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The EPOS quote prices one till. The room has four screens in it.
This is the part of an EPOS bill that surprises people, and it is not a trick. Hospitality software is priced per site and per device, so the number on the quote describes a single till in a single building. Every kitchen screen, every kiosk, every handheld and every extra site has a line of its own, and most of those lines are monthly.
Here is how the published prices actually stack, using figures the providers put on their own websites, and what a year looks like once you add them up.
Start with the software licence, because that is the figure on the quote.
Square publishes its hospitality pricing openly. Square for Restaurants lists a Plus plan at £69 a month, charged per location, on top of payment processing.
Shopify prices the same way. Its point of sale pricing page adds £69 a month for each POS Pro location, on top of the Shopify plan the business is already paying for.
Two different companies, the same structure. The licence attaches to the site rather than to the business. So a group running three venues is buying three licences, and the quote you were shown covers one of them.
At £69 a month, one site is £828 a year. Three sites are £207 a month, which is £2,484 a year, before a single piece of hardware and before a single transaction.
Then the room fills up.
Square's published price list puts its Kitchen Display System at from £15 per device, per month, and Square Kiosk at £35 per device, per month. Both are charged on the count of screens, so a kitchen running two displays pays twice.
Run that out on one site. Two kitchen screens at £15 a month each is £30 a month, or £360 a year. One kiosk at £35 a month is £420 a year.
Add those to the licence. A single venue with a till, two kitchen screens and one kiosk is at £828 plus £360 plus £420, which is £1,608 a year in software alone, before hardware, before processing and before anything goes wrong.
Those are Square's published figures for Square's own products. They are not a market average, and nobody should assume every provider prices the same way. They are here because Square publishes them, which makes the structure visible, and the structure is the thing worth understanding.
Hardware is priced on its own, and it is where the free offers live.
Merchant Savvy's card processing fees guide, last updated 6 October 2025, puts terminal rental at £14 to £35 a month per device. The same shape as the software: per device, per month, so the second card machine doubles the line.
Free hardware removes that line and nothing else. We went through what the word free is actually covering in a separate piece, and the short version is that the terminal was never where the money was.
One more, because it is the one that turns a comparison into a decision.
The same guide notes that switching before the end of an agreed term can carry an early termination fee, which it describes as costing anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand pounds, and its advice is to check the termination fee and the notice period before signing rather than afterwards.
That is worth doing on the EPOS agreement specifically, not only on the card processing one. They are often separate documents and people read the second and sign the first.
Worth being straight about the limits of this exercise.
It does not tell you whether the system is any good. A cheap EPOS the kitchen refuses to use costs far more than an expensive one everybody uses.
It does not price the integrations. Accounts, rotas, bookings and delivery platforms are often separate modules with separate lines, and the cheapest base licence is sometimes the one that needs the most bolted on to be usable.
It does not price your own time. Building the menu properly, keeping prices current and training the team is real work, and it lands on somebody whatever the software costs.
And it does not touch processing, which for most venues is the larger number by a distance. The fee stack sitting under the headline rate is the first piece in this series.
Ask for that last one in writing. A provider pricing honestly will send a figure rather than a brochure.
The technology is Shift4's.
Our hardware is free. There is no terminal rental and no subscription on the terminal, because there is nothing to rent, and installation costs nothing with nothing to pay upfront. We charge no PCI compliance fee.
We do charge an authorisation fee. It is priced per contract rather than published, and there are other contract terms that are not on this website. In an article about the lines that never make it onto the quote, it would be poor form to leave one of ours out.
Where we are different on the point this article is actually about is that we publish. Every product and module price we charge is listed in full on the pricing page, so you can build the same per site and per device sum for us before you speak to anybody. If the handheld is the part you are pricing, the handheld ordering page covers what it does.
It depends whether you are buying the hardware or subscribing to the software on it. As a published example, Square Kiosk is listed at £35 per device, per month, charged on the count of screens, so two kiosks are two lines. Hardware can be a separate purchase on top. The useful question is the monthly figure per kiosk, multiplied by the number you actually want on the floor.
Kitchen displays are usually priced per screen per month rather than bought once. Square lists its Kitchen Display System at from £15 per device, per month. A kitchen running a hot screen and a cold screen is paying for both, so count the screens before you compare two quotes.
Most will, and the question worth asking is how. Some integrations sit in the base licence, some are paid modules with their own monthly price, and some need a third party connector billed separately again. Ask which of those three applies to the accounting package you already use, and what it adds per month.
Add up what you pay per site and per screen today, then put your figures through the savings calculator and compare it against ours, which are published in full.
Send three months of card statements and one busy Friday. We will show you what your card processing is costing you now against what it would cost with us, with every fee named, before you commit to anything.
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