Is a kiosk worth it for a small restaurant? Break-even math

One kiosk at Square's printed prices costs a small restaurant about $67 a month over three years, if you already pay for Square Plus. On our made-up numbers it pays for itself with about eight extra orders a month, or one hour a week taken off the schedule. The bigger risk is a lower average check, which one controlled study found.

This page works out the break-even for one store with one kiosk. The kiosk cost guide lists every cost line and compares vendors, with a two-kiosk example. Here the question is narrower: what a single kiosk has to do for a small counter-service shop to earn its keep.

What does one kiosk cost a month?

These prices come from Square's and Apple's own pages. The rest are assumptions, labeled as ours.

Cost line	Amount	Where it comes from
Square Kiosk hardware, mounted on a counter or wall	$149 once	Square's kiosk hardware page, which says the installation hardware is in the box
iPad to run it	$449 once	Apple's iPad (A16) buy page, lowest listed price; Square's kiosk specs list the iPad (A16) as compatible
Square Kiosk app	$50 a month	Square's kiosk hardware page, per device with Square Plus
Square Plus plan	$49 a month, only if you are not on it yet	Square's pricing page, per location
Months you keep the kiosk	36	Our assumption; Square's warranty on the hardware is one year

Spread over 36 months, the $598 of hardware comes to $16.61 a month. Add the $50 app and one kiosk costs $66.61 a month for a store already on Square Plus. A store on Square Free has to move up to Plus for the kiosk app, which adds $49 and brings the total to $115.61 a month. Plus also cuts the in-person card rate from 2.6% + 15¢ to 2.5% + 15¢; on a made-up $25,000 a month of card sales that saves $25, for a net of $90.61. Tax, shipping, signs and your setup time are left out.

Toast's kiosk page prints no price and offers a demo, and Clover's kiosk page says to contact Clover for custom pricing. The last column in the next table shows the same math for a made-up quote of $200 a month.

What does the kiosk have to do to break even?

A kiosk can pay for itself three ways: orders you would have lost, paid hours you no longer schedule, or a bigger check. Here is how much of each one covers the monthly cost on its own.

Our assumptions (made up for this example): average check $14; food and packaging 30% of sales; card fees at Square Plus rates; counter wage $16 an hour before payroll taxes; the kiosk takes 900 orders a month, about 30 a day.

What the kiosk does	At $66.61 a month	At $115.61 a month	At $200 a month
Extra orders a month (each adds $9.30 after food and card fees)	7.2, so 8	12.4, so 13	21.5, so 22
Counter hours off the schedule a month, at $16	4.2 (about 1 a week)	7.2 (about 1.7 a week)	12.5 (about 2.9 a week)
Rise in average check on the 900 kiosk orders	11 cents	19 cents	33 cents

How the rows work: an extra $14 order leaves $14 minus $4.20 of food and 50 cents of card fees, or $9.30. For the check row, each extra dollar on an existing order keeps 67.5 cents after food and the card percentage, so $66.61 needs $98.68 more in sales, or 11 cents on each of 900 orders.

Why is the real answer less certain than the table?

The kiosk's price is small next to what it can do to your sales, in either direction. Suppose the kiosk lowered spending by 70 cents on each of its 900 orders. That is $630 a month in sales, or about $425 after food and card fees, which is six times the kiosk's cost. Seventy cents is the gap a 2019 University of North Texas field experiment found between kiosk and cashier guests at a campus Burger King. Chains such as Shake Shack report higher kiosk checks, from comparisons where guests chose the kiosk. Your store could land on either side.

Three things make the labor and order rows harder for a small shop:

• Hours only count when they leave the schedule. If your one cashier also makes drinks, bags orders and answers the phone, a kiosk may make the shift calmer without making it shorter.
• Lost orders only count if you lose them now. Count guests who walk out of the line for two weeks. If nobody leaves, the extra-orders row is zero.
• Some guests will keep using the register. In the Federal Reserve's 2026 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice, consumers made an average of 47 payments a month; suburban and urban consumers made six cash payments a month and rural consumers nine, and households earning under $25,000 and adults 55 and older relied on cash more. A card-only kiosk leaves those guests at the counter.

Which small restaurants does a kiosk suit?

Answer yes or no for your busiest day. More yeses mean the table above is more likely to work for you.

1. A line forms at the register most days, and some guests leave it.
2. Your menu is built on choices (bowls, build-your-own, drinks with many options) that slow the cashier down.
3. You could take at least an hour a week off the counter schedule.
4. You already pay for the POS plan the kiosk needs.
5. Most guests pay by card.
6. You have counter or wall space where staff can see the kiosk, with power and a steady internet connection. Square's setup guide says the Square Kiosk app does not take offline payments.

If the queue is at the tables, QR codes may cost less; see the kiosk, QR or tablet guide. If you decide to try one, run it for at least four weeks against your own baseline weeks before you commit to three years.

How do you run this for a quoted kiosk?

1. Ask for every cost in writing: hardware or lease, mount, card reader, software per month, any POS plan change, install and support. The kiosk lease-or-buy guide compares the payment routes vendors print.
2. Spread one-time costs over the months you expect to keep the kiosk, and add the monthly fees.
3. Divide that monthly total by your margin per order and by your hourly wage. For the check row, divide it by the share of each extra dollar you keep, then by your monthly kiosk orders.
4. Ask whether the monthly fee continues if you turn the kiosk off.

Maple's voice ordering kiosk works the same way in this math. It is in early access with a small number of restaurants, Maple supplies the kiosk, and it is priced per unit with no public price. Ask for the monthly figure and put it in the last column.

Published by Maple, which sells an early-access voice ordering kiosk. This AI-assisted guide combines prices printed on Square's and Apple's pages, a University of North Texas thesis and the Federal Reserve's 2026 payment diary with an original break-even table built on labeled, made-up inputs. It does not report a Maple test, forecast your sales or give any price a vendor does not publish.