Add commission-free direct ordering to Toast

Toast was founded in 2013 in Boston, Massachusetts, with a single, opinionated bet: build a POS for restaurants only, and build it on Android instead of iPad. That bet paid off. Toast went public on the NYSE under the ticker TOST in September 2021 and is now the largest restaurant-specific POS platform in the United States, reporting more than 127,000 net live restaurant locations as of its Q3 2024 results.

Toast's product surface is wider than any other restaurant POS. The core POS handles dine-in, counter, and tableside on the Toast Flex and Toast Go handhelds. Toast KDS routes tickets in the kitchen. Toast Online Ordering covers takeout and delivery from the restaurant's site. Toast Delivery Services dispatches third-party couriers. Toast Catering & Events handles large orders. Toast Payroll, Toast Tips Manager, and Toast Capital sit alongside as financial and HR modules. For an operator who wants one vendor relationship across the entire restaurant, Toast is the easiest answer in the market.

Toast's strengths are concrete. Tableside payments on the Go work reliably. Server-side flows are restaurant-native, not retail. The KDS is tightly coupled with the POS. Card-present payments are robust. Reporting is detailed. For dine-in and tableside, Toast is genuinely one of the best products operators can buy.

Toast Online Ordering is included with most Toast plans, but each online order carries an additional online processing rate that stacks on top of the in-store rate. Toast Delivery Services dispatches a third-party courier, but it adds a delivery fee that, in many comparisons, ends up similar in shape to a small marketplace commission once stacked with the Toast Online Ordering processing rate. For a restaurant doing meaningful online and delivery volume, those per-order rates compound.

On the brand and channel side, Toast Online Ordering is a Toast-branded experience that links from the restaurant's site, and the brand surface is constrained by Toast's templates. There is no Voice AI for phone orders. Distribution to Google, Instagram, WhatsApp, Apple Maps, or ChatGPT search is not native to Toast. The customer data captured through Toast Online Ordering sits inside the Toast account and is not easy to export to outside SMS or email tools without a third-party Toast app or a CSV export workflow.

On the contract side, Toast deals are typically multi-year. That is fine when Toast is being used for what it is best at (dine-in, KDS, tableside), but it means restaurants cannot simply switch off the parts of Toast they have outgrown. A direct ordering channel that lives outside the Toast contract is therefore the natural complement, not a replacement.

DirectOrders does not touch Toast. The Toast Flex stays on the counter for in-store payments. The Toast Go stays in servers' aprons for tableside. The Toast KDS keeps routing dine-in tickets. Toast Online Ordering can either stay live for the first few weeks as a fallback or be turned off the moment DirectOrders goes live. None of the Toast contract, the Toast hardware, or the Toast Online Ordering configuration needs to change for DirectOrders to operate.

Alongside Toast, DirectOrders runs the direct online ordering channel. Customers order from a fully branded website on your own domain. Voice AI answers your restaurant phone during rush. Delivery is fulfilled by Uber Direct or DoorDash Drive at courier cost. Orders print on the same Epson kitchen printer the kitchen already uses for Toast dine-in tickets, so back of house workflow is unified.

The result is that the in-store experience customers and staff already know on Toast does not change, and the direct ordering economics improve sharply: zero per-order commission, courier-cost delivery, a customer database owned by the restaurant, and 15+ channels of distribution.