Online ordering for cafes, ranked by Zayos on a $9 ticket.

A one-site or two-site coffee shop that wants the register, the ordering page, drink modifiers and tipping to be the same system. Square Online publishes a $0 plan, the modifier builder handles milk, syrup, shot count and temperature without hacks, and nothing has to be integrated because it is all one account. For an independent cafe this is the default, and it takes a specific reason to beat it.

Listed by Square, read 4 Oct 2026. Square Free $0, Square Plus $49/month per location, Square Premium $149/month per location. Online card processing is 3.3% + 30 cents on the Free plan and 2.9% + 30 cents on the paid plans.

The 30 cent fixed component is the problem at cafe ticket sizes. On a $9 order the Free plan takes about 60 cents, which is roughly 6.6% of the ticket, and on a $4.50 espresso it is closer to 10%. Loyalty, the feature a cafe actually lives on, is not part of the Free plan and only works inside Square.

An independent coffee shop that wants a branded order-ahead app without paying app-agency money for it. Joe bundles the point of sale, loyalty rewards, a stored-value wallet, kitchen display, web ordering and the branded app experience, and charges on transactions rather than a subscription. The stored-value wallet is the part a cafe should care about: prepaid balances turn a daily habit into cash up front.

Joe charges on transactions rather than a subscription: a payment rate in person, and a commission plus payment processing on branded app and mobile orders. We could not read its current rates on 4 Oct 2026, so none is restated here. Ask Joe for the app-order rate in writing.

A commission and a processing fee both apply to an app order, so on a small coffee ticket the per-order share can be high: work it out on your own average order before you sign. Usage-based pricing also means the bill grows exactly as you succeed, and it is a coffee-specific vendor, so a cafe with a serious kitchen may outgrow the food side.

A busy cafe or small coffee chain already running Toast, especially one with a real food menu. One menu, one ticket flow, one vendor, and the kitchen display and online orders share a spine. If Toast is already on your counter, adding its ordering module is the least disruptive move available.

Toast lists its Starter Kit from $0 a month and its Point of Sale plan from $69 a month, with online ordering sold as an add-on and no price shown for it (read 4 Oct 2026). Toast lists no processing rate either, so ask for both in writing.

You cannot buy the ordering module without Toast, so the hardware and the payment processing come with it, and the diner-facing page defaults to a toasttab.com address rather than your own. Ask for the all-in monthly cost in the demo, because the pricing page does not show it.

The cafe whose real problem is 7:30am to 9:00am. ChowNow publishes Order Throttling: incoming orders are placed into 15-minute capacity slots, full slots are hidden, and customers are pushed to the next available time. That is a virtual queue instead of a bar backed up eleven drinks deep, and it is the most concrete rush-management feature published by anyone on this list.

Listed by ChowNow, read 4 Oct 2026, each as a starting price. Launch $229/month on annual billing or $249 month-to-month, Grow $319/$349, Elevate $409/$449, plus a one-time setup fee of $119 to $499 and payment processing of 2.95% + 29 cents. Branded mobile apps add Apple’s $99 annual developer fee. 0% commission on direct orders.

The subscription is heavy for a cafe: the Launch plan is a fixed monthly bill before the first coffee is sold, with processing on every order on top. ChowNow is also built around restaurant ordering, so drink-first workflows and prepaid balances are not its home ground.

A cafe where the queue, not the website, is the bottleneck. Flipdish is one of the few vendors that publishes kiosk pricing outright, and a kiosk at the door does more for a 20-person morning line than any ordering page. Worth a look if you want the website, app and kiosk from one vendor with prices you can read before you talk to anybody.

Listed by Flipdish, read 4 Oct 2026. Website from $119/month billed annually or $149 monthly. Website and mobile app from $199 annually or $249 monthly. Self-service kiosk from $79 annually or $99 monthly. All quoted per site. Flipdish does not publish commission, per-order fees or contract length on its pricing page.

The published prices stop exactly where the important questions start. There is no per-order fee, processing rate or contract term on the pricing page, and the headline figures are annual-billing rates, so the month-to-month number is the one to compare. Get all of it in writing.

A new cafe that wants to find out whether its regulars will order ahead at all before it pays anybody. GloriaFood offers a free ordering system. Two afternoons of menu entry buys you the answer. One caution: its own site now says "GloriaFood will reach end of life on April 30, 2027" (gloriafood.com, read 4 Oct 2026), so treat it as a stopgap, not a home.

The core ordering system is offered free, with paid add-ons for online card payments, promotions and a point of sale. GloriaFood lists those prices on its own pricing page. We could not confirm them there on 4 Oct 2026, so no figure is repeated here. Card processing depends on the provider you connect.

It is ordering and nothing else. No loyalty worth the name, no stored-value wallet, no rush throttling, no owned customer database.

A multi-site cafe group with real food revenue: box lunches, catering trays, breakfast platters, wholesale accounts. Zayos is one flat bill per location for a branded ordering site on your own domain, a customer book you own, and marketplace tickets ingested onto the same tablet on the $499 Operator + Tablet plan. If a meaningful share of your revenue comes in at $60 or more per order, the flat structure starts to pay.

$399/month Operator, $499/month Operator + Tablet, $599/month Concierge, per location, month to month, no setup fee. 0% commission, and the restaurant keeps 100% of food revenue, and 100% of tips on pickup and dine-in. On delivery the tip goes to the driver. The diner pays a flat service fee at checkout: $0.99 pickup, $0.99 delivery, $0 dine-in, 10% on catering. Payments run through Stripe.

We build Zayos and it ranks last here because on a cafe ticket it deserves to. A flat $0.99 pickup fee is 11% of a $9 coffee-and-pastry order and about 22% of a $4.50 espresso, and asking a daily regular to pay that is a bad trade for both of us. Flat fees are built for $25 to $45 tickets. If your average online order is under about $20, take Square and come back when the food side is real.