Restaurant software contracts: 12 questions to ask before you sign

Before you sign any restaurant software deal, get the full agreement, not the sales sheet, and answer 12 questions in writing: the term, automatic renewal, the cost of leaving early, who owns the hardware, whether you must use the vendor’s card processing, every per-order fee, how prices can rise, and how you get your data out. The monthly price is the part everyone compares. The term, the exit and the processing are where restaurants get stuck.

This is a buyer’s checklist, not legal advice. If the deal is long or large, have a lawyer read it.

Why do restaurant software contracts cause so much regret?

Short answer: because the costs that hurt arrive after the demo, when you try to change something.

A demo shows the screens. The agreement decides what happens in month 14, when the tool isn’t working for you, a cheaper option appears, or you sell the restaurant. Four things tend to tie owners down:

• A long term with a fee for leaving early.
• Hardware you lease or finance that keeps billing after the software is gone.
• Card processing tied to the software, so switching one means switching both.
• Automatic renewal with a short notice window that is easy to miss.

None of these is wrong in itself. A longer term can buy a lower price, and an all-in-one POS with its own processing can be simpler to run. The problem is signing without knowing which of them you have agreed to.

What are the 12 questions to ask before you sign?

Short answer: these 12, with the answer found in the agreement itself, not in an email from sales.

Agreements use different headings, so the middle column says where the answer usually sits.

One more worth asking: who do I call during a Saturday service, and how fast do they answer? A support promise that is not in the agreement is a hope, not a term.

How long are restaurant POS contracts, and what about Toast?

Short answer: it depends on the vendor and the deal, so read the agreement you are offered. We could not read Toast’s terms ourselves.

“Toast contract length” is one of the most searched questions about restaurant software. We can’t answer it from Toast’s own pages: its pricing and product pages returned an error to our checks on 15 Oct 2026, and its help pages give no price or term. Third-party blogs quote figures, but we don’t repeat numbers we can’t trace to the vendor.

What Toast’s help pages do show is how its table ordering is built. To get Toast Mobile Order & Pay orders to the kitchen, “designate an auto-firing device in the restaurant”, and items follow Toast’s routing to printers or kitchen screens. Guests pay on their phones by card, Apple Pay or Toast gift cards (Toast FAQs, updated 17 Sep 2026). In other words, it runs inside Toast’s POS and Toast’s payments. For any POS-based ordering tool like that, questions 4, 5 and 6 matter most, because the hardware, the processing and the ordering come as one package.

If you already use Toast and want to leave, read the termination clause, check whether your devices are owned or financed, and check whether processing has its own agreement. Our Toast Mobile Order & Pay alternatives post covers what to use instead, and WaiterPilot vs Toast compares the two directly.

What do published terms look like? Six vendors as published on 15 Oct 2026

Short answer: they vary a lot, and several leave the key terms off the public page.

These are copied from each vendor’s own pages as published on 15 Oct 2026. They change, so check again before you decide. “Not stated” means we could not find it on the page we read, not that it doesn’t exist.

Ordder’s 1% line is quoted exactly because its wording is unclear; ask Ordder how it applies to you. Sources: Square, MENU TIGER, Ordder pricing and terms, Owner.com, sunday. For a side-by-side of features as well as price, see our comparisons.

What does a long term really cost if you leave early? A worked example

Short answer: in this example, leaving a 36-month deal after one year costs $3,720, before any difference in card fees.

Casa Olivo is a fictional restaurant (an example, not a customer). “Vendor X” is hypothetical, not a real company, and every term below is an assumption chosen to show the arithmetic.

The assumptions.

• Vendor X charges $150 a month for software on a 36-month term.
• The early termination fee is 50% of the software fees left in the term.
• Hardware is leased separately at $80 a month for 36 months, and the lease can’t be cancelled.
• Vendor X requires its own card processing at a rate 0.2 percentage points higher than Casa Olivo’s current processor.
• Casa Olivo takes $60,000 a month on cards.

Leaving after 12 months.

And the cost of staying, from processing alone. 0.2% × $60,000 = $120 a month, or $1,440 a year. Over the full 36 months that is $4,320 on top of the software, paid whether the tool is earning its place or not.

The point is not the numbers, which are invented for the example. It is that questions 3, 4 and 5 can be worth more than the monthly price you compared. Put your own figures in the same three lines for every vendor on your shortlist. For the per-order side of the bill, flat fee vs commission works through three restaurants, and our cost calculator does it with your own sales.

How should you test before you commit?

Short answer: on real busy services, with the agreement already read, and with a written go or no-go rule.

A free trial only protects you if you know what happens when it ends (question 11) and you have measured something during it. Our guide to judging a 30-day ordering trial gives a week-by-week plan and a scorecard. Two rules make the trial useful:

1. Read the agreement before day one, so the trial tests the tool and not your patience with the paperwork.
2. Decide what “go” means before you start, such as a target for how fast first orders are confirmed or waiter calls are answered, and hold the tool to it on day 30.

If you are comparing several QR ordering tools, the restaurant QR buyer’s checklist covers the product questions that sit next to these contract ones.

How does WaiterPilot answer the 12 questions?

Short answer: no contract, no hardware, no processing and 0% commission, but some things are not published yet, and we say which.

Two limits belong in any honest comparison. WaiterPilot has no POS or kitchen-printer connection, so staff ring orders into your till by hand if you use one; see how it works with your POS. And it takes no payments, so if you want guests to pay at the table from their phones, a pay-at-table or POS-based tool fits that job better.

What to do next

1. Ask every vendor on your shortlist for the full agreement and the fee schedule, in writing.
2. Fill in the 12-question table for each one, citing the clause.
3. Work out the exit cost after 12 months, as in the example above.
4. Run the free trial on busy nights with your go or no-go rule written down.

To see WaiterPilot’s offer in full, read the pricing page. To see the product before you read any paperwork, try a sample order.