The best online ordering for food trucks, and why Zayos is last.
Published July 2026 · Updated July 26, 2026
The best online ordering system for a single food truck is Square Online, because it takes direct orders at $0 a month and a truck cannot carry fixed cost through a rained-out week. Flat subscriptions only pay off for fleets, commissaries and catering-heavy trucks.
Which kind of truck are you running?
Trucks are not one segment. The right platform changes completely depending on where the revenue actually comes from, so answer this before you read a single price.
One truck, one crew
Under about 300 online orders a month, revenue swings with weather and the lot schedule. Buy the smallest fixed cost you can. Square Online at $0 a month is the honest answer, and every subscription on this page is worse arithmetic than it until volume steadies.
A truck that mostly sells catering and events
The money is in booked events, not walk-up pre-orders, so what you need is a deposit flow, a lead form and a follow-up habit. Owner.com is the strongest marketing package here. Truck-specific booking marketplaces exist too, though several of them publish no fee schedule, so we cannot rank them on price.
A fleet, a commissary, or a truck attached to a restaurant
Now you have several menus, several service points and marketplace tickets arriving in more than one place. This is the only truck situation where a per-location platform such as Zayos is defensible, and it is defensible because the kitchen, not the truck, is carrying the volume.
We build Zayos, and it only wins the third situation. Saying so is the only way the other two rankings are worth reading. Every price below came off the vendor’s own pricing page on July 26, 2026, or is attributed to a named tracker where the vendor publishes nothing.
Five platforms, ranked by fixed cost per order.
Square Online
The right answer for one truckAlmost 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.
Free $0, Plus $49/month, Premium $149/month per location, with online processing at 3.3% + 30 cents on Free and 2.9% + 30 cents on the paid plans following Square's October 2025 pricing overhaul (POS USA, page updated June 13, 2026, accessed 2026-07-26). In-person card rates differ by plan and are not compared here.
You pay for it in processing, and the extra 0.4 points on the Free plan is real money once online sales pass roughly $10,000 a month. It is a general commerce product, so nothing in it knows that your address changes on Thursday.
Toast Online Ordering
If a brick and mortar already runs ToastA 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 publishes $0/month for the Starter Kit and from $69/month for Point of Sale. Merchant Maverick reports the online ordering module at $75/month and processing at 3.09% to 3.69% + $0.15 on Starter Kit or 2.49% + $0.15 on the flat-rate Point of Sale option (guide updated June 2025, accessed 2026-07-26).
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.
Owner.com
Best for a truck that sells cateringThe 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.
Published on owner.com/pricing, read 2026-07-26: $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. Month to month, no cancellation fee, migration included.
At $249 a month plus 5%, a truck doing 200 orders at a $16 ticket pays about $409, which is a lot of fixed cost against $3,200 of sales. Owner itself positions the Flat Rate plan for restaurants doing $5,000 or more a month online, and most single trucks are not there.
ChowNow
Flat, commission-free, with a diner appA 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.
Published on get.chownow.com/pricing, read 2026-07-26: 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.
Zayos
Only once a kitchen is behind the truckA 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: $499/month Operator, $599/month Operator + Marketplace, $699/month Concierge, per location, month to month, no setup fee. The restaurant pays $0 per order and keeps 100% of food revenue and tips. The diner pays a flat $0.99 pickup, $2.99 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 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.
What does each one bill a truck per month?
Software cost only, at 200 and 400 online orders a month on a $16 average ticket. Card processing is billed separately on every platform here and is excluded so the subscriptions line up.
| Plan | How it bills | 200 orders | 400 orders | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Square Online Free | $0/mo, processing only | $0 | $0 | Highest online processing rate of the group |
| Toast Online Ordering | reported $75/mo module on a $0 to $69/mo POS plan | $75 to $144 | $75 to $144 | Requires Toast POS and Toast processing |
| ChowNow Launch | $229/mo on annual billing | $229 | $229 | Plus $119 to $499 one-time setup |
| Owner.com Flexible | $249/mo + 5% of order value | $409 | $569 | Guest also pays 5% |
| Owner.com Flat Rate | $499/mo flat | $499 | $499 | Owner suggests $5k+/mo online sales |
| Zayos Operator | $499/mo flat per location | $499 | $499 | Diner pays $0.99 pickup, $2.99 delivery |
When should a truck buy no subscription at all?
When your online orders are still counted in dozens. A truck taking 60 pre-orders a month does not have an ordering problem, it has a demand problem, and no platform on this page fixes that. Put the menu on a free Square Online page, put a QR code on the window, and spend the $249 you did not commit on the lot fee for a better location.
The signal that it is time to pay for something is not revenue, it is friction. When somebody is retyping marketplace tickets into the register, when two service points are running different menus, or when a catering inquiry sat unanswered for three days, the subscription is buying back labor you are already spending. Until then it is buying features nobody in the truck has time to open. Run your own numbers with the free AI report, or read the wider comparison in the all-restaurant roundup.
Food truck ordering, answered.
What is the best online ordering system for a food truck?
Is $499 a month too much for a food truck?
What does a food truck actually need that a restaurant does not?
Should a food truck take delivery orders at all?
Do the truck-specific ordering platforms cost less?
When does a truck operator outgrow the free tier?
Sources
- POS USA, Square fees and pricing. Free $0, Plus $49, Premium $149 per location, online processing 3.3% + 30 cents on Free and 2.9% + 30 cents on paid plans after the October 2025 overhaul (page updated June 13, 2026, accessed July 26, 2026).
- Merchant Maverick, Toast pricing guide. $0 Starter Kit, Point of Sale from $69/month, online ordering module reported at $75/month, processing 3.09% to 3.69% + $0.15 or 2.49% + $0.15 (guide updated June 2025, accessed July 26, 2026).
- Owner.com pricing page. $249 Flexible plus 5% restaurant fee, $499 Flat Rate, 5% guest order support fee on both, Flat Rate positioned for $5,000 or more in monthly online sales, month to month (accessed July 26, 2026).
- ChowNow pricing page. Launch $229/$249, Grow $319/$349, Elevate $409/$449, $119 to $499 setup fee, 2.95% + $0.29 processing, $99 Apple developer fee, printers $250 to $420 (accessed July 26, 2026).
- Zayos pricing. The $499, $599 and $699 per location tiers, no setup fee, and the diner-paid $0.99 pickup and $2.99 delivery service fee.
Truck-specific booking and ordering marketplaces were considered and left out of the table because they do not publish a public fee schedule. Vendors change plans, so confirm current terms directly before signing.
Find out if you have outgrown free.
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