Batchly vs Toast
Toast is built for restaurants. Batchly is built for specialty retail — the smoke shop, the bottle shop, the boutique — with per-sale dual pricing that decides who covers the card fee. Here is where each one actually fits.
Toast is a strong, category-defining product. If you run a kitchen, it is probably on your short list for good reason: it was designed from the first line of code for tables, tickets, coursing, and the pass. This page will not pretend otherwise. What it will do is draw the honest line between a restaurant platform and a retail one, because a shop that sells packaged goods over a counter has a different set of problems than a shop that cooks.
The short version: Toast runs the front-of-house and back-of-house of a restaurant. Batchly runs the register, the shelf, and the payments for a specialty retail store — and it lets the merchant decide, on every single sale, who pays the 3.5% + $0.20 card processing fee.
The differences that matter
| Toast | Batchly | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | Restaurants and bars — tables, kitchen tickets, coursing, tips. | Specialty retail — a shop with about 100 products and roughly 20 core movers, sold over the counter. |
| The card fee | Merchant typically absorbs it. Published in-person rates run around 2.49% + 15¢ on some plans (as published, subject to change); a few plans add surcharge tooling — check your terms. | Your call, per sale: absorb, pass, or split it 50/50. Pass mode posts a cash price and a card price side by side — a compliant cash discount that works on any card in all 50 states. |
| Inventory | Menu-, recipe-, and ingredient-oriented — built around what the kitchen makes. | Product-oriented — barcodes, case packs, reorder points, and The Usual texting regulars before they run out. |
| Specialty retail needs | Not the focus. | Age and ID checks at scan for smoke and liquor, bar tabs, gift cards, memberships with card-on-file. |
| AI staff | Restaurant tooling; no retail phone agent. | Shophand — Front Desk answers your line 24/7 from live stock; an optional +$49.96/mo hire. |
| Hardware | Proprietary restaurant hardware — kitchen displays, handhelds, kitchen printers. | A focused countertop terminal; card data stays on the terminal and gateway, never on Batchly's servers. |
| Software price | Published plans, from a free starter tier up to about $69/mo per terminal for the core POS (as published). | $99/mo per store, +$49.96/mo for Shophand, additional registers $30/mo. 21-day free trial. |
Toast is a trademark of Toast, Inc. Batchly is not affiliated with or endorsed by Toast. Competitor figures are approximate, drawn from publicly published pricing as of writing, and are subject to change — check Toast's site for current terms.
Where Toast fits
Pick Toast if the kitchen is the business. Full-service and quick-service restaurants, bars with a real drink program, cafes where most of the revenue is prepared food — that is Toast's home turf. Coursing, modifiers, seat-level ordering, kitchen display screens, tip pooling, and menu engineering are baked in because that is what the product was built to do. If a host is seating tables and a line cook is reading tickets off a screen, you want a restaurant platform, and Toast is one of the best.
Where Batchly fits
Pick Batchly if the shelf is the business. A smoke or vape shop, a liquor store, an ice cream or coffee counter that mostly rings up packaged product, a boutique — these live and die on inventory accuracy and card-fee margin, not on coursing a plate. Batchly is built around a catalog of roughly 100 SKUs, scans a barcode, checks an ID when it should, tracks reorder points, and runs memberships and gift cards from the same register. And it does the one thing no restaurant platform is designed to do: on every sale it lets you choose absorb, pass, or split for the 3.5% + $0.20 processing fee.
Dual pricing is the line in the sand
This is the difference that shows up in your margin. In pass mode the register posts two numbers — the cash price and the card price — and the customer picks how to pay. Presented as a cash discount, it is permitted in all 50 states, works on any card, and takes your effective card-fee cost toward $0 on the tickets where you use it. Absorb a fee for a regular, pass it on the next sale, split it when that feels right. See how it works on the dual pricing page, and read the plain-English version on is cash discounting legal. As always, confirm the details with your processor and counsel and check your state — Batchly gives you the tool and the compliant presentation; it does not give legal advice.
Common questions
Is Toast better than Batchly?
If you run a kitchen, Toast is likely the better fit — it was built for tables, tickets, and coursing. Batchly is the better fit if you sell packaged goods over a counter and want per-sale dual pricing on the card fee.
Can Toast do dual pricing or a cash discount?
Some Toast plans include surcharge tooling, which is a different model from a cash discount. Batchly's dual pricing posts a cash price and a card price side by side as a compliant cash discount, and it works on any card in all 50 states. Confirm the details with your processor and counsel and check your state.
I run a cafe that also sells retail. Which one?
If food service is the core of the business, Toast is built for that. If the retail shelf drives most of your revenue and food is a smaller part, Batchly runs the register, the inventory, and the payments, and dual pricing decides who covers the card fee on every sale.
See the other comparisons
Weighing a few options? Read Batchly vs Square, Batchly vs Clover, and Batchly vs Shopify POS. When you want the numbers on your own volume, the pricing page lays out the flat $99/mo plan and the match-or-beat processing rate behind it.
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