The true cost of a restaurant EPOS system in the UK

Hardware, monthly fees, card processing and the hidden extras vendors don’t advertise — added up properly, over three years, with real numbers.

Ask five EPOS vendors what their system costs and you’ll get five different answers. That’s mostly because you’re asking five different questions. One quotes the monthly software fee. Another leads with the hardware bundle. A third talks about card rates and hopes you won’t ask about the rest.

None of them is exactly lying. They’re just answering the question that makes their number look smallest. The number that actually matters is the total: everything you pay, to everyone, over the life of the system. Hardware, software, card processing, the add-ons, the support tier, the setup fee — all of it, added up over three years.

Three years is the right window. It’s roughly how long a till setup lasts before something wants replacing, and it’s the length of the longest contracts vendors will ask you to sign. Work the cost out over three years and quotes suddenly become comparable. Skip that step and you end up comparing a monthly fee with a card rate with a hardware bundle, which is like comparing the price of a car with the price of petrol and the price of insurance.

This guide walks through each cost in turn, with the typical UK ranges you’d see in 2026, worked examples, and the questions that get real numbers out of a salesperson. No vendor gets a free pass here — including us. We’ll say our piece at the end.

The maths that matters

Three years, everything in

Here’s the uncomfortable bit, and it’s worth getting it out of the way early: for most restaurants, the software subscription — the number on the website, the number the entire sales process revolves around — is the smallest of the three big costs. The three buckets, roughly, are:

• Hardware. The one-off hit. Somewhere between £1,000 and £10,000 depending on how many tills and sites you’re kitting out.
• Software. The monthly fee. Usually £900 to £8,000-plus over three years for an independent, depending on tills, tiers and add-ons.
• Card processing. The giant. Often £10,000 to £70,000-plus over three years. Yes, really. We’ll do the sums in a minute.

The software subscription is usually the smallest line on the invoice. Card processing is usually the largest. Vendors price their marketing around the first and their profits around the second.

Then there’s a fourth bucket, the quiet one: setup fees, onboarding, training, support tiers, online ordering, delivery integrations, loyalty add-ons, spare hardware, exit fees. Individually they look like rounding errors. Together they can add thousands over three years, and they’re the costs most likely to arrive as a surprise, because they’re the ones least likely to appear in the first quote.

So that’s the shape of this article: the three big buckets, then the quiet one, then three worked examples with the totals added up honestly, then a checklist of questions to put to any vendor — us included — before you sign anything.

Bucket one: hardware

The part you can touch

Hardware is the most visible cost and, oddly, the one people overthink the least. It’s tangible — you can hold a card terminal — so it feels like the honest part of the deal. Sometimes it is. Often it’s where the bundling tricks live.

A normal single-till setup needs more bits than most people expect. The tablet or terminal is the obvious one, but then there’s the stand it sits in, the receipt printer, the cash drawer, the card terminal, and the networking to hold it all together. Add a kitchen screen and a backup printer and the list gets long quickly. Here’s what each piece typically costs in the UK if you buy it outright:

Typical UK outright-purchase ranges, September 2026. Excludes installation labour.

So a single till with a kitchen screen lands somewhere around £1,200 to £2,000 all in. Two tills and a busy kitchen: £2,500 to £4,000. Nobody should be shocked by these numbers — they’re roughly what a decent oven service costs — but they do need to be in the budget from the start, because this is the money you spend before you’ve taken a single order.

The “free hardware” offer

You will be offered free hardware. Every vendor does it, and it’s worth understanding what it actually is: a bundle. The hardware isn’t free; its cost is folded into a higher monthly software fee or a longer contract, usually 24 to 36 months. Sometimes that’s a perfectly good deal — it spreads the cost and you get one throat to choke when something breaks. But compare it properly: take the total contract value over its full term and put it next to the buy-it-yourself total. If the “free” bundle costs £2,000 more over three years than buying the kit and paying the standard monthly fee, you’ve just financed hardware at a terrible interest rate without anyone saying the word “finance”.

Also check what happens to the hardware at the end. Some contracts let you keep it. Some want it back. Some quietly roll you into a new term. “Free” should never come with a question mark.

Lease versus buy

Leasing hardware — paying monthly for the kit itself, separate from the software — is common and not inherently bad. It keeps the upfront number low, which matters when you’re opening and every pound is already spoken for. The maths to do is simple: multiply the monthly lease by the term and compare it with the purchase price. Leases often cost 1.5 to 2 times the purchase price over three to five years, and at the end you usually don’t own the kit. If cash flow is the constraint, that can still be the right call. Just make it a conscious one, not a default.

Refurbished and spares

Two practical points from people who’ve been through a few refits. First, refurbished is fine for the dumb stuff — cash drawers, stands, even printers — but be careful with tablets. An old iPad with a tired battery and no more OS updates is a liability on a till, not a saving. Second, buy the spare printer. A thermal printer costs under £200 and a dead printer on a Friday night costs you a service. Every experienced operator has a story about this. Don’t become someone else’s story.

Bucket two: monthly software

The number on the website

This is the figure every vendor leads with, usually somewhere between £25 and £70 a month per till for the systems aimed at independents. It’s also the least complete number in the whole conversation, because almost everything interesting about software pricing is in what the headline figure doesn’t include.

Start with the unit. Some vendors charge per till or device, some per site, some a mix — one fee for the first till, a smaller fee for each extra. A quote of £30 a month sounds cheap until you learn it’s per device and you need three tills, two kitchen screens and a back-office login. Always ask: per what, exactly, and for how many of them?

Tiers and the features behind the paywall

Nearly every vendor sells tiers — Standard, Pro, Premium, whatever they call them — and the difference between tiers is where the real comparison happens. The entry tier usually covers taking orders and payments, which is fine for a café. The things that tend to sit one or two tiers up: proper reporting and exports, multi-site management, staff performance tracking, advanced discounts and promotions, integrations with accounting or delivery platforms, and online ordering. If you need any of those — and most restaurants need at least one — price the tier you’d actually buy, not the one on the homepage.

Watch too for per-user fees. Most hospitality systems include unlimited users, because the alternative would be chaos on a rota. But some charge for manager logins, back-office seats or API access. If you’ve got an accountant who wants reports access and a head office that wants a dashboard, check whether those seats cost extra.

Annual billing and the price-rise clause

Paying annually usually knocks 10 to 20 percent off — the classic “two months free”. It’s worth doing once you’re settled and sure the system suits you. In year one, though, monthly billing is flexibility you may want to keep, even at a premium. Switching EPOS in month four because the system can’t handle your menu is painful enough without having prepaid the year.

The sneakier bit is the price-rise clause. Read the contract for what happens to your monthly fee over time. Some vendors reserve the right to raise prices annually, and 5 to 10 percent a year is not unusual. On a £50-a-month plan that’s an extra £90 to £180 a year by year three — not catastrophic, but it should be in your three-year maths, not sprung on you in a renewal email.

Bucket three: card processing

The giant nobody puts on the homepage

Here’s the sum that changes how you look at every EPOS quote. Take a modest neighbourhood restaurant doing £600,000 a year. Say 80 percent of that goes through cards — about normal now, and drifting higher every year. That’s £480,000 of card turnover. At a typical rate of 1.6 percent, the processing bill is £7,680 a year. Over three years: £23,040.

Read that again. The card processing on a single-site restaurant can cost more over three years than the hardware and the software combined, several times over. And yet the sales conversation spends forty minutes on the software demo and about ninety seconds on the card rate. There’s a reason for that, and it isn’t your benefit.

Blended rates versus interchange-plus

You’ll be offered one of two pricing models, and understanding the difference is the single most useful ten minutes you can spend before signing anything.

A blended rate is one flat percentage on everything — say 1.6 percent on every card transaction. Simple, predictable, easy to compare. Most small restaurants end up on blended pricing and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Interchange-plus (sometimes called interchange++) splits the bill: the actual interchange fee set by the card schemes, plus the processor’s fixed markup on top. It’s more transparent — you see what the processor actually keeps — and for higher turnovers it’s usually cheaper. But the headline “plus” figure looks tiny (fractions of a percent) while the total effective rate depends on your card mix, so it’s harder to compare at a glance.

Typical UK in-person rates in 2026: blended, roughly 1.4 to 1.75 percent for debit and credit. Interchange-plus, a markup of around 0.3 to 0.6 percent over interchange, which usually lands in a similar place for a normal card mix. Keyed-in and phone payments cost more — often 2 percent-plus — and American Express sits above Visa and Mastercard on most schedules. If someone quotes you 1.1 percent, ask what it excludes. It excludes something.

The lock-in question

This is the part vendors least like discussing: am I tied to your payments provider? Some EPOS systems work with any processor. Others only work properly — or at all — with the vendor’s chosen payments partner. If it’s the latter, your card rate isn’t really a separate decision; it’s part of the EPOS decision, and switching processors later means switching tills too.

That matters because card rates are negotiable and EPOS systems mostly aren’t. A restaurant doing £1 million in card turnover that shaves 0.2 percent off its rate saves £2,000 a year — every year, for doing nothing except asking. But you can only play processors off against each other if your till lets you leave. Before you sign, ask the question directly: “If I find a cheaper card rate in eighteen months, can I switch processors and keep this system?” The answer tells you a lot about the vendor.

The small print on the payments schedule

Beyond the headline rate, a payments schedule usually hides half a dozen smaller charges. None of them is huge on its own; together they add a few hundred pounds a year that never appeared in the sales pitch:

• Terminal rental. £18 to £35 a month per terminal is standard if you don’t buy outright. “Free terminal” deals usually mean a longer payments contract — same trick as the hardware bundle.
• PCI compliance fees. Some providers charge £30 to £90 a year for PCI compliance administration. Some include it. Ask.
• Authorisation and per-transaction pence. A few pence per transaction on top of the percentage. On a busy quick-service counter doing thousands of small transactions, the pence add up faster than the percent.
• Monthly minimums. A minimum monthly service charge — if your processing fees don’t reach it, you pay the difference. Mostly bites seasonal businesses and quiet sites.
• Chargebacks. £10 to £25 per disputed transaction, win or lose. Rare in restaurants, but one bad week with a stolen card can sting.
• Settlement speed. Next-working-day settlement versus two or three days. Not a fee, but a cash-flow fact worth knowing before a busy bank holiday weekend.

And then there’s the oldest trick in the book: “we’ll beat your current rate.” Maybe they will — on the headline percentage, for the card types you asked about, for the first year. Get the full schedule in writing: every card type, the pence per transaction, the monthly fees, the terminal cost, the contract term on the payments side (it’s often separate from the software contract, and often longer). A rate is only cheaper if the whole schedule is cheaper.

Bucket four: the quiet extras

What the quote leaves out

This is the bucket that turns a tidy quote into a messy reality. None of these items is a scandal on its own. They’re normal costs of running a system. The problem is purely that they tend to surface after you’ve signed, when your bargaining power is gone.

Getting started: setup, menu build, training

Onboarding ranges from genuinely free to several hundred pounds, and the difference is usually labour: who builds your menu, who configures the taxes and printers, who trains the team. Some vendors charge per menu item for the initial build — fine if you’re a café with forty items, painful if you’re a restaurant with three hundred. Training is often one remote session included, with on-site training days billed at £300 to £600 a day. Ask exactly what “free onboarding” covers, in writing, and what the first paid extra would be.

Support tiers and Saturday nights

Standard support — weekdays, office hours — is usually included. The tier that answers the phone at 7pm on a Saturday is often a paid add-on, £20 to £50 a month. Think about when your system is most likely to break. It’s not Tuesday at 11am. It’s the busiest service of the week, when the vendor’s office is closed. The question isn’t whether you need support; it’s whether you need that support, and what it costs.

Online ordering and delivery

Direct online ordering through your EPOS — your own website or app, orders landing straight on the till — typically costs £15 to £40 a month, sometimes with a small per-order fee. That’s usually good value next to the alternative: the big delivery marketplaces, which charge 15 to 30 percent commission per order. A takeaway doing £5,000 a week through a marketplace at 25 percent is paying £1,250 a week in commission — more in a month than the entire EPOS system costs in a year. The EPOS question here is narrower: does the system integrate with the platforms you use, is the integration included or an add-on, and what does your own direct ordering cost? The commission negotiation with the marketplaces is a separate battle, but it dwarfs everything else, so don’t let the EPOS decision distract from it.

The add-on shelf

Loyalty schemes, gift cards, table reservations, stock management upgrades, staff scheduling, review integrations — each one is typically £10 to £30 a month, each one sounds reasonable in isolation, and three of them together quietly add £1,000-plus a year. Audit your actual needs before the demo, not during it. The demo is designed to make you want all of them.

Growth costs: tills, screens, sites

Price the business you’ll have in two years, not just the one you have today. What does a second till cost — full price again, or a discount? A kitchen display licence per screen? And if you open a second site, is multi-site management included in your tier or is it a step up? The vendors who are cheapest for a single till aren’t always cheapest at three sites, and switching systems mid-expansion is nobody’s idea of fun.

When the internet drops

Ask what happens during a broadband outage, because it will happen. Some systems keep taking card payments offline and sync later. Some drop to cash only. Some keep the till running but lose the card terminal. There isn’t a universally right answer — it depends on your connectivity and your card mix — but “we’ll figure it out on the day” is how you lose a Friday night. Know the behaviour before you need it.

Leaving: data, notice, and auto-renewal

Every contract ends, even the good ones. Check three things: the notice period (30 to 90 days is typical), whether the contract auto-renews and for how long, and what it costs to leave early — remaining contract value is the common formula, which on a three-year deal signed in month six is a sobering number. Also ask about your data: can you export your sales history and customer list, for free, in a usable format? If the answer is vague, assume the answer is no, and price that risk accordingly.

Worked examples

Three restaurants, three honest totals

Enough theory. Here are three typical UK setups with everything added up over three years — the window that makes quotes comparable. The assumptions are stated under the table; change them to match your business and the ranking of the buckets barely moves.

Illustrative totals, September 2026. Assumes: café £300k turnover, 75% card at 1.65%; restaurant £700k, 80% card at 1.55%; group £2.1m, 80% card at 1.45%. Software £25/£45/£40 per till per month. Extras cover setup, online ordering and support tiers. Your numbers will differ — the shape won’t.

Two things jump out. First, in every case the card processing is roughly three-quarters of the total. That £25-a-month software plan everyone argues about is a tenth of the bill. Second, the extras bucket is bigger than the software in the café example. The quiet costs are not quiet at all once you add them up.

This is also why “cheapest EPOS” is usually the wrong question. Saving £10 a month on software saves £360 over three years. Shaving 0.15 percent off your card rate on £500,000 of card turnover saves £750 a year. The negotiation that matters most is the one vendors spend the least time on.

Before you sign

Twelve questions that get the real numbers

Take this list to every demo. A good vendor answers all twelve without flinching. A vendor that dodges more than a couple has told you everything you need to know.

• What is the total cost over three years — hardware, software, processing and add-ons — for my setup?
• Is the card rate blended or interchange-plus, and what is my likely effective rate on my card mix?
• Am I locked to your payments provider? Can I switch processors later and keep this system?
• What is the contract term, the notice period, and does it auto-renew? What does leaving early cost?
• Can my monthly fee rise during the contract, and by how much?
• What exactly does onboarding include — menu build, configuration, training, go-live support?
• What does support cost outside office hours, and who answers on a Saturday night?
• What happens when the internet drops — can I still take card payments?
• What do extra tills, kitchen screens and additional sites cost?
• Is online ordering included, and what are the delivery platform integrations and commissions?
• Can I export my sales history and customer data for free, in a usable format?
• What are the PCI fees, chargeback fees, settlement times and any monthly minimums?

Get the answers in writing. Not in the demo, not on the call — in the quote, in an email, somewhere you can find it in eighteen months when the renewal lands and someone’s memory of the conversation has gone fuzzy. The vendors worth buying from won’t mind. They’ll have heard it all before.

The bottom line

The cheapest quote is rarely the cheapest system

A restaurant EPOS system doesn’t cost £25 a month. It costs the hardware once, the software every month, the card processing on every single transaction, and a trail of smaller fees that only show up when you go looking for them. Add it all up over three years and you get a number somewhere between £14,000 for a small café and £100,000 for a small group — with card processing doing most of the heavy lifting in every case.

That isn’t an argument against spending the money. A good till earns its keep in faster service, fewer errors, tighter stock control and — as we’ve written about before — far less room for the small losses that bleed a business dry. It’s an argument for buying with your eyes open: price the whole system, negotiate the card rate hardest, and be deeply suspicious of any quote that fits on one page.

As promised, our piece: we publish our pricing — hardware, monthly fees and processing — at cubepos.co.uk, because we’d rather you did this maths before you buy than after. Run the same twelve questions past us. We’ll answer them.

Figures are typical UK market ranges checked in September 2026. Individual quotes vary with turnover, card mix, hardware choices and contract terms — use them as a starting point for your own three-year maths, not as a price list.

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