them. Every line below is a software fee, and it comes back every month.
That distinction is most of the reason this bill deserved a post. If this were rented equipment, there would be a way out: rentals end, buyouts exist, a paid-off machine drops off the bill. A software fee has no ending built into it anywhere.
- Kitchen display screen software, $31.26 per screen, three screens: $93.78
- The base register software: $80.37
- Third-party delivery integrations (DoorDash, Grubhub, UberEats): $80.37
- The catering and events module: $181.58
- Online ordering, sold as “Digital Storefront Pro”: $133.06
- The marketing bundle (gift cards, loyalty, email, texts): $149.11
- The restaurant management module: $133.96
- The team management module: $133.06
Notice what the biggest line is. The catering module runs $181.58 a month: more than twice the register software itself. The register is the part I thought I was buying. It’s 8% of the bill.
My favorite line is the kitchen screen, and you have to lay all three invoices side by side to see it. I already own the screens. What the $31.26 buys is the license to keep one running for a month, per screen, on hardware I paid for. Same fee name on all three invoices, same software, same job: it shows the kitchen what to cook. The shop pays $31.26 a screen. Hop City pays $23.73. The truck pays $26.25. Three prices for the same license, and I know exactly why: I negotiated all three, separately, per location. Those numbers are what winning looks like. The haggling works, but it works one line at a time, on a bill with eight lines, times three locations, forever. I sell pizza at one price no matter which door you walk through.
The part that should bother you: the growth tax
Here’s the line item nobody puts on the expansion spreadsheet. Every truck is its own location, and every location pays for its own software stack. My mobile truck’s invoice was $458.60 in February, same as in July. The software does not care what the truck sold.
So a POS priced per location is a tax on growing. Add a second truck and you’ve signed up for roughly another $500 a month of software before it sells its first slice, forever, at a rate you don’t set.
When I wrote up what a pizza food truck really costs, software was not the line anybody asked about. It should have been. Over five years, $500 a month is $30,000: more than some operators paid for the whole trailer.
So I’m building my own
We call it Tempo. A register at the counter, a kitchen screen behind it, online ordering wired straight into both, and a dashboard that shows the day the way I think about it: sales by the hour, by location, next to labor.
I’m not a software guy. I make pizza and I read invoices. But the tools changed more in the last two years than this industry has changed in forty, and building software now runs a lot like running a kitchen: describe exactly what you want, then send back what comes out wrong until it comes out right. I describe what the counter needs. The AI writes the code. I spend slow hours trying to break what it built, and I’ve gotten good at breaking it.
Right now Tempo rings test orders in the back office, and the kitchen screen has already run a Friday night quietly next to the Toast one. It isn’t switched over yet. When it flips, the plan is that customers notice exactly nothing, which is the highest compliment a register can earn.
What it costs to run is a hosting bill, not three location subscriptions.
I’ll publish the exact number when the switch flips, next to the invoices it replaces. That’s the same deal as every number on this site: real ones or none.
What to do about yours
You almost certainly should not build your own POS. I have an unfair setup: slow hours, stubbornness, and a business small enough to test on. Fine.
But do this tonight: pull your last three software invoices, just the software, not the processing statements, and add them up. I knew my food cost to the decimal and could not have told you that number within five hundred dollars. It was $2,016.73. Now I know it, and every decision about it got easier the day it had a number.
Yours is sitting in your inbox.