--- title: "Your POS Deal Is Five Prices, Not One — Read the Other Four Before You Sign" description: "The processing rate gets all the attention in the demo. The renewal window, the hardware terms, the exit fee and your data decide what the system really costs over the life of the contract." canonical_url: https://ovenscars.com/articles/what-a-fair-pos-contract-looks-like/ author: "Oven Scars Editorial" publisher: "Oven Scars" section: "Technology" date_published: 2026-10-13T00:00:00.000Z tags: ["pos", "payments", "contracts", "processing-fees"] word_count: 1052 reading_time_minutes: 8 license: "CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 — cite as \"Oven Scars\" and link the canonical URL" --- # Your POS Deal Is Five Prices, Not One — Read the Other Four Before You Sign *The processing rate gets all the attention in the demo. The renewal window, the hardware terms, the exit fee and your data decide what the system really costs over the life of the contract.* **Operator takeaway:** This week, divide total processing fees by card volume on your last three statements to get your effective rate, split by in-person, online and keyed-in. Before you sign or renew anything, get five answers in writing: the rate on your mix, the term and the notice date, the exit fee in dollars, who owns the hardware, and how your data leaves with you. The National Restaurant Association calls card processing [the third-largest operating expense for most restaurants, behind food and labor](https://www.restaurant.org/issues-and-advocacy/policy-agenda/swipefees/). Nation's Restaurant News puts the typical bite at [1.5% to 3.5% of every sale](https://www.nrn.com/restaurant-operations/new-legislation-targets-credit-card-swipe-fees-what-operators-should-know). Toast's own math has the average independent pizzeria at [just over $440,000 a year in revenue](https://pos.toasttab.com/blog/on-the-line/how-much-do-pizza-shops-make). Run that volume through a card terminal and every tenth of a percentage point is $440 a year. That's why the rate dominates the sales demo. It's also why the other four prices in the contract get so little airtime. ## Price one: the rate on your mix, not the rate on the brochure Square is one of the few vendors that publishes its restaurant rates in full, which makes it a useful worked example. On its [restaurant pricing page](https://squareup.com/us/en/point-of-sale/restaurants/pricing), an in-person card costs 2.6% + 15¢ on the free plan, 2.5% + 15¢ on Plus ($49 a month) and 2.4% + 15¢ on Premium ($149 a month). Online orders run 3.3% + 30¢ on the free plan and 2.9% + 30¢ on the paid ones. A keyed-in card or a card on file costs 3.5% + 15¢ on every plan. Two things fall out of that table. First, the upgrade math: on the in-person rate alone, Plus saves 0.1 points for $588 a year, so it only pays for itself above roughly $588,000 in annual in-person card volume. On online orders the gap is 0.4 points, which covers the same $588 at about $147,000 of online volume. Your answer depends entirely on your channel mix, which is the point. Second, the phone. A shop that still takes phone orders by reading a card number into the terminal is paying the highest rate on the sheet for the oldest habit in the building. Square also lists custom pricing for businesses processing more than $250,000 a year. If you're over that line, the published rate is an opening offer. - Card processing: [3rd-largest operating expense for most restaurants](https://www.restaurant.org/issues-and-advocacy/policy-agenda/swipefees/) (National Restaurant Association) - Typical cost: [1.5%–3.5% of each sale](https://www.nrn.com/restaurant-operations/new-legislation-targets-credit-card-swipe-fees-what-operators-should-know) (NRN) - U.S. businesses paid [$236 billion in swipe fees in 2024](https://www.nrn.com/restaurant-operations/new-legislation-targets-credit-card-swipe-fees-what-operators-should-know) (Independent Restaurant Coalition, via NRN) - Square in-person rate: [2.6% + 15¢ free plan; 2.4% + 15¢ on the $149/month plan; 3.5% + 15¢ keyed-in](https://squareup.com/us/en/point-of-sale/restaurants/pricing) - Toast POS renewal: [automatic, one-year periods, 30 days' written notice to opt out](https://support.toasttab.com/en/article/Toast-Point-of-Sale-POS-Renewal-FAQ) ## Price two: the term, and the date you have to say no Toast's support documentation is plain about how its POS agreements roll: they [renew automatically for successive one-year periods](https://support.toasttab.com/en/article/Toast-Point-of-Sale-POS-Renewal-FAQ) unless you give at least 30 days' written notice before the term ends. The initial term is whatever your order form says. Square, by contrast, says you can [cancel or switch plans anytime](https://squareup.com/us/en/point-of-sale/restaurants/pricing). Neither model is wrong. But an auto-renewing contract has a deadline buried in it, and Toast's own guide for Canadian operators warns that [cancellation windows can be as short as 30 to 60 days before the term ends, and that early-termination fees can run into the thousands of dollars](https://pos.toasttab.com/ca/blog/on-the-line/how-to-compare-restaurant-pos-agreements). Miss the window and you're shopping for a new system with a year still on the meter. The rate gets negotiated in the demo. The contract gets decided in the fine print, and nobody demos the fine print. ## Price three: the hardware, and whether it leaves with you "Free" software usually means the cost moved somewhere else. Toast advertises [pricing that starts at $0 a month](https://pos.toasttab.com/pricing), with 0% hardware financing by application, a note that pricing covers only the first terminal subscription, and a condition that its services run only on Toast-approved devices, a list Toast can change. None of that is hidden. All of it means the terminals on your counter are tied to one platform. Leases are where this has gone badly for small businesses. New York's attorney general went after Northern Leasing, which a court found had [deceptively steered small businesses, restaurants among them, into overpriced leases on inexpensive card-processing equipment](https://ag.ny.gov/index%2Ephp/press-release/2021/attorney-general-james-shuts-down-northern-leasing-spinoffs-continuing-prey-small). A 2020 ruling rescinded hundreds of thousands of those leases. Before you sign for hardware, ask whether you own it, finance it or rent it, what it costs in total over the term, and whether it runs anything else if you leave. ## Price four and five: the exit fee and your data The Federal Trade Commission's case against processor First American Payment Systems is the cautionary version of an exit fee. The FTC alleged the company [failed to disclose early-termination fees, made false claims about savings and made cancelling hard and expensive](https://www.ftc.gov/node/82697). It settled for $4.9 million, and in February 2025 the FTC [mailed 5,588 refund checks totaling more than $2.6 million](https://ftc.gov/Enforcement/Refunds/First-American-Payment-Systems-Settlement) to businesses that had paid those fees. The fifth price is the one nobody puts on a quote: what happens to your sales history and customer list when you go. Toast's Canadian guide tells operators to [confirm whether historical sales and reporting data can be exported on exit](https://pos.toasttab.com/ca/blog/on-the-line/how-to-compare-restaurant-pos-agreements). Two years of item-level sales is how you price a menu. Don't let it become a reason you can't leave. This week, pull your last three processing statements and divide total fees by total card volume. That's your effective rate. Split it by in-person, online and keyed-in. Before you sign or renew anything, get these five answers in writing: (1) "What's my all-in effective rate on this channel mix?" (2) "What's the initial term, and what's the last date I can give notice?" (3) "What's the early-termination fee, in dollars?" (4) "Do I own the hardware, and does it run anything else?" (5) "In what format do I get my sales and customer data when I leave?" Put the notice date on the office calendar the day you sign. The honest limitation: nobody publishes an effective-rate benchmark for pizzerias, and most vendors don't post their merchant agreements, early-termination schedules or negotiated rates publicly. That's why this piece leans on one vendor that publishes and one that documents its renewals. Toast's contract-comparison advice is written for Canada, where the payment-card Code of Conduct gives merchants a summary box that U.S. operators don't get. And the Credit Card Competition Act, which the restaurant lobby says would lower swipe fees, hasn't passed. Until it does, the cheapest rate you'll get is the one you read before signing. None of this is legal advice. Have your attorney read the merchant agreement before you sign it. ## Sources cited - https://www.restaurant.org/issues-and-advocacy/policy-agenda/swipefees/ - https://www.nrn.com/restaurant-operations/new-legislation-targets-credit-card-swipe-fees-what-operators-should-know - https://pos.toasttab.com/blog/on-the-line/how-much-do-pizza-shops-make - https://squareup.com/us/en/point-of-sale/restaurants/pricing - https://support.toasttab.com/en/article/Toast-Point-of-Sale-POS-Renewal-FAQ - https://pos.toasttab.com/ca/blog/on-the-line/how-to-compare-restaurant-pos-agreements - https://pos.toasttab.com/pricing - https://ag.ny.gov/index%2Ephp/press-release/2021/attorney-general-james-shuts-down-northern-leasing-spinoffs-continuing-prey-small - https://www.ftc.gov/node/82697 - https://ftc.gov/Enforcement/Refunds/First-American-Payment-Systems-Settlement --- Published by [Oven Scars](https://ovenscars.com/), news and ideas for pizzeria owners. 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