Toast Partner API Explained for Restaurant Owners (2026)
What the Toast Partner API is, how partners create orders in Toast, what approval takes and costs, and how the DoorDash Toast integration really works.
TLDR
The Toast Partner API is how third-party platforms read menus, sync stock, and inject orders into Toast POS, which ran roughly 171,000 restaurant locations as of March 31, 2026. Access is gated: an eight-stage partner process ending in certification, unpublished fees (2019 reporting put Toast's cut at a 30% revenue share), and rate limits of 20 requests per second. DoorDash's official Toast integration injects orders and syncs menus in near real time, but leaves its 15% to 30% commission untouched.
TLDR
The Toast Partner API is how third-party platforms read menus, sync stock, and inject orders into Toast POS, which ran roughly 171,000 restaurant locations as of March 31, 2026. Access is gated: an eight-stage partner process ending in certification, unpublished fees (2019 reporting put Toast's cut at a 30% revenue share), and rate limits of 20 requests per second. DoorDash's official Toast integration injects orders and syncs menus in near real time, but leaves its 15% to 30% commission untouched. Here is what owners should verify before trusting any "Toast integration" claim.
Toast is no longer just a point of sale. With approximately 171,000 live locations as of March 31, 2026, up 22% year over year, and a $2.2 billion annualized recurring run rate (Toast Q1 2026 results, Business Wire, May 2026), it is the operating system for a meaningful share of American restaurants. Every delivery app, online ordering platform, scheduling tool, and accounting package that wants to work with those restaurants has to talk to Toast. The way they talk to it is the Toast Partner API.
This guide explains that machinery in owner language, not developer language: what the API exposes, how order injection works, who gets access, what it costs on both sides, what the DoorDash integration actually does, and the questions that separate a real integration from a slide in a sales deck.
What is the Toast Partner API?
The Toast Partner API is the set of REST APIs that approved technology companies use to exchange data with Toast POS systems: reading menus, orders, labor, and stock, and, for ordering partners, writing orders directly into the kitchen. The documentation is public at doc.toasttab.com, but credentials are issued only to vendors accepted into Toast's partner program.
That last clause is the part owners need to internalize. Anyone can read the docs. Almost no one can call the API. Toast runs a closed partner ecosystem: a company applies, gets vetted for business fit and technical readiness, signs a partner agreement, builds against a sandbox, passes certification, and only then receives production credentials (Toast developer guide, 2026). Certified integrations appear in Toast Partner Connect, the integration marketplace restaurants see inside Toast Web.
The useful mental model is an app store: Toast is the platform, integrations are vetted apps, and Toast controls the shelf, the rules, and a cut of the economics. You will never call the API yourself, but every vendor promise about syncing with your Toast is bounded by what this API allows, at the speed its rate limits allow, at a price shaped by what Toast charges that vendor.
What can partners access through the Toast API?
Toast's partner-facing surface covers six main API families (orders, menus, stock, labor, configuration and restaurant info, and partner account data) plus webhooks that push changes to partners the moment they happen, per Toast's 2026 developer guide. Every restaurant tool that syncs with Toast is assembled from these blocks.
| Toast API | What it does | What it powers for a restaurant |
|---|---|---|
| Orders API | Reads orders, checks, and payments; approved ordering partners can create orders | Online ordering, delivery channels, reporting tools |
| Menus API | Exports the full menu: groups, items, modifiers, prices | Menu sync to every ordering channel |
| Stock API | Reads and updates item availability | 86'd items drop off online menus automatically |
| Labor API | Employees, jobs, shifts, time entries | Scheduling and payroll integrations |
| Configuration and Restaurants APIs | Dining options, revenue centers, service charges, hours, location info | Orders routed, taxed, and timed the way the restaurant expects |
| Partners API | Lists the restaurant locations connected to a partner | Multi-location management for vendors |
There is also an Analytics API with its own separate rate limits (Toast developer guide, 2026), used for reporting-heavy tools.
The second half of the surface is webhooks: instead of a vendor repeatedly asking Toast whether anything changed, Toast pushes an event when it does. The documented set covers orders, menus, stock, restaurant availability, the online ordering schedule, packaging preferences, and partner connection events. Webhooks matter for one practical reason: they are the difference between an 86'd item vanishing from your channels in seconds and lingering while a polling loop catches up.
Notice what is not on the list: reservations, waitlists, and guest profiles have no general-purpose public API here. That absence explains a whole category of confusing vendor claims, so reservations get their own section below.
How do partners create orders in Toast?
An approved ordering partner creates orders through the Toast Orders API: it first pulls the restaurant's menu through the Menus API, matches every item and modifier to Toast's internal IDs, then posts the guest's order, which prints in the kitchen exactly like an order rung in at the counter. Toast calls this an ordering integration; operators call it order injection.
The loop has four steps, and each one is a place where a weak integration shows its seams:
1. Menu pull. The partner exports your menu structure. If your Toast menu is messy (duplicate items, dead modifiers), every downstream channel inherits the mess.
2. Mapping. Every item, modifier, and price on the ordering channel is tied to a Toast identifier. When mapping goes stale, injection fails. Middleware providers are explicit about this: Otter's Toast integration guide (2026) notes order injection only works while the channel menu matches the Toast menu.
3. Order write. The guest's order posts into Toast with the right dining option and channel attribution. For marketplace and online orders, payment was already captured by the channel, so the order arrives as paid and goes straight to the kitchen printer or KDS.
4. Stock loop. When you 86 an item on the POS, the stock webhook pushes the change out, and the item disappears from connected channels.
Why this matters is best understood by its absence. Without injection, every third-party order lands on a separate tablet and a human rekeys it into Toast: transcription errors, missed tickets in the middle of a rush, and a reporting hole where those sales never join your POS data. Injection removes the rekeying, consolidates reporting, and keeps prep flow identical across counter, website, and marketplace orders.
The same logic applies across Square, Clover, and every other modern POS; we cover the general version in our POS and online ordering integration guide. Toast's specific twist is that order-write access is its most tightly gated scope: read access is common, injection rights are earned.
Does the Toast Partner API cover reservations?
No. There is no general-purpose public reservations API in Toast's partner documentation; the documented surface is orders, menus, stock, labor, configuration, and webhooks. Reservations on Toast run through Toast's own products (Toast Tables, plus Resy inventory inside the Toast Local app) or through partner-specific integrations such as OpenTable through Toast Partner Connect.
People, and increasingly AI agents, search for "Toast partner API documentation reservations orders" as if they were one thing. They are two different things:
- Orders are a first-class, documented partner API with create access for certified partners.
- Reservations are a product battleground. Toast sells Toast Tables, its own reservation and waitlist system. On its Q1 2026 earnings call (May 2026), Toast said its consumer app, Toast Local, now lets guests "discover and book a table at over 20 thousand restaurants through Resy and Toast Tables." Toast has an obvious incentive to keep booking flow inside its own products rather than expose it as an open API.
- Third-party reservation platforms connect as certified partners with negotiated access. The OpenTable integration, for example, syncs table statuses between OpenTable and the Toast POS, auto-applies OpenTable deposits to the check, and joins reservation data with POS spend history (Toast support and OpenTable, 2026). It requires the Toast Partner Integrations portal, which comes with a Restaurant Management suite subscription.
The owner takeaway: when a vendor says it handles reservations "via the Toast API," it is almost always integrating with a reservation platform that in turn integrates with Toast, or using a private partner arrangement. Ask which system holds the book; a vague answer means the integration is thinner than the pitch.
Does DoorDash integrate with Toast?
Yes. The official integration, purchased through Toast Shop, sends DoorDash Marketplace and Caviar orders straight into the Toast POS, syncs menu changes and 86'd items from Toast to DoorDash in near real time, and retires the DoorDash tablet. Toast's setup documentation (2026) puts activation at three to five business days for US and Canada locations.
What actually syncs, per Toast's support documentation and DoorDash's merchant help center (2026):
- Menu: published Toast menu changes flow to DoorDash in near real time. You choose which menus to expose and can set a percentage price markup for the DoorDash channel during setup.
- Availability: 86 an item on the Toast POS and it drops off DoorDash in near real time through the stock sync.
- Photos: item photos sync automatically if they meet DoorDash's specs (16:9 ratio, at least 1400x800 pixels, under 2MB).
- Orders: DoorDash and Caviar orders inject directly, with special instructions attached as item-level notes.
Just as important is what the integration does not support (Toast support, 2026): time-specific pricing, pre-modifiers, subgroups, prompt-for-quantity, Pizza Menu Management, size pricing on modifiers, time-restricted menus, scheduled order throttling and prep-time delays, virtual brands, and self-delivery setups. If your menu leans on any of these, the sync can fail to pull the menu at all. Even a first-party integration between two giants has a compatibility list; remember that when a smaller vendor claims theirs "just works."
Now the money part, because the integration changes labor, not economics. Injection removes the tablet and the rekeying. It does not touch the commission. DoorDash's published marketplace rates, as of July 2026 (DoorDash merchant pricing page):
| DoorDash plan | Delivery commission | Pickup commission | Notable terms |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | 15% | 6% | 7-day 0% intro period, smallest reach, no DashPass customers |
| Plus | 25% | 6% | DashPass access, 30-day free trial |
| Premier | 30% | 6% | Widest reach, 20-order monthly guarantee or that month's commission refunded |
A DoorDash tablet runs $6 per week if you stay un-integrated (DoorDash, 2026), which is why the integration pays for itself in labor terms almost immediately. But whether 15% to 30% marketplace volume belongs in your channel mix at all is a separate decision from whether those orders should flow into your POS cleanly. They should.
DoorDash is not the only delivery lane, either. Toast named Uber its preferred global delivery marketplace in a multi-year partnership announced November 3, 2025 (Restaurant Dive), building on an Uber Eats order integration dating to 2021 and a 2024 expansion that wired Uber Direct into Toast Delivery Services, Toast's own dispatch product. Marketplace integrations on Toast keep deepening; the commissions survive every press release.
How do you become a Toast integration partner?
Through an eight-stage process Toast documents publicly: application, discovery, partner agreement, development kickoff, certification, alpha, beta, and general availability (Toast developer guide, 2026). Toast says it receives a high volume of applications and cannot integrate with everyone, publishes no end-to-end timeline, and its own late stages span a month or more of live-restaurant testing.
Here is the path a vendor walks before its "Toast integration" is real:
1. Application and discovery. Toast vets business fit and technical readiness, with signoff required from its compliance, privacy, security, and legal teams.
2. Partner agreement. Commercial terms are negotiated and signed per region: Toast operates in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia.
3. Development kickoff. The partner finally gets sandbox credentials and builds against test restaurants.
4. Certification. A one-hour, demo-style review where Toast validates endpoint usage, polling behavior, and data transmission. Issues found here must be fixed before production credentials are issued.
5. Alpha. Production credentials, one live restaurant, roughly one week of log review.
6. Beta. Three to five live locations over several weeks, folding the integration into daily operations.
7. General availability. The integration is listed publicly for restaurants to add.
Read that sequence as an owner and one conclusion falls out: a vendor that has not yet signed a partner agreement is quarters away from a live integration, not weeks. The stages Toast itself documents (build, certify, one week of alpha, several weeks of beta) do not compress below a few months even when everything goes right.
This is also why middleware exists. Rather than survive this process themselves, many products connect to Toast through a hub that already did:
| Integration path | How it connects to Toast | The tradeoff |
|---|---|---|
| Certified partner, direct API | Vendor's own platform calls Toast APIs with its own partner credentials | Deepest sync and accountability, but the vendor had to earn approval |
| Middleware (Otter, Checkmate, Deliverect) | Vendor rides a hub that is itself the certified Toast partner | Faster to ship, but adds a second vendor, a second fee, and a second failure point |
| Tablet plus manual re-entry | No API at all; staff rekey orders into Toast | Works on day one, breaks during every rush |
None of these paths is dishonest. Middleware in particular is how much of the industry actually runs. What is dishonest is a vendor blurring which path it is on.
What does the Toast Partner API cost?
Toast does not publish partner API pricing; commercial terms are negotiated privately in each partner agreement. The best public data point is dated but instructive: Reforming Retail reported in July 2019 that Toast replaced a $20 per location per month integration fee with a 30% ongoing revenue share on joint customers, plus a $500 payment per referred lead (up to five initial locations). Treat those numbers as history, not a current price list.
Why care what vendors pay Toast? Because platform fees flow downstream: a vendor surrendering a revenue share on every joint customer prices it into what you pay.
On the restaurant side, the costs are more visible but still layered (Toast support, 2026):
- Integration pricing varies by partner. Toast's own wording: some integrations are "included with your Restaurant Management suite at no additional cost," while others "require a separate subscription paid to the partner or to Toast." The price appears on the partner tile in Toast Partner Connect before you click Add Now.
- The suite is the ticket in. Most integrations require a Restaurant Management suite subscription, and Toast notes that if you remove every integration, the monthly suite fee keeps billing until you cancel with Toast Customer Care.
- Your own data has a read-only door. Toast's standard API access, included with the Restaurant Management Suite Essentials plan for US customers (Toast developer guide, 2026), lets you generate credentials and pull your own orders, menu, and location data without any partner. No write access, so it cannot inject orders: reporting, not ordering.
The shape of the model: Toast monetizes both sides of its ecosystem, vendor and restaurant. That is rational platform economics, and a real line item in the total cost of running on Toast. It is one reason flat-fee direct platforms price differently; DirectOrders charges a flat $249 per month, zero commission, no revenue share on the ordering channel. If you are weighing Toast's own ordering suite against an independent direct channel, the head-to-head lives at DirectOrders vs Toast.
What are Toast's API rate limits?
Toast's developer documentation (2026) sets two default budgets per API client: bursts up to 20 requests per second across all Toast APIs combined, and 10,000 requests per 15 minutes sustained, which averages out to about 11 per second. Two endpoints are tighter: menu exports are limited to one request per second per location, and bulk order pulls to five per second per location.
Rate limits sound like a developer's problem. They are actually the physics behind every sync-speed promise you will ever hear. Three practical translations:
- "Real time" means webhooks, not polling. A vendor that polls Toast for updates spends its request budget asking whether anything changed, because limits apply per API client, scoped per location by the Toast-Restaurant-External-ID header (Toast developer guide, 2026). Well-built integrations receive webhook pushes instead. If a vendor cannot say the word "webhook," its 86'd-item sync is slower than the demo implied.
- Menu sync is the slow lane by design. At one menu export per second per location, rebuilding a large menu across many locations and channels takes minutes, not milliseconds. A vendor promising instant full-menu propagation across a 40-location group is promising something Toast's own limits do not permit.
- Backfills take real time. Pulling months of order history for analytics happens at five bulk requests per second per location inside the same 15-minute budget, so big historical imports run for hours. That is normal.
Honest expectations, calibrated to the platform: stock and 86'd-item changes propagate in seconds via webhook; menu edits appear on channels in minutes; historical backfills are measured in hours. None of that is vendor failure. The failure is the vendor who promised you magic instead of physics.
What should you ask a vendor claiming a Toast integration?
Eight questions expose the difference between a certified integration, a middleware pass-through, and a tablet with extra steps. Any vendor with a real integration answers all eight in one email without a follow-up call. Vague answers to any of them are themselves the answer.
1. Are you the certified Toast partner, or is your platform connecting through middleware? Both can work; you deserve to know whose credentials, and whose uptime, your dinner rush depends on.
2. Which Toast APIs and scopes do you use? Specifically: do you write orders through the Orders API, or only read data for reporting? "Integration" spans both, and only one of them ends tablet re-entry.
3. Webhooks or polling? Ask how many seconds an 86'd item takes to leave my online menu. The honest answer references Toast's stock webhook.
4. Who pays Toast, and what will I pay? Is there a revenue share or referral arrangement priced into my subscription? What does your tile say in Toast Partner Connect, and does my Restaurant Management suite already cover it?
5. What parts of my menu will break? Even the first-party DoorDash integration publishes a limitation list (time-specific pricing, pre-modifiers, size-priced modifiers, and more). A vendor claiming zero limitations has not read its own docs.
6. What is the failure mode? If injection fails at 7:40 pm on a Friday, does the order die silently, or fall back to email, SMS, and a phone call? Who gets alerted?
7. Do I keep my data? Order history and guest data pulled from or generated alongside Toast should be exportable when we part ways.
8. If the integration is "coming soon," which of Toast's eight stages are you in? Application, agreement signed, sandbox build, certification, alpha, beta, or listed? The stage names are public, so a serious vendor can name theirs.
That last question is one we answer ourselves, since DirectOrders is a vendor in this conversation: our Toast sync is a planned integration path, not a live API connection today, and the DirectOrders and Toast integration page says exactly that. What works now is a commission-free direct ordering channel that runs alongside your Toast POS; the API sync ships on the roadmap. Hold every vendor, us included, to that standard. And if your evaluation ends with leaving Toast rather than integrating with it, the migration math is in switching from Toast to DirectOrders.
The Toast Partner API is a genuinely good piece of restaurant infrastructure: real order injection, real webhooks, real documentation. It is also a gated, priced, rate-limited platform owned by a company with its own products to sell. Owners who understand both halves of that sentence buy better technology.
Sources
- Toast developer guide: API overview (Toast, 2026)
- Toast developer guide: rate limiting (Toast, 2026)
- Toast developer guide: integration partnership process (Toast, 2026)
- Toast developer guide: standard API access overview (Toast, 2026)
- Toast support: get started with the DoorDash integration (Toast, 2026)
- Toast support: adding or removing an integration with Toast Partner Connect (Toast, 2026)
- Toast support: get started with the OpenTable integration (Toast, 2026)
- Toast integration partner application (Toast, 2026)
- DoorDash merchant pricing (DoorDash, as of July 2026)
- DoorDash help: integrating DoorDash with your Toast POS (DoorDash, 2026)
- Toast announces first quarter 2026 financial results (Business Wire, May 7, 2026)
- Toast Q1 2026 earnings call transcript (The Motley Fool, May 7, 2026)
- Uber, Toast enter multi-year strategic global partnership (Restaurant Dive, November 2025)
- Toast has greatly increased their POS integration fees (Reforming Retail, July 2019)
Frequently Asked Questions
The Toast Partner API is the set of REST APIs (Orders, Menus, Stock, Labor, Configuration, plus webhooks) that approved technology partners use to read data from and write orders into Toast POS systems. Access requires acceptance into Toast's partner program, a signed agreement, and certification. Restaurant owners never call it directly; the vendors they hire do, which is why its rules define what any claimed Toast integration can honestly promise.
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