Switching From Toast to DirectOrders: A 90-Day Migration Guide

A small but growing number of independent restaurants are moving online ordering off Toast and onto a flat-fee, commission-free platform while keeping Toast as the in-store POS. This is a practical guide based on verified Toast pricing pages, contract terms operators have shared publicly, and the migration playbook we run with restaurants every week.

Why Operators Reconsider Toast Online Ordering

Toast is a real POS. The terminals work, the kitchen display system is solid, and the payroll module is genuinely useful for owners running a single location with hourly staff. The question is not "is Toast bad" (it isn't). The question is whether bundling online ordering, payment processing, and a per-month software fee into the same platform is the most economical setup for your restaurant.

Three patterns drive most switches:

1. Online order volume crossed a threshold. When online orders are 5% of revenue, processing fees feel small. When they hit 25 to 40%, the same percentage rate becomes a real number on the P&L.

2. Customer-side fees showed up at checkout. Toast added a customer-facing online ordering fee (sometimes called a service or platform fee) on Toast-hosted ordering pages, which guests see at checkout and operators do not always control. Reuters reported the rollout in July 2023 and Toast removed the flat $0.99 fee after customer backlash, but customer-side fees remain in some configurations.

3. The contract is up for renewal. Two-year auto-renew clauses force the conversation, and operators use the renewal window to look at alternatives.

What Toast Online Ordering Actually Costs

Pulled from pos.toasttab.com/pricing and Toast's published help docs as of April 2026:

Run the math for a restaurant doing $40,000 per month in online orders on the Toast Core plan:

• Software base: $69
• Digital Ordering add-on: $75
• Processing on $40,000 at 2.49% + $0.15 (assume $35 average ticket, ~1,143 orders): $996 + $171 = $1,167
• Monthly Toast online-ordering cost: ~$1,311
• Annualized: ~$15,732

A restaurant on the Starter Kit (3.39 to 3.69%) would pay closer to $1,500 per month or about $18,000 per year just for online ordering and processing.

Compare to DirectOrders Pro at $249 per month flat, no per-order fees, with Stripe at 2.9% + $0.30 (which goes to Stripe, not us): the same $40,000 in online orders costs $249 + $1,491 (Stripe) = ~$1,740 per month if you keep payment processing routed through us, or $249 per month if you connect your own merchant account. The all-in delta lands between $5,000 and $15,000 per year depending on processor choice. Use our commission calculator to plug in your specific volume.

Toast Contract Terms Worth Knowing

This is where most operators get caught. The contract terms come from Toast's Master Services Agreement (publicly summarized at central.toasttab.com and confirmed by operators in industry forums):

• Initial term: 2 years standard. Some Starter Kit deals are shorter, some Enterprise contracts longer.
• Auto-renewal: 1 year. You typically have a 30 to 60 day cancellation window before the renewal date or you renew automatically.
• Early termination fee: varies by contract; commonly the remaining months of software fees plus any unamortized hardware financing. Operators have reported figures around $150 per month remaining for software-only line items.
• Hardware financing: Toast hardware is often financed over 24 to 36 months. You owe the balance even if you cancel.
• Payment processing: bundled. You cannot easily route card processing to a different processor while staying on Toast Online Ordering.

Before you initiate any switch, pull your fully-executed contract from your Toast admin or your records and write down: contract start date, initial term length, current renewal date, cancellation notice window, and any unamortized hardware balance. This single sheet will save you arguments later.

What You Keep, What You Migrate, What You Replace

The most important reframe: switching online ordering is not the same as switching POS. Most restaurants on Toast do not need to rip out the POS terminals. Here is the honest split.

Keep on Toast (no change):

• POS terminals at the counter and table-side handhelds
• Toast KDS (kitchen display) hardware in the kitchen
• Toast Payroll if you use it for hourly staff
• Toast Inventory if you have it set up
• In-store card processing on Toast Pay (the rates apply only to in-store transactions, not online)

Migrate to DirectOrders:

• Branded online ordering page (replaces your Toast Online Ordering URL)
• Custom domain or subdomain (e.g., order.yourrestaurant.com)
• Menu items, modifiers, prep times, hours, holiday closures
• Customer accounts and order history (export from Toast, import to DirectOrders)
• Loyalty program rules if you had a basic one (advanced loyalty stays on Toast Loyalty if you use it)
• Email and SMS marketing lists (export, import, get fresh consent if needed)

Replace entirely:

• Toast Online Ordering subscription (cancel the $75/mo Digital Ordering add-on at renewal)
• Toast-hosted customer-facing ordering pages (redirect to DirectOrders)
• Any Toast online-ordering-specific add-ons (gift card add-on, online gift card add-on if you only used them online)

Honest tradeoffs (what DirectOrders does NOT do):

• We are not a POS. We do not sell terminals, KDS hardware, or table-side ordering devices.
• We do not run payroll, scheduling, or HR. Keep Toast Payroll, Homebase, 7shifts, or whatever you use.
• We do not handle in-store payments. Card-present transactions stay on Toast Pay or your existing processor.
• We do not provide inventory tracking at the recipe level. Toast Inventory and Restaurant365 do this better.

If you need a single vendor to do POS, online, payroll, and inventory, you may want to stay on Toast and just renegotiate. If you want best-in-class online ordering, AI phone ordering, and multi-channel presence sitting on top of Toast, that is what DirectOrders is built for.

The 90-Day Migration Timeline

This is the timeline we run with operators. Compressing it works for some restaurants; stretching it works for most. Days are weekdays.

Days 1 to 30: Audit, Decide, and Set Up

Week 1. Pull the Toast contract and write down the renewal date. Pull 3 months of online order reports from Toast (orders, revenue, average ticket, customer count, refund rate). Pull your current Toast invoice and circle the line items you'll cancel. Use our commission calculator and the commission cost guide to model the savings on your numbers.

Week 2. Book a DirectOrders demo. Get the Toast integration confirmed for your specific Toast configuration (POS only, POS + KDS, POS + Online + KDS). Review the Toast integration page for the supported sync flow.

Week 3. Sign the DirectOrders agreement. Hand over: high-resolution logo, brand colors, custom domain DNS access, Stripe or merchant account credentials, current menu (PDF or Toast export), hours, delivery zones if you self-deliver. The DirectOrders team builds the branded site in this week.

Week 4. Review the staging site. Walk through every menu item, every modifier, every hour, every holiday. Place 5 test orders end-to-end (pickup, delivery, large group, modifier-heavy, scheduled-for-later). Confirm the Toast KDS receives the test orders correctly.

Days 31 to 60: Soft Launch and Parallel Run

Week 5. Soft launch. Keep Toast Online Ordering live. Send a "we have a new ordering site" email to your top 200 customers. Update one social media link to the new site. Watch for support tickets and order issues for 7 days.

Week 6. If week 5 was clean, update your Google Business Profile to point ordering to the new site. Update your Instagram and Facebook bio links. Update Yelp and TripAdvisor.

Week 7. Update QR codes on the table tents (if you do in-store QR ordering for takeout). Update menu inserts, business cards, delivery bags, anywhere the old ordering URL appears.

Week 8. Train staff. Front of house needs to know the phone number and the website URL by heart. Kitchen staff needs to recognize DirectOrders tickets vs. Toast tickets on the KDS. Run a Saturday rush with both systems live and debrief on Monday.

Days 61 to 90: Hard Cutover and Toast Cancellation

Week 9. Pick a cutover date. Communicate it to staff and to your top customers (email + 1 SMS). Recommended: Tuesday morning, not Friday before a busy weekend.

Week 10. On the cutover date, redirect the old Toast Online Ordering URL to the new DirectOrders URL. Toast typically allows a 301 redirect from your Toast subdomain. If not, update every link on every external site you control.

Week 11. Submit the Toast cancellation in writing per the contract notice window. Keep the email thread. Confirm in writing: cancellation effective date, final billing date, any unamortized hardware balance, return-shipping instructions for any leased peripherals (often none if you bought hardware outright).

Week 12. Reconcile. Pull the first full month of DirectOrders reports. Compare side by side to the same month a year prior on Toast: revenue, order count, average ticket, refund rate, customer return rate. Adjust marketing spend accordingly. The first month is also when you'll discover any customer-list import gaps; backfill from your last Toast export.

Feature Parity, Honestly

This is the comparison most "vs" pages bury. Verified against pos.toasttab.com/pricing, central.toasttab.com, and our own product pages.

The TL;DR of the table: DirectOrders is narrower than Toast. We do online ordering, AI phone ordering, and multi-channel presence really well; we don't do POS hardware or payroll. If your goal is to reduce online ordering cost without ripping out the POS, this is a clean fit.

Common Migration Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

After running this migration with several dozen operators, the same pitfalls show up.

1. Skipping the contract review. Operators initiate the switch, then discover they have 14 months left on Toast with a meaningful early termination fee. Always pull the contract first and time the cancellation to the renewal window. If you have 18+ months left, the savings still beat the ETF in most cases, but model it explicitly.

2. Forgetting to update Google Business Profile. Google sends real online ordering traffic to whatever URL is in the "order online" attribute on your GBP. Forget to update it and you keep sending customers to the cancelled Toast page. Update GBP within 24 hours of cutover.

3. Not training the kitchen on the new ticket format. Toast tickets and DirectOrders tickets look different on the KDS. The first weekend rush is not the time for the kitchen to figure this out. Run a Wednesday lunch with both systems live as the rehearsal.

4. Importing customer data without consent refresh. If your Toast email list was opt-in, you can move it. If it was scraped from order data without explicit marketing consent, sending a "we moved" email is risky under CAN-SPAM and CASL rules in Canada. Send a re-permission email or do a slow drip with clear opt-out language.

5. Forgetting third-party menus. If DoorDash and Uber Eats pull from a synced Toast menu, that sync breaks when you turn off Toast Online Ordering for direct orders. Confirm the third-party menu sync source separately. DirectOrders supports menu sync to third parties; the omnichannel ordering guide walks through it.

6. Cutting over on a Friday night. Don't. Tuesday morning. Always.

What to Tell Your Staff

The internal communication matters more than most owners think. Here's the rough script we recommend:

"Starting [date], we're moving our online ordering to a new system called DirectOrders. The Toast POS at the counter stays the same. The Toast KDS in the kitchen stays the same. Online orders will come in through a new system but they'll print to the same KDS you're already using. Front of house: when customers ask about ordering online, the new website is [domain]. Phone orders will continue to work the way they always have. Any questions, ask [manager name]. We'll do a rehearsal on [date] to walk through it together."

Short. Specific. Doesn't make it bigger than it is.

When You Should NOT Switch

Some restaurants are better off staying on Toast. We will tell you so on the demo call.

• You use Toast Payroll heavily and your accountant is set up for it. Switching online ordering does not change this, but the savings might not justify the operational change.
• Your online order volume is below ~$8,000/month. The percentage savings are small in absolute dollars and the migration effort isn't worth it. Wait until volume crosses $10K/month.
• You're 18+ months into a Toast contract with a steep early termination fee. Time the switch to the renewal window. The savings are still there in 12 months.
• You need integrated table-side ordering and pay-at-the-table. Toast does this natively. DirectOrders does not.
• Your team is at capacity and cannot absorb a 90-day project. This is a real and valid reason. Push the switch to the next slow season.

Bottom Line

Switching online ordering from Toast to DirectOrders is not a rip-and-replace. It's keeping the POS, keeping the kitchen hardware, keeping the payroll, and replacing one cost line item: the bundled software fee plus per-order processing on online orders. For a restaurant doing $40K+ per month in online orders, the math typically saves $5,000 to $15,000 per year. The migration is 90 days end-to-end, with the heaviest two weeks in the middle.

If you have a Toast contract coming up for renewal in the next 90 days, this is the right time to model the alternative. Book a demo and we'll walk through your Toast invoice, your contract, and the savings on your specific volume. If the numbers don't work, we'll tell you that too.

Sources

• Toast pricing page (verified April 2026): software tiers, processing rates, Digital Ordering add-on
• Toast Central help center: contract terms, cancellation process
• Reuters: Toast removes $0.99 online order fee, July 2023: customer-facing fee context
• DirectOrders pricing: Pro $249/mo, Pro + Voice $349/mo, no per-order fees
• DirectOrders Toast integration: supported sync flow with Toast as POS
• DirectOrders commission calculator: plug in your specific online order volume to model savings