If you've shopped for a restaurant POS, you've seen it: software that starts at $0 a month, or close to it. It's a good deal until you read the rest.
For many POS companies, the software isn't the business. Card processing is. Every time a guest taps a card, a slice of that payment goes to the card networks and the guest's bank (that's interchange), and a slice goes to whoever processes the payment. When your POS is also your processor — and you're not allowed to use anyone else — they set that second slice.
We call that markup the payments tax. It's charged on every sale, it grows when you grow, and you rarely get to negotiate it.
How it shows up
It isn't always one line item. It usually looks like some mix of:
- Required processing. Use their payments, or you can't use the POS.
- Rates on a quote. No published rate, so it's hard to compare.
- Hardware on contract. Terminals financed or leased over multiple years, tied to staying on their processing.
- Leaving costs extra. Early termination fees, or hardware you still owe on.
None of this is hidden in a legal sense. It's in the agreement. But it means the "$0 software" number isn't the number that matters.
The number that matters
Add up everything you pay in a year — software, processing, hardware — and divide it by your card sales. That's your effective rate. Two venues on the same POS can have very different effective rates depending on their average check, their card mix and what they negotiated.
A small difference adds up fast. On $60,000 a month in card sales, every 0.10% is $720 a year. Every 0.50% is $3,600 — real money for an independent restaurant.
What we do differently
Tallo is built so the payments tax is optional:
- Bring your own processor on any plan, with no penalty and no features held back.
- Every rate is published — including interchange-plus on our Plus plan, where you pay the true card cost plus a fixed markup.
- No hardware contract. Tallo runs on affordable Android tablets you buy outright.
If you want to see what your current setup costs, our payments tax calculator will run the numbers in under a minute.