An AI front-of-house restaurant system handles the customer-facing intake layer of your restaurant: answering phone calls, taking orders by voice, routing them to your kitchen, and giving customers a direct way to order online. The technology replaces tasks that currently require a staff member at the front counter or phone. Costs range from $0/month (customer-funded fee models) to $200+/month depending on how the vendor structures pricing.
Third-party delivery platforms charge 15-30% commission on every order. A restaurant doing $20,000 per month in DoorDash orders at 27% average commission pays $5,400 per month in fees, against roughly $200 per month to run a direct ordering channel. You cannot eliminate third-party platforms entirely if you need their discovery traffic, but most restaurants can profitably migrate a substantial share of repeat customers to a direct channel within 90 days. This guide shows the exact math and the mechanics.
A restaurant that misses 5 phone calls per day at a $22 average ticket loses $40,150 per year in potential revenue. At 8 missed calls per day, that number climbs past $64,000. Most of those losses are invisible because you never see the order that did not happen. An AI phone system at 10 cents per call eliminates nearly all of that loss for under $80 per month.
Olo is an enterprise digital ordering platform built for multi-unit restaurant chains. Implementation costs range from $5,000 to $50,000 depending on configuration, plus annual contract fees and per-transaction charges. Olo is not designed for independent or small-chain restaurants — their sales process, minimum viable configurations, and support structure all assume enterprise scale. Single-location restaurants have alternatives that cost a fraction of Olo’s implementation fee with comparable or better direct ordering functionality.
Restaurant POS systems routinely cost more than their advertised rates through six categories of fees that are rarely disclosed upfront: hardware lock-in costs, payment processing markups above interchange rates, per-module add-on fees for features operators expect to be included, early termination penalties in 24-48 month contracts, support tier charges, and data migration costs at switching. On Toast’s Standard plan, the gap between the $110/month headline and the real monthly cost commonly runs $300-$500/month for a typical single-location restaurant. Understanding these categories before signing prevents four- and five-figure surprises.
Square for Restaurants charges 2.6%+10¢ per card-present transaction on both its Free and Plus ($60/mo) plans, with no rate negotiation for most operators. A restaurant processing $15,000/month pays $460/month in Square transaction fees before any software cost. Above roughly $10,000/month in card volume, platforms that use Stripe’s direct rate (2.7%+5¢) plus a small subscription or per-order fee produce lower total costs than Square Free, while including features Square charges extra for or does not offer at all.
DoorDash charges restaurants 15% (Basic), 25% (Plus), or 30% (Premier) commission on every order, plus a separate 2.9%+30¢ payment processing fee on all tiers. On 100 orders at $25 average, DoorDash Basic costs $477 in combined fees; Premier costs $853. Direct ordering platforms charge 0-1% or a flat monthly fee. At 100 orders per month, the difference between DoorDash Basic and a direct channel is $380-$780 per month, or $4,560-$9,360 per year.
Toast POS software runs $0-$165/month depending on tier, but that number excludes hardware ($627-$2,200+ upfront), payment processing at 3.09%-3.5%+15¢ per transaction, paid add-ons for online ordering ($75/mo) and loyalty ($25-75/mo), and a 24-month software contract with separate 36-48 month hardware leases. A typical single-location restaurant pays $6,400-$15,000+ in the first year. Toast requires a sales call to quote totals, which means operators routinely discover the full cost after signing.
