A restaurant POS costs somewhere between a few hundred dollars a year and several thousand, and the monthly fee everybody compares is frequently the smallest of the four numbers involved.
Here is how to work out what one will actually cost you.
The four lines
Software, per month. The advertised number. Check immediately whether it is per location or per terminal — per-terminal pricing is standard in this category and it changes everything. Three tills at a modest per-terminal rate is a different product from the price on the page.
Hardware. Terminals, kitchen printers or display screens, card readers, cash drawers, a router. Bought outright, leased, or bundled into the monthly fee. Leases are where these deals quietly become expensive — a multi-year hardware lease is a loan, priced like one.
Payment processing. A percentage of card volume plus a flat fee per transaction. Over a year this is almost always the largest of the four, and it is the one least often compared.
Setup, training and support. Sometimes free, sometimes a one-off, sometimes a support tier.
Why processing dominates, with arithmetic
Work it with your own numbers.
Say you do sixty thousand dollars a month, ninety per cent on card. That is fifty-four thousand of card volume. A difference of a quarter of a percentage point in processing rate is a hundred and thirty-five dollars a month — more than many systems charge for software.
Half a point is two hundred and seventy a month, or over three thousand a year, which is larger than the entire software and hardware cost of most systems.
So a cheap monthly fee attached to a high processing rate is not cheap, and that pairing is common precisely because the monthly fee is the number people compare. Get the effective rate in writing, including the per-transaction fee, and model it at your real volume.
The questions that change the number
Is the software per terminal or per location?
What is the effective processing rate — the percentage and the per-transaction fee, and for which card types? Rates often differ for debit, credit, rewards cards and keyed-in transactions, and the quoted headline rate is usually the best case.
Is the hardware leased? For how long, and what is the total over the term? Compare that to buying.
Is there a contract, and what is the early termination fee? This category has historically used long terms with real exit costs.
What is not included? Online ordering, a kitchen display, a second menu, loyalty — these are frequently separate lines.
What it should not cost you
Your data. Getting your sales history and customer list out should be free and simple. If it is not, price in the cost of never being able to leave.
Your flexibility. A three-year hardware lease on a business with a one-year lease on its building is a mismatch worth noticing.
How we price it, for comparison
Sonorch is a flat monthly price by team size rather than per terminal — ninety-nine dollars a month for up to five staff, and that includes the AI receptionist as well as the register. The pricing page has the tiers.
Payment processing is its own arrangement, as it is with every vendor, and it is the line worth negotiating hardest regardless of who you buy software from.
The comparison worth doing
Build a one-year total for each vendor: twelve months of software at your terminal count, hardware either amortised or the lease total, processing at your real card volume and effective rate, plus setup.
That single number is comparable. The monthly fee is not.
Most operators doing this exercise for the first time find the ranking changes — the vendor with the lowest advertised price is frequently not the cheapest once processing is in, and occasionally it is the most expensive. We went through why in the cheapest restaurant POS is rarely the cheapest.