Online ordering for small restaurants, ranked honestly by Zayos.
Published July 2026 · Updated July 26, 2026
For a small restaurant under roughly 370 online orders a month, Square Online is the cheapest credible system: $0 to $149 a month plus card processing. Above that, a flat fee wins. GloriaFood is free, Menufy is the cheapest flat plan, and Zayos suits higher volume.
Why does the company that builds Zayos rank itself sixth?
Because on this page it belongs sixth. A $499 monthly plan is a bad deal for a restaurant doing 80 online orders a month, and saying otherwise would cost you money and cost us the only thing that makes a roundup useful. Zayos is built by Zay Revenue Group in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and it is the flat-fee option on this list, which is a real advantage at real volume and a real disadvantage below it.
Three rules held this list together. Every competitor is described by its actual strength. Every price was checked against the vendor’s own pricing page in July 2026, and where a vendor publishes nothing, this page says so and names the tracker instead of guessing. And the ranking is by fit for a small independent, not by who pays us, because nobody does.
At what order volume does a flat fee beat a percentage?
Modeled at a $32 average online ticket, the band most independent takeout kitchens sit in. Percentage rows are computed from each vendor’s own published rate. Find your row, then find your column.
| Platform | 75 orders/mo | 250 orders/mo | 600 orders/mo |
|---|---|---|---|
| GloriaFood (free plan + $29 payments module) | $29 + processing | $29 + processing | $29 + processing |
| Square Online, Free plan | $102 | $339 | $814 |
| Square Online, Plus plan ($49) | $141 | $356 | $786 |
| Menufy, month to month | $179 + processing | $179 + processing | $179 + processing |
| ChowNow Launch, month to month | $342 | $558 | $989 |
| Owner.com Flexible ($249 + 5%) | $369 | $649 | $1,209 |
| Owner.com Flat Rate | $499 | $499 | $499 |
| Zayos Operator | $499 | $499 | $499 |
Card processing is excluded from the GloriaFood, Menufy and Zayos rows because none of those three publishes an online processing rate on its pricing page. Read those rows as a floor, not a total, and ask each vendor for the rate in writing. Everything else is computed from published rates as accessed in July 2026.
At a $32 ticket, a $499 flat plan costs less than Square Online’s Free plan above roughly 370 orders a month, less than ChowNow Launch above roughly 200, and less than Owner.com Flexible above roughly 156. Below those lines, the percentage platform is genuinely the cheaper buy and you should take it.
One number puts all of this in proportion. At 250 orders a month on a $32 ticket, a 25% blended marketplace take is about $2,000 a month. Every single row in the table above is a fraction of that. For a small restaurant the expensive mistake is not choosing the wrong subscription, it is having no direct channel at all. Run your own figures in the savings calculator or read the commission-free ordering guide.
Which system fits a small restaurant best?
Ordered by fit for one to three locations doing under roughly 600 online orders a month. Each entry opens with who the platform is genuinely best for.
Square Online
Cheapest credible startA one-location restaurant that needs a working ordering page this week and cannot commit to a monthly bill. Square Online publishes a $0 plan, runs on the same Square account as your register, and handles modifiers, pickup windows and tipping with nothing to integrate. For a small independent it is the lowest-risk way to start taking direct orders.
Published, verified July 2026. Free $0, Plus $49/month per location, 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, after the rate change Square made in January 2026. No setup fee, no contract.
Processing is the real bill. At a $32 average ticket the Free plan costs about $1.36 an order, so 600 online orders a month is roughly $814 before you have paid for anything else. Restaurant depth is also thin: loyalty is a separate paid add-on, and your marketplace orders keep arriving on their own tablets.
GloriaFood
Free, when free is the constraintThe restaurant with no software budget at all this quarter. GloriaFood publishes an ordering system that is genuinely free, with unlimited orders, unlimited locations and no commission, and you can be taking pickup orders off your own site in an afternoon. When cash is the binding constraint, that beats every argument about features.
Published, verified July 2026. The ordering system is $0: no monthly fee, no setup fee, no contract, no credit card required, no per-order commission. Taking card payments online is a $29/month module. A POS add-on is $49/month per location on a two-year commitment, and advanced promotions are $19/month. Card processing depends on the provider you connect and is not published.
Free buys you ordering, not a business. There is no owned customer database worth the name, no marketplace ingestion, the POS module asks for two years, and you will outgrow it. Treat it as a bridge that proves your regulars will order direct, then move.
ChowNow
Commission-free plus a diner networkA small restaurant that wants commission-free direct ordering with a modest discovery bump attached. The underrated feature for a small kitchen is Order Throttling: ChowNow hands out 15-minute capacity slots and hides the full ones, so a two-person line does not get twelve tickets at 6:40pm.
Published, verified July 2026. 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, and Flex Delivery orders are $7.98 each. 0% commission on direct orders.
Three lines stack before you have sold a single sandwich: subscription, setup fee, processing. At 250 orders a month on a $32 ticket, Launch lands near $558, which is more than a $499 flat plan that charges the restaurant nothing per order.
Owner.com
Most complete package, and you pick the fee shapeA small restaurant whose actual problem is marketing, not order-taking. Owner ships the website, a branded app, automated SEO pages, loyalty, and email and text campaigns in one subscription. It is also the only platform here that openly sells you a choice between a percentage plan and a flat plan, which is a genuinely operator-friendly thing to do.
Published, verified July 2026. Flexible is $249/month plus a 5% restaurant fee per order. Flat Rate is $499/month with no additional restaurant fees. On both plans guests pay a 5% order support fee at checkout. Month to month, cancel any time, no cancellation fees, with special rates offered for multi-location groups.
The guest-side 5% is a percentage, so it climbs with the ticket: $5.00 on a $100 order, where a flat fee stays at $2.99. And the two plans cross at roughly 156 orders a month on a $32 ticket, so an operator sitting above that on Flexible is quietly paying Owner more than Owner’s own flat plan would cost.
Zayos
The crossover, once the volume is realThe small restaurant that is not really small online any more: roughly 400 or more direct orders a month, or a marketplace habit it wants to break. Zayos is one flat monthly bill per location for a branded ordering site on your own domain, a customer book you own and can export, and, on the $599 plan, DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub tickets ingested into the same kitchen tablet through Otter.
Published on our pricing page. $499/month Operator, $599/month Operator + Marketplace, $699/month Concierge, per location, month to month, no setup fee. The restaurant pays 0% commission and keeps 100% of food revenue and tips. The diner pays a flat service fee at checkout: $0.99 pickup, $2.99 delivery, $0 dine-in, 10% on catering. Payments run through Stripe, so confirm card processing in your quote the way you would with anyone on this list.
Full disclosure: we build Zayos, and $499 is the wrong number for a genuinely small restaurant. Below roughly 370 online orders a month at a $32 ticket, Square Online costs less. Below about 200, so does ChowNow. We are also the youngest platform here. Naya Grill in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach is live and taking orders today, and eight more storefronts are built with ordering opening at each launch. If a ten-year track record is your first filter, four platforms above this one have one.
Toast Online Ordering
Only if you already run ToastA small restaurant already on Toast POS. One menu, one ticket flow, one vendor, no third-party integration to babysit. If your whole floor already runs on Toast, adding its ordering module is the path of least resistance, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
Toast publishes POS plans (a $0 Starter Kit on pay-as-you-go, Point of Sale from $69/month) but prices digital ordering inside a quote. Sauce reports the online ordering module at roughly $75/month on top of the POS plan, with online-order processing reported at 3.09% to 3.69% + 15 cents on pay-as-you-go and about 2.49% + 15 cents on a paid monthly plan (accessed July 2026).
You cannot buy it without Toast, which means Toast hardware and Toast payment processing arrive with it, and the diner-facing page defaults to a toasttab.com address rather than your own domain. Buying a point of sale to get an ordering page is backwards.
What small restaurant owners ask before they sign.
What is the best online ordering system for a small restaurant?
How many online orders a month do I need before a flat monthly fee is worth it?
Is there a genuinely free online ordering system for restaurants?
Do I need a point of sale system to take online orders?
Should a small restaurant quit DoorDash and Uber Eats entirely?
What does online ordering actually cost a small restaurant in 2026?
- GloriaFood pricing page: free ordering system with unlimited orders and no commission, $29/month online payment module, $49/month POS on a two-year commitment, $19/month promotions (accessed July 2026).
- Square pricing and POS USA, Square Fees and Pricing 2026: Free / Plus $49 / Premium $149 per location, and the 3.3% + 30 cents (Free) versus 2.9% + 30 cents (paid) online rates effective January 2026 (accessed July 2026).
- Menufy pricing page: $149/month on a 12-month plan with free equipment, $179/month with no agreement and no cancellation penalty, one plan, no per-order commissions (accessed July 2026).
- ChowNow pricing page: Launch $229/$249, Grow $319/$349, Elevate $409/$449, $119 to $499 setup fee, 2.95% + 29 cents processing, $99 Apple developer fee, $7.98 per Flex Delivery order (accessed July 2026). Order Throttling behaviour from ChowNow restaurant support.
- Owner.com pricing page: Flexible $249/month plus 5% restaurant fee, Flat Rate $499/month, 5% guest order support fee on both, month to month with no cancellation fees (accessed July 2026).
- Sauce, Toast Online Ordering Pricing and Fees: reported ~$75/month ordering module, $0 Starter Kit and $69+ POS plans, 3.09% to 3.69% + 15 cents pay-as-you-go and ~2.49% + 15 cents on a paid plan (accessed July 2026).
- Zayos pricing: the $499, $599 and $699 tiers, no setup fee, and the diner-paid flat service fee referenced throughout.
Vendors change plans. Where a figure is marked reported, the vendor did not publish it as of July 2026 and this page attributes the estimate rather than presenting it as official. Confirm current terms before you sign anything.
Find your own crossover number.
The free AI report reads your restaurant’s real order volume and ticket, then shows which side of the line you are on. No card, about 60 seconds, no sales call.