Toast vs Lightspeed: Cost and Fees Calculator
Enter your volumes to compare estimated monthly costs and fees for Toast and Lightspeed across the selling types both offer, using published US pricing.
Full POS system
Estimates combine processing fees and monthly subscriptions on the plans noted above. One-time hardware, setup, and add-ons are excluded. Rates are published or typical US pricing as of mid-2026 and may have changed.
How the Toast vs Lightspeed calculator works, and how the two compare
Toast is the leading restaurant-specific POS platform in the US, with proprietary hardware and mandatory in-house payment processing. Toast's Core plan is $69 per month at 2.49% + $0.15 in person; the $0 Starter Kit bundles hardware but charges 3.09% + $0.15, online orders run 3.50% + $0.15, and hardware is proprietary at roughly $800 per station. Lightspeed is a retail and restaurant POS company with the deepest inventory and reporting tools in its class, plus a built-in eCommerce option. Lightspeed plans start around $69 per month (rising to $399 on premium restaurant tiers) with Lightspeed Payments at 2.6% + $0.10 in person and 2.9% + $0.30 online, running on standard iPads.
How they are similar: Where they overlap: both Toast and Lightspeed cover running a full point-of-sale system, which is what this calculator compares. They also share the same commercial model: both operate as a point-of-sale platform where software subscriptions and card processing come as a package. In both cases the bill is driven by a percentage of each sale plus any fixed per-transaction fee, which is why your average transaction size changes the effective rate as much as the headline percentage does.
How they differ: Only Lightspeed offers online selling, so that side of the business is not part of this comparison. Toast is restaurant-only and all-in: the deepest food-service feature set on the market, but you must use Toast processing, hardware has near-zero resale value, and contracts commonly run 2 to 3 years. Lightspeed is the numbers-person's POS: item-level profitability, multi-location reporting, and serious inventory depth, at the cost of higher software tiers as you add capability.
Assumptions used in this calculator
- Toast is modeled on: Core plan $69 per month at 2.49% + $0.15; Starter Kit $0 per month at 3.09% + $0.15.
- Lightspeed is modeled on: From $69 per month, 2.6% + $0.10 with Lightspeed Payments, iPad hardware.
- Rates are published or typical US pricing as of mid-2026 and change often; quote-based providers are modeled at representative rates. Always confirm current pricing with the provider.
- One-time hardware, setup, add-on apps, keyed-in transactions, international cards, and chargeback fees are excluded from the monthly figures.