The best online ordering for food trucks, and why Zayos is last.

Almost every independent food truck. It is the only platform here that takes online orders at $0 a month, the reader and the register are the same account, and Square hardware is built for a counter that does not have a fixed address. When your fixed cost is zero, a slow rained-out week costs you nothing.

Square Free $0, Square Plus $49/month, Square Premium $149/month per location, with online processing at 3.3% + 30 cents on Free and 2.9% + 30 cents on the paid plans (Square pricing and plans, read 4 Oct 2026). In-person card rates differ by plan and are not compared here.

You pay for it in processing: every online order on the Free plan carries 3.3% + 30 cents, a higher rate than the paid plans. It is a general commerce product, so nothing in it knows that your address changes on Thursday.

A truck that is the second service point of a restaurant already standardized on Toast. One menu, one reporting stack, one vendor, and the truck stops being a separate set of books. Toast also sells a $0 Starter Kit, which keeps the entry cost sane for a second location.

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 get both in writing.

It is a POS-first ecosystem: the hardware and the payment processing come with it. Buying Toast so a truck can take pre-orders is a large decision to solve a small problem, and the ordering page defaults to a toasttab.com address rather than yours.

The truck whose real business is corporate lunches, weddings and repeat event bookings. Owner bundles the site, a branded app, automated email and text, and loyalty into one subscription, and for a truck trying to turn a festival crowd into a mailing list that bundle is the strongest one here.

Listed on owner.com/pricing, read 4 Oct 2026: $249/month Flexible plus a 5% restaurant fee per order, or $499/month Flat Rate with no restaurant fee. Guests pay a 5% order support fee on both plans.

At $249 a month plus 5% of every order, the fixed part alone is a lot to carry for a truck whose sales swing with the weather, and the Flat Rate plan is more still. Most single trucks do not have the online volume to justify either.

A truck with a following that wants zero commission and a little discovery. ChowNow charges 0% on direct orders and lists you in its own diner app, which is worth something in a dense city where people browse for lunch.

Listed on get.chownow.com/pricing, read 4 Oct 2026: Launch $229/month billed annually or $249 month to month, Grow $319/$349, Elevate $409/$449. Plus a one-time setup fee of $119 to $499, processing at 2.95% + $0.29, a $99 annual Apple developer fee for a branded app, and printers at $250 to $420.

The setup fee lands before you have taken an order, and a subscription that starts at $229 is a hard sell for a vehicle that cannot open in a thunderstorm. Nothing in it handles a location that changes daily.

A commissary, a fleet, or a truck run by a restaurant group that already has marketplace volume to consolidate. Direct orders and Otter-ingested DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub tickets land on one kitchen tablet, which is worth paying for when there are several menus and several channels. For one truck, it is not.

Published on /pricing: $399/month Operator, $499/month Operator + Tablet, $599/month Concierge, per location, month to month, no setup fee. The restaurant pays $0 per order and 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 $0.99 pickup, $0.99 delivery, $0 dine-in, 10% catering service fee.

We build Zayos and we are ranking it last in its own roundup, because $499 a month per location (Operator + Tablet) is the wrong shape for a single truck doing 200 orders. That is roughly $2.50 of software per order against a $16 ticket. Buy it when a kitchen is carrying the volume, not when a generator is.