Free restaurant POS: what free covers and what it costs later

Type pos for restaurant free into a search box and you get three different products under one word. Some are free with no time limit and charge for the useful extras. Some are free because the money is made on card processing. Some are free for a fortnight and then are not.

None of that is dishonest. It just means "free" tells you almost nothing on its own. This article is a way of reading those offers, written by people who sell restaurant software, so treat the last section as the disclosure it is.

The three shapes of a free plan

Free with paid add-ons. The core program is free and the parts a busy kitchen needs are sold separately. Loyverse publishes this openly: its point of sale, kitchen display and customer display apps are listed as free. Add-ons are priced at $7 a month per store for full sales history, and $25 a month per store for employee management or advanced inventory. Nothing is hidden. You simply need to know which add-ons you will want by month three.

Free because the money is in the card fee. The software is free and the company earns on every card payment. Square lists a free restaurant plan that includes menu management and a branded ordering page. It prices some apps on top of it, such as its kitchen display app at $30 a month per device on the Plus tier. This can be excellent value, but the cost moves with your turnover instead of sitting still.

Free for a set number of days. A trial. Honest, easy to compare, and over on a known date.

One local note before you compare them. Many kitchens in Bahrain settle a large share of delivery orders in cash at the door. A plan that pays for itself out of card processing earns nothing from that half of your trade. The software stays free and the company simply makes less, which is fine, until the feature you need turns out to be the paid one.

The four questions to ask a free restaurant point of sale

Ask these before you enter a single item.

What happens to my history? Some free plans keep only a short window of sales. If you cannot look back a year, you cannot see a season.

What does the hardware cost? This is where a free plan usually turns into a real bill. A screen, a stand, a kitchen printer, a cash drawer and a card reader are a quote, not a download. Second-hand kit can be sensible here, and our piece on used POS equipment covers what to check before you buy any.

How many staff can use it? Employee logins are one of the most common paid upgrades, and a restaurant with three shifts needs them.

Can I get my data out? If a free plan cannot export your customers and your sales, then leaving it later costs you everything you learned on it.

"An owner told me he had found a free system and was very pleased. Then the printer quote came in, and the second screen, and the stand. The software really was free. The evening it was meant to fix cost him three months of a subscription in one afternoon."

— Tanzeel ur Rehman, co-founder of Get Menu

What we actually give away

We should be straight about this, because the word free is doing a lot of work on the internet.

Get Menu has a free QR code generator at /tools/qr-code-generator that anybody can use without an account. It makes a code that points wherever you tell it. If all you need is a code on the table that opens a PDF of your menu, take it and go, and read what a free QR menu can and cannot do before you print anything.

Beyond that, Get Menu is a paid product with a 15 day trial that asks for no card details. Nothing is charged by accident, and if you do nothing at the end the account simply stops. We do not run a free plan, and we would rather say so plainly than call a trial something it is not.

What the paid part does, so you can judge the trade

Get Menu is not a cash register. It does not open a drawer, print at the counter, or read a card. Payment is cash or your own card machine at the table or the door. There are no online payments in it, so no customer card details exist in the system. That is a genuine limitation and it is also the reason there is nothing to steal.

What it does instead is take the order on the customer's phone.

Your restaurant gets its own address on getmenu.ae with 12 page layouts to suit how the menu reads, and a photo style toggle for square images, tall ones, or none at all. If your menu is already in a spreadsheet you upload the whole file rather than typing every item.

Options and add-ons carry their own prices and required choices are enforced, so a burger cannot reach the kitchen without a cooking level. Every line is priced again at checkout from your live menu, so what was shown is what is charged, and a double tap cannot order twice.

Stock counts fall as orders come in, including counts on a single option, and an item greys itself out at zero without anyone watching. Every table gets its own code, generated for you with a card designer and a print pack emailed ready for the printer. A table orders without flagging anybody down, and a group can order into one bill from separate phones.

Orders arrive as a ticket in your managers' group on WhatsApp, and a dispatch in your riders' group when something is going out, with the map pin the customer dropped at checkout.

Loyalty runs on stamps and on tiers your regulars grow into, with the card living in the customer's Google Wallet and updating itself. Coupons carry caps, exclusions and expiry dates. VAT invoices carrying your registration number download as a PDF without a login, numbered in one unbroken sequence.

And there is no share of your sales taken. You pay a flat monthly amount and keep 0% commission on everything you sell. The current numbers live on our pricing page, not in an article, because articles go stale.

So is a free pos ever the right answer?

Often, yes.

If you are one person with a small counter and no delivery, a free plan with a cheap card reader is a perfectly good place to start. The best free restaurant pos for you is whichever one your card provider already works with.

If your problem is the queue, the phone, and the customers you cannot name, a free counter program will not touch it, because none of that happens at the counter. That is the honest split, and our comparison of restaurant POS categories lays out the four families of product so you can see which one your problem lives in.

Buy the cheap thing for the cheap problem. Do not buy the free thing and hope it grows into the expensive problem.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a genuinely free restaurant POS?

Yes. Several companies publish free plans on their own pricing pages, with paid add-ons for history, staff logins or inventory. Read the add-on list, because that is the real price.

Does Get Menu have a free plan?

No. There is a 15 day trial with no card details asked for, and a free QR code generator anyone can use. After the trial it is a paid subscription.

Can I take card payments through Get Menu?

No. Payment is cash or your own card machine at the door or the table, so there are no card details held in the system at all.

What does free normally exclude?

Long sales history, staff logins, stock tools and support are the usual four. Hardware is almost never included in any plan, free or paid.

Can I move my data if I leave?

With Get Menu you can export your customer list and your sales to a spreadsheet on any day, including your last one. Ask the same question of any free plan before you start entering items.