NCR Aloha (NCR Voyix) Alternatives for Restaurant Groups: 7 Options

Labels on this page are used in one fixed way, and we are copying the definition rather than paraphrasing it, because a paraphrase is how this word drifts. VERIFIED means read off the VENDOR's own page, or verified-by-absence at the vendor's own URL. A figure published by a third-party aggregator (Vendr, PriceLevel, SelectHub, ITQlick, G2, Capterra, checkthat.ai, any buyer-data or review platform) is REPORTED, however good that aggregator's data is. ASSUMPTION means it is a modelling input of ours rather than anyone's published figure. A page that failed to load supports nothing at all: a 403, a 404 or a timeout is a failure to observe, not an observation of absence, so where our own read failed the cell says that instead of implying we looked and found nothing.

Here is what that produced. Every vendor page in the table below was fetched on August 30, 2026 and every one of them returned HTTP 200 with full content. Nothing in the VERIFIED column rests on a blocked request.

The one first party pricing document, opened and read

NCR does publish one thing with the word pricing in the filename. Its documentation site hosts a PDF called Feature Focus Guide: Tier Pricing, dated April 15, 2025, listed under Aloha Cloud. If NCR published its own subscription tiers anywhere, that filename is where a careful reader would look.

We downloaded it and read all twenty seven pages. It is not about what NCR charges you. It is a merchant configuration manual explaining how to set up tier pricing for your own guests, so that loyalty members pay less than walk ins on the same item. The only dollar figures in the entire document are example promotion names in a worked scenario, six mix and match items for $35 at the regular discount and $30 for a VIP loyalty member. There is no NCR subscription price, no terminal fee, no processing rate, nothing about what Aloha costs. VERIFIED, in the sense that matters: we opened the one first party artifact whose name suggested it might contain pricing, and it does not. The absence of a published Aloha price is now observed in the vendor's marketing site and in its documentation library, not assumed from either.

Where the $175 figure actually comes from, and how much weight it carries

This matters more than the number itself, so read this part before you use it. Two sources put Aloha Cloud's Pro tier near $175 per terminal per month. One is loman.ai, which publishes a detailed Aloha pricing breakdown and also sells a competing AI phone answering product for restaurants, priced and promoted inside the same article. The other is pricingnow.com, which discloses on its own site that its answers are researched and refined with AI tools and then editor reviewed, that it may earn commission on links, and which, in the very same Aloha answer that carries the $175 figure, closes by name checking Loman AI. Those two are not independent of each other in the way a corroboration argument requires, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

The genuinely independent third source, POS USA, does not corroborate $175. It reports software near $170 per month per location, attributes that to Aloha Essentials rather than Aloha Cloud, and labels it in its own words an industry reported starting point. That is a different product and a different unit, and treating it as confirmation of the Cloud figure would be exactly the kind of stacking that makes a page look sourced without being sourced.

So: REPORTED near $175 per terminal per month, from one detailed source with a commercial interest in Aloha looking expensive and one AI assisted aggregator that cites that source. We use it because it is the only per terminal figure that exists, we use it as the low case rather than dressing it up, and if your invoice says something different then your invoice is right and this page is wrong. That is what the calculator is for.

Two figures do carry real weight. Hardware near $1,000 per terminal is reported by three sources that are not derived from each other, including POS USA. And the requirement to use NCR's own payment processing is stated flatly by POS USA and repeated by pricingnow.com, and it is the claim on this page with the largest financial consequence, because it removes your ability to shop the single largest variable cost in a restaurant's technology stack.

The April 2025 fee increase, described accurately

This is the best documented event in Aloha's recent cost history and it is worth getting exactly right, because it is also the one most likely to be overstated by someone trying to sell you something.

On April 22, 2025 the trade site Retail Systems published a piece titled Aloha and NCR Merchant Fees Just Increased. The piece carries the byline Retail Systems; the author biography attached to that account on the site identifies Craig Allen Keefner and says he has managed the Kiosk Industry Group since 2014. The outlet covers self service and automated retail and does not sell a point of sale system. The piece reproduces the key points of a merchant notice: a Discount Fee increase of 0.25 percentage points effective April 1, 2025 for processing agreements approved before April 1, 2024; a move of settlement fee billing onto authorisation attempts with an increase of up to $0.07 per transaction; a monthly minimum fee rising to $75 for inactive or minimally processing accounts; and a fee for customers who elect month end discount billing set at either their contracted rate or 0.05 percent. POS USA and loman.ai independently report the same discount fee and authorisation fee figures.

Four honest caveats. The Retail Systems piece is opinion writing, it is openly contemptuous of NCR, and it credits another newsletter for surfacing the notice; we are citing its reproduction of the notice figures, not its characterisation of anyone. Its section arguing that the increase applies to Aloha specifically reads as analysis rather than as a quotation from the notice, so treat the applicability conclusion as that outlet's reasoning rather than as NCR's statement. We did not obtain the underlying merchant notice ourselves. And most importantly for the model below: this was a one time change to processing fees, not an annual escalation rate on the software subscription. Nobody, anywhere, publishes an Aloha subscription escalation percentage. Do not let anyone, us included, convert this event into a recurring rate.

The processing rate comparison nobody prints, because it does not flatter anyone

Here is something you can act on this week, and it cuts against the simple story. SpotOn publishes its card present rate on its own site: 2.45 percent plus $0.15 on the POS Essentials plan. NCR's reported card present rate is 2.6 percent plus $0.10. Those two look like an easy win for SpotOn, and at a lot of restaurants they are not.

Work it per transaction. SpotOn saves you 0.15 percentage points on the ticket value and costs you an extra five cents on the swipe. Those cancel out at a ticket of $33.33. Below that average check, NCR's reported structure is cheaper on card present volume; above it, SpotOn's published one is. At a $22 average check across a fifteen terminal group doing $18,000 a month per terminal, the reported NCR structure costs about $98,967 a year in card present processing and SpotOn's published rate costs about $101,471. At a $45 average check the same volume costs about $91,440 on NCR and about $90,180 on SpotOn.

Two things follow. First, if you are a quick service or fast casual operator with a low average check, a lower headline percentage can cost you money, and any comparison that shows you percentages without per transaction fees is not a comparison. Second, this is the clearest case on the whole page where the right answer is switch vendors rather than build anything, because processing is not a problem a custom system solves. We would rather tell you that here than let you find it out after signing something with us.

The five year model, and the caveat it carries

The model below takes a fifteen terminal group, which is a realistic mid sized multi location operator and matches the scale this page is written for. It uses the REPORTED Aloha Cloud Pro figure of $175 per terminal per month, adds REPORTED hardware at $1,000 per terminal once at year zero, and escalates the software three percent a year.

That three percent is an ASSUMPTION and we want to be explicit about why it is that number and not a bigger one. No source anywhere documents an Aloha software escalation rate. The only documented Aloha price change is the April 2025 processing fee event above, which is a different thing. We could have taken that event's 0.25 percentage point discount fee move and dressed it up as an annual software escalator, which would have pulled every crossover on this page toward our own conclusion. We did not, because a number chosen to flatter the seller is worth nothing to the buyer. Three percent is a plain, conventional software escalation assumption, and it is on the low side. Below the table you will find the same model run at zero percent and at five percent, and the crossover year does not move at any of them.

Against it sits a commissioned build at $90,000, the middle of our $45,000 to $180,000 range and not a quote for any specific group, with maintenance at eighteen percent of the build fee per year as a stated ASSUMPTION drawn from conventional custom software maintenance contracts rather than from anything specific to this category. Year 0 is the year you buy and install; maintenance starts in year 1.

Processing fees are deliberately excluded from this table, and that decision favours Aloha. A commissioned build does not replace your card reader and does not eliminate card processing; you still have a processor either way. Putting Aloha's processing on one side of the ledger and nothing on the other would be dishonest arithmetic, and it would move the crossover roughly two years earlier than it belongs. If you want to see the processing difference, it is in the section above, and the answer there is to change vendors, not to build.

Read the first three rows before the last three, because they are the part a vendor chart would hide. At the end of year 0 you are $43,500 behind on the build. At the end of year 1 you are still $27,255 behind. At the end of year 2 you are $10,037 behind. Renting is genuinely the cheaper decision for three full years, and if your horizon is shorter than that, the answer on this page is stay. The lines cross in year 3, at $146,784.25 against $138,600.00, a gap of $8,184.25. By year 5 it is $218,754.91 against $171,000.00, a gap of $47,754.91, and it widens every year after that because one line has a slope and the other is flat.

Now the sensitivity, which is the part that decides whether you should believe any of it. Set the escalation assumption to zero and cumulative Aloha at year 5 is $204,000 instead of $218,755, and the crossover is still year 3. Set it to five percent and year 5 is $229,260, and the crossover is still year 3. The conclusion is not sensitive to the one input we could not source, which is the only reason we are comfortable printing it.

The build price is a different story, and it is where the argument has real limits. At $45,000, the floor of our range, the build is cheaper than Aloha from year 0 onward at this terminal count. At $180,000, the ceiling, it never catches up inside ten years against fifteen terminals, and we would tell you that on the call rather than let you find out afterwards. Terminal count moves it the other way, hard: at thirty terminals a $90,000 build wins from year 0, and at six terminals it does not win inside ten years at all. That is the whole argument in one sentence. This is a scale decision, not a philosophy.

Cumulative spend for a fifteen terminal restaurant group, five years out. Aloha Cloud at the $175 per terminal per month figure REPORTED by loman.ai and pricingnow.com, with hardware at $1,000 per terminal REPORTED by three sources and paid once at year zero, escalating three percent a year as a labelled ASSUMPTION that no source documents and that we deliberately set low. Against it, a commissioned build at $90,000, the middle of our $45,000 to $180,000 range rather than a quote for anyone, paid once at year zero, with maintenance at eighteen percent of the build price a year as a stated ASSUMPTION. Card processing is excluded from both lines, because a build does not replace your card reader and charging it to one side only would be arithmetic with a thumb on the scale. Every figure in this chart comes from the table above.

Look at the left half of this chart before the right half, because the left half is the part that decides whether the right half is worth anything to you. The build line starts $43,500 above the Aloha line and stays above it through the whole of years 1 and 2. Renting is the correct financial decision for three years running. That is not a concession we are making reluctantly to look balanced; it is the actual shape of the trade, and any operator whose money has to work inside twenty four months should stop reading here and go negotiate a better Aloha renewal instead.

The lines cross during year 3 at roughly $131,000 of cumulative spend on each path. After that the gap opens every single year: $8,184 at the end of year 3, $27,438 at the end of year 4, $47,755 at the end of year 5. Nothing in this model bends the subscription line back down, because nothing in a real per terminal agreement does either. The only two things that flatten it are closing locations and taking terminals off the floor, and neither of those is a plan.

Three honest limits on this chart. First, it is drawn on a REPORTED price, not a quote, and the sourcing on that price is thinner than we would like, which is why the calculator below defaults to it but does not lock it. Second, the build price is the middle of a range and the range is wide for a reason; at the ceiling of it, against fifteen terminals, the lines never meet inside ten years. Third, and most important, a commissioned build at this price does not replace an EMV certified card present terminal, a kitchen printer network or an offline capable order entry system. What it replaces is the layer above that, and the next section is where that gets specific.

Every default below is a figure from the table above, and every one is editable, because the defaults are third party estimates and your invoice is a fact. Nothing is submitted anywhere. There is no email gate, the tool makes no external request, and it stores no value. The arithmetic runs in your browser and stops there. If your inputs make the build lose, the tool says so in plain language rather than quietly hiding the result.

One use worth knowing about. If what you are considering is not replacing Aloha but replacing the add on modules stacked on top of it, put the monthly cost of just those modules in the rate field instead of your full bill. The comparison then answers the question that is actually on the table, which is whether the online ordering, inventory, loyalty and reporting layer is worth renting forever.

A word on the roster before the roster. Two of the most detailed Aloha comparison guides an operator will find are written by companies selling the reader an alternative subscription: loman.ai publishes a thorough Aloha pricing breakdown and promotes its own restaurant product inside it, and katalystos.com publishes an Aloha versus Toast guide that estimates monthly ranges for both and then positions its own cloud point of sale as cheaper than either. Neither of those is dishonest, and both contain useful work. But a buyer should know that the most detailed cost analysis of their current vendor was written by someone who gets paid if they leave. Meanwhile the neutral review aggregators tend to have the opposite problem: one large hospitality review site rates Aloha's cost as Above Average and carries no dollar figure at all, and its own price estimator tool returned no matching results when we tried it on August 30, 2026.

What follows is the field an actual multi unit operator would evaluate, ordered the way we would evaluate it. Every price is labelled, every source is named, and where a vendor's own numbers are not obtainable we say that instead of substituting somebody else's.

1. Toast POS

What it is. The cloud native restaurant platform that has taken more share from the legacy incumbents than anything else in the last decade. Android hardware, a very large restaurant specific integration ecosystem, and a product line that now reaches well past the terminal into payroll, online ordering, marketing, gift cards, capital lending and delivery.

Published price. VERIFIED at pos.toasttab.com/pricing, read August 30, 2026: pricing starts at $0 per month, with flexible plans covering hardware kits, flat rate processing and payroll bundles, and a direction to request a custom quote. That is genuinely all the page itself commits to in a form a reader can check. The Point of Sale plan is published at a starting rate of $69 per month, and the Build Your Own tier is the one that goes to a quote. Those plan figures are drawn by script rather than delivered in the served file, so an automated fetch sees only the $0 Starter Kit; read in a browser they are Toast's own published numbers. POS USA, REPORTED, puts Toast in the $0 to $69 per month band in its competitor comparison table.

Best for. Operators who want the deepest restaurant specific integration ecosystem in the category and are comfortable assembling their cost from a base plus per module add ons.

Where it falls short. The same add on structure that makes the entry price look low is what makes the exit price hard to predict, and neither Toast nor NCR publishes the tier figures you would need to settle that comparison. We found no source we would stand behind for what a fully built out Toast stack costs against a comparable Aloha configuration, so we are not going to tell you which one lands higher. And the $0 starting point is a real number attached to a plan most multi unit groups will not stay on for long. You are also swapping one processing relationship for another rather than opening it up.

Verdict. The most credible like for like replacement for Aloha, and a genuine architectural upgrade. It is not a cost escape, because it is still rent, and the rent still scales with your growth.

Aloha Cloud vs Toast: the comparison most operators are actually running

This is the head to head that comes up more than any other, so here it is properly, with the honest admission that it cannot be settled on price.

On transparency, Toast wins narrowly and neither wins cleanly. Toast publishes a $0 per month Starter Kit and a $69 per month Point of Sale plan on its own site, and pushes only its Build Your Own tier to a quote. NCR publishes nothing at all, on any page, including the one document in its library with the word pricing in the filename. So Toast gives you two checkable anchors and Aloha gives you none, and both leave you negotiating without a benchmark. Anyone who shows you a precise monthly figure for either one is showing you an estimate, and you deserve to be told which.

On architecture, Toast wins, and it is not close. Aloha Cloud is NCR's newer Android product and Aloha Essentials is a Windows based hybrid that predates the cloud era. Toast was built after the cloud and it shows in update cadence, remote management and the pace at which new modules land. If your frustration is that your system feels like it belongs to an earlier decade, that frustration is well founded and Toast is the direct answer to it.

On enterprise depth, Aloha Essentials still wins for the largest and most complex operations. Multi revenue centre venues, deep modifier logic, granular permission control, offline behaviour during a service, and enterprise menu governance across dozens of sites are exactly what Aloha Essentials was built for, and the reason large chains have not all moved. Note that this advantage belongs to Essentials, not to Aloha Cloud. If you are on Aloha Cloud, you do not currently have it.

On processing, this is the material difference and it deserves the emphasis. POS USA reports that NCR requires you to use its integrated payment processing and that third party processors are not supported. Toast likewise steers you to its own flat rate processing. So in practice both are closed, and switching between them is switching which company sets the largest variable cost in your stack, not regaining the ability to shop it. If the ability to shop processing is what you are after, look at the vendors below who publish an actual rate card, because a published rate is the only kind you can negotiate against.

On cost, nobody can answer it for you, including us. The only figures that exist for a real multi location comparison are third party estimates, and the most cited of them for this specific matchup comes from a company selling a third product. Get quotes from both, on your real terminal count, with every module you actually use itemised, and put them into the calculator above. That is the only version of this comparison that is true for your group.

2. Square for Restaurants

What it is. The lowest friction entry in the category. A free tier, month to month terms, no long contract, hardware you can buy off a website, and an ecosystem that reaches into payroll, banking, marketing and lending.

Published price. VERIFIED at squareup.com's restaurant pricing page, read August 30, 2026. A free tier exists. On the middle plan, the Square kitchen display app is $30 per month per device and the kiosk app is $50 per month per device. On the higher plan, those drop to $20 and $30 per month per device. The Pro tier is custom priced and the page states the eligibility threshold in its own words: process over $250,000 per year. Base subscriptions are published as Free at $0, Plus at $49 per location per month and Premium at $149 per location per month.

Best for. Single location and small multi location independents who want to be able to leave. Month to month with no term is a real feature, and it is the single thing Aloha most conspicuously does not offer.

Where it falls short. Two ways, and both bite at exactly the scale this page is written for. The per device add on fees compound: fifteen kitchen display screens at $30 is $450 a month before anything else, which is the same per unit trap you are trying to leave. And enterprise multi site reporting, franchise level controls and menu governance across many locations are where Square is thinnest against Aloha Essentials.

Verdict. The right answer for a two or three location independent and the wrong answer for a fifteen location group. Include it in the shortlist honestly and rule it out on capability rather than on price.

3. SpotOn Restaurant

What it is. A full service focused restaurant platform covering point of sale, online ordering, loyalty, marketing, labour and reporting, and the most transparent vendor in this entire comparison by a wide margin.

Published price. VERIFIED at spoton.com/pricing, read August 30, 2026, with every figure below present in the page itself. Three plans. All-In at $0 per station per month with hardware included, processing at 2.79 percent plus $0.20 card present and 3.79 percent plus $0.20 keyed, on a two year minimum term. POS Essentials at $55 per station per month, processing at 2.45 percent plus $0.15 card present with American Express at 3.19 percent plus $0.15, and 3.45 percent plus $0.15 keyed. Build Your Own for multi unit and high volume, custom priced. Hardware is listed openly: Station 15 at $995 with a promotional $750 each, Station 10 at $550 promotional $415, handheld $495 promotional $297, guest facing display $200, wireless router $300, with implementation costs additional. There is also an optional software Core Bundle at $50 per month per location plus 20 basis points of gross payment volume, capped at $200 per location.

Best for. Multi location full service groups that want to be able to model their own cost before a sales call, and operators who want a real published processing rate they can hold a vendor to.

Where it falls short. The Core Bundle's twenty basis points of gross payment volume means part of your software cost scales with revenue rather than with terminal count, which is a worse shape than a flat per terminal fee for a high volume location, even with the $200 cap. The All-In plan's headline of $0 per station is real and it is paid for in the processing rate, which at 2.79 percent plus $0.20 is the most expensive card present rate on this page. And as shown further up, the POS Essentials rate only beats NCR's reported rate above a $33.33 average check.

Verdict. The strongest comparison point on this page precisely because it is checkable. If you do nothing else with this page, get a SpotOn quote, because it is the only one you can validate against a public rate card before you take the call.

4. Lightspeed Restaurant

What it is. A hospitality platform with genuine depth in full service, strong inventory and menu tooling, and a published tier structure that makes it unusually easy to evaluate at the low end.

Published price. VERIFIED at lightspeedhq.com's restaurant pricing page, read August 30, 2026: Starter at 69 USD per month, Essential at 189 USD per month, Premium at 399 USD per month, with the kitchen display system listed at $30 per screen per month across all three. The Enterprise tier is not priced and carries a Get a quote button. Processing rates are not published on that page.

Best for. Independents and small groups that want to compare real numbers without a discovery call, and operators who want strong inventory and recipe costing without buying a separate product for it.

Where it falls short. The transparency runs out at exactly the point where you need it. A fifteen terminal multi location group is an Enterprise conversation, and the Enterprise tier reverts to the same custom quote opacity you are trying to escape at Aloha. So the published tiers tell you what Lightspeed charges a restaurant that is not you. Processing is also unpriced on the page, which means the largest variable cost is invisible at the shortlist stage.

Verdict. Genuinely transparent below the enterprise line and no more transparent than NCR above it. Worth a quote; do not mistake the published tiers for the price you would pay.

5. TouchBistro

What it is. An iPad based full service restaurant system with a long standing reputation for floor plan and table management, plus a guest engagement layer of reservations, loyalty, gift cards and marketing sold around it.

Published price. VERIFIED at touchbistro.com/pricing, read August 30, 2026: Point of Sale starting at $69 per month and an Essentials Bundle, hardware included, starting at $119 per month, with a Custom Setup priced on request. Credit where it is due, the page footnotes its own limits in plain sight: hardware, payment processing and additional fees apply on the $69 tier, and payment processing and additional fees apply on the $119 tier.

Best for. Single location and small chain full service floors where table management and coursing are the daily bottleneck, and operators who want hardware bundled into a predictable monthly.

Where it falls short. The vendor's own footnotes tell you the sticker is not the bill, which is honest and is also the same pattern as everywhere else in this category. And like Square, it thins out against Aloha Essentials once you are governing menus and reporting across a dozen or more sites.

Verdict. A credible small and mid sized swap with unusually candid disclosure. Not built for the top end of the range this page addresses.

6. Clover

What it is. A very widely deployed small business platform with a broad hardware family, sold overwhelmingly through banks, independent sales organisations and payment processors rather than direct.

Published price. This one has to be handled carefully. We make no absence claim about clover.com. Its pricing page returned a shell to us on August 30, 2026 with no readable pricing content in it, and a page that delivers nothing readable is a failure to observe, not an observation that nothing is published. So we use a third party: REPORTED by tech.co, an independent technology publication, Quick Service plans at $135, $185 and $245 per month and Full Service plans at $179, $239 and $354 per month, all on 36 month terms, with card present processing between 2.3 and 2.6 percent plus $0.10 and keyed at 3.5 percent plus $0.10. Other aggregators report materially different numbers for the same named plans, which is not a contradiction to resolve; it is the finding. Clover is resold on negotiated terms and the price genuinely varies by who sells it to you.

Best for. Operators who want the hardware family and are comfortable that the deal is brokered by whoever handles their merchant account.

Where it falls short. No canonical price exists anywhere, not even a stable third party consensus one, which makes Clover arguably less benchmarkable than Aloha's single custom quote model. Thirty six month terms are long. And the enterprise restaurant tooling is not where Aloha Essentials is.

Verdict. Include it for completeness and because your bank will probably suggest it. Price it as reseller variable and get two quotes from two different resellers, because you will get two different numbers.

7. A commissioned build you own

What it is. This is the option that does not appear on any comparison page in this category, for the straightforward reason that everyone who writes those pages sells a subscription. You pay a one time fixed fee inside $45,000 to $180,000, you get a system built around your group's actual workflow, and you own it: the code, the data model, the integrations, the documentation. There is no per terminal licence, no per location fee, no seat count, no renewal, and no escalator.

What it is not, and this is the part other pages would leave out. It is not a replacement for your card present terminal. We do not build EMV certified payment hardware, we do not run a card processing business, and a restaurant cannot take a chip card on a custom web application. A commissioned build sits alongside a point of sale. What it replaces is the layer above the terminal, which is where a surprising share of your monthly actually lives: online ordering and its commissions, inventory and recipe costing, labour forecasting and scheduling, multi location reporting and menu governance, guest data and loyalty, and increasingly the AI layer that answers the phone, takes the reservation and reads the P and L.

Published price. $45,000 to $180,000, one time, scoped after a diagnosis call. Maintenance modelled at eighteen percent a year on this page is a stated ASSUMPTION for modelling, not a contract term.

Best for. Groups above roughly ten terminals whose add on module spend is a meaningful share of the bill, who have one or two workflows that leak money every month, and who intend to be operating in five years.

Where it falls short. Below about six terminals the arithmetic on this page does not work and we will tell you so. It carries an internal ownership obligation: somebody at your company has to own the system after handoff or it decays. It is slower to stand up than buying a subscription. And we have no hospitality case study, which is a real gap and is addressed honestly in the worksheet at the bottom of this page.

Verdict. The only structurally different option on the list. Every other row changes who you rent from.

Each of these has to survive a hostile reading, so none of them carries a number we cannot source and none of them is a slogan. Where an argument only applies at certain sizes, that is stated inside the argument rather than in a disclaimer at the bottom.

1. The subscription never ends, and the math already showed it

Cumulative Aloha spend on a fifteen terminal group reaches $146,784 by year 3 and $218,755 by year 5, against $138,600 and $171,000 for a $90,000 commissioned build with an eighteen percent maintenance assumption. The lines cross during year 3 and the gap is $47,755 by year 5. Those are the same numbers as the chart above, and they came from the same sourced inputs. Nothing about them requires you to believe anything we say about ownership philosophically. It is arithmetic, and you can rerun it on your own invoice in the calculator.

2. Per terminal pricing taxes exactly the thing you are trying to do

This is the argument that matters most to a group that intends to grow. Open a location and the software bill goes up. Add a bar station for the summer patio, add handhelds so servers stop walking to the terminal, add a second kitchen display for the expo line, and each one is another recurring line. Reported additional Aloha Cloud terminals run near $45 per month each, and Square's kitchen display app is $30 per month per device on its own published page, and Lightspeed's is $30 per screen per month on its own published page. None of those is unreasonable individually. Together they mean that every operational improvement you make carries a permanent tax. An owned system has a marginal cost of zero per terminal, so growth is free on the software line and the only question left is whether the location works.

3. An asset on the balance sheet instead of an expense on the P and L

Five years of subscription payments leave you with nothing you can sell, transfer, or show a buyer. A commissioned system is property. If you sell the group, it transfers with the group and it is part of what makes the group worth buying, because the operating advantage goes with it. If you refinance, it is an asset. If you franchise, it is an asset you can licence. Rent buys you access for a month at a time; ownership buys you something that is still there in year six.

4. Built around your workflow instead of the other way round

Every platform on the list above is built for the median restaurant, which does not exist. Your prep sheets, your par levels, your comp policy, your family meal accounting, your catering workflow, the way your regional managers actually read a Monday report, none of that is the median. On a subscription you adapt the operation to the software and then you pay for the sixty features you never open. A commissioned build is scoped to the workflows that are actually costing you money, and nothing else gets built or paid for.

5. The AI layer is where the per seat tax is heading next

Look at where this category is going, because the pricing pattern is already visible. Vendors are shipping AI features as premium tiers and per device or per location add ons rather than as part of the base: SpotOn's Core Bundle, which includes its AI profit analysis and AI marketing tools, is $50 per month per location plus twenty basis points of gross payment volume on SpotOn's own published page. Lightspeed lists an AI feature as a tier differentiator on its own published page. That is the same per unit structure as everything else, applied to the newest and fastest moving part of the stack, and it means every future AI capability arrives with a recurring price tag attached to your terminal count. A commissioned system puts the AI at the core rather than in a tier, and adds no per terminal charge when you extend it.

6. Unlimited users, including the ones you do not pay for

Seasonal staff, a second shift, the regional manager who checks four locations, the bookkeeper, the accountant, the landlord's reporting requirement, the franchisee. On per seat and per terminal pricing every one of those is a decision about whether the access is worth the fee, which is a stupid decision to have to make about your own business. On an owned system access is a permissions question, not a purchasing question.

7. Your data, your export path, no exit negotiation

Menu structures, recipe and modifier trees, guest history, loyalty balances, labour records and years of item level sales data are the asset your business actually accumulates. On a subscription, your ability to take those with you is whatever your agreement says and whatever the vendor's export tooling supports, and you find out which on the worst possible week. On an owned system the database is yours, the schema is documented, and the export path is a query. This is not a promise about any specific vendor's conduct; it is a statement about who holds the keys, which is a structural fact and not a matter of anyone's good faith.

8. Processor lock in is a structural cost you can only exit by leaving

POS USA states that NCR requires you to use its integrated payment processing and that third party processors are not supported. If that is what your agreement says, then the largest variable cost in your technology stack is set by a company you cannot put out to tender, and the April 2025 fee notice is what that looks like in practice: the Discount Fee moved, the authorisation fee moved, and there was no competitive response available to you inside the platform. Owning your operations layer does not by itself free your card processing, and we will not claim it does. What it does is decouple the two decisions, so that when you do change point of sale vendors for processing reasons, you are not simultaneously rebuilding your entire operating stack.

9. Change speed, which is the argument operators feel before they can price it

The realistic path to getting a feature you need out of a large platform vendor is a request that joins a roadmap you cannot see, prioritised against the needs of every other customer, most of whom are not like you. The realistic path on a system you own is a scoped change with a cost and a date. That difference does not show up in any total cost model, and it is frequently the thing an operator names first when asked what actually changed after a build.

10. One fixed fee, and what the proof behind it actually is

$45,000 to $180,000, one time, scoped after the diagnosis and not before it. Here is the proof, stated exactly and with its limits, because a receipt that is not real is worse than no receipt.

We have built and shipped custom AI systems for operating businesses, and the reference we offer by name is Jim Glaser Law, where the principal takes reference calls. We built and run the LELF platform. Our systems have handled more than 6,000 AI answered calls in production, which is the closest thing we have to a hospitality relevant proof point, because phone handling in a restaurant group is the same problem shape. We have delivered more than 40 commissions. And the limit: none of that is a restaurant. We have no hospitality case study, because we have not built one yet. If a vertical specific reference is a requirement for you, that is a legitimate requirement and we are the wrong vendor for it. We would rather you read that here than discover it in the second meeting.

This is the section that decides whether you should believe the rest of the page, so it is specific and it is not short. Every one of these is a real reason to renew, and several of them describe most of the people reading this.

You have fewer than about six terminals

This is the hardest number on the page and it comes straight out of the model. At six terminals, cumulative Aloha spend over five years at the reported figure is about $87,500. A $90,000 commissioned build costs $171,000 over the same period with the maintenance assumption. It does not cross over inside ten years. At three terminals it is about $43,750 over five years against the same $171,000, and it is not close. If you are a single location independent or a two site operator, the arithmetic on this page says stay, and there is no version of the conversation where we tell you otherwise. Go get quotes from SpotOn, Lightspeed and TouchBistro, whose published rate cards are up above, and use them as leverage on your renewal.

Your horizon is shorter than three years

Even at fifteen terminals, renting is the cheaper decision for the first three years. If you are inside a lease you might not renew, considering a sale, in the middle of a refinance, or otherwise unsure what the group looks like in thirty six months, then the crossover is behind an event you cannot predict and a one time capital outlay is the wrong shape. Stay, and revisit when the horizon is longer than the crossover.

What you actually need is the point of sale itself, not the layer above it

If your complaint is the terminal, the card reader, the offline behaviour, the printer routing, or the speed of the order entry screen, a commissioned build does not solve any of that and it would be dishonest of us to imply otherwise. That is a point of sale problem with a point of sale solution, and the six vendors above are the shortlist. We would tell you the same thing on the call.

You live inside one Aloha Essentials capability nothing else matches

Multi revenue centre venue handling, the depth of the modifier and coursing logic, the granular permission and audit structure, or the specific offline behaviour that keeps you taking orders when the network drops. If one of those is load bearing for your operation, the migration risk is real and the replacement candidates genuinely may not match it. Staying and negotiating is the rational move.

Your staff turnover is high and your training budget is not

The labour pool argument is not sentimental, it is financial. If you hire experienced managers who already know Aloha, switching platforms means paying for retraining across every location, twice, once during the parallel run and once for everyone hired afterwards. Nobody quotes you that number and it is frequently larger than the software difference.

You need something working next month

A commissioned build is scoped, built and handed over. It is not a purchase order and a download. If the requirement is a working system inside a few weeks, buy a subscription. There is no clever version of this answer.

You do not have an internal owner for the system

An owned system needs someone at your company who is accountable for it after handoff: not a developer, but a person who knows what it is supposed to do and who raises their hand when it stops doing it. If nobody on your team will take that, an owned system decays into an unsupported liability, which is a worse outcome than renting. Be honest about this one before anything else.

Your real problem is the processing rate

Then your answer is in the processing comparison further up this page and it is to change vendors, not to build. Get the SpotOn published rate card, work out your true average check, and run the per transaction math rather than comparing percentages. Building software does not lower a card present rate by a single basis point.

Answer these in sequence. Several of them end the exercise, and ending it early is a good outcome, not a failed one.

1. Is your problem the terminal itself? Order entry speed, card reader behaviour, printer routing, offline resilience, the physical hardware. If yes, stop. This is a point of sale replacement and the six vendors above are your shortlist. Start with SpotOn and Lightspeed because they publish rate cards, which means you can prepare before the call rather than during it.

2. Is your problem the processing rate? If yes, stop, but do the math first. Work out your true average check, then compare on the full structure and not on the percentage. A rate of 2.45 percent plus $0.15 is more expensive than 2.6 percent plus $0.10 on any ticket below $33.33. Then get quotes, and treat NCR's reported requirement to use its own processing as a reason the answer here is probably a vendor change.

3. How many terminals do you run across the whole group? Under six, stop. The model on this page says renting wins for you and it is not marginal. Use the published rate cards above as renewal leverage and come back if you triple in size.

4. Will this group exist, in roughly this shape, in four years? If no or unsure, stop. The crossover on a fifteen terminal group lands during year 3 at the modelled figures. Behind an uncertain event, a capital outlay is the wrong shape and a monthly is the right one.

5. Can you name, in one sentence with a dollar or hour figure attached, the workflow that leaks money every month? If no, do not sign anything with anyone. Book the diagnosis call if you want help writing that sentence, because writing it is the work of the call, but do not commission a build without it and do not let any vendor sell you one.

6. What share of your monthly bill is add on modules rather than the core terminal licence? Online ordering, inventory, loyalty, kitchen display, enterprise reporting, marketing. If it is a large share, this is the strongest case on the page, because that layer is exactly what a commissioned build replaces and exactly what it removes from your recurring cost. Put just that number in the calculator's rate field and look at what it says.

7. Is there a named person at your company who will own the system after handoff? If no, stop. Fix that first. An owned system with no internal owner is worse than a subscription, and we would rather lose the engagement than hand one over into a vacuum.

If you got through all seven, the case is real and worth forty five minutes. If you stopped at any of them, the page did its job.

Nobody publishes an honest version of this, because the vendor you are leaving has no reason to and the vendor you are joining has every reason to make it sound trivial. Here is the shape of it, with a clear note wherever we could not source a specific number rather than an invented range.

Read the agreement before you read any quote

The document that controls your exit is your current agreement, not your invoice. Find the term length, the automatic renewal mechanics, the notice period required to prevent renewal, any escalation clause, the early termination provisions, the data access and return language, and whether the payment processing agreement has its own separate term that does not expire when the software term does. That last one catches people, because the software contract and the merchant processing agreement are frequently not the same document with the same dates. We cannot tell you what yours says. It is thirty minutes of reading and it is the highest value thirty minutes in this entire process.

What data actually has to move

In a restaurant migration this is more than a menu export. The full list is usually: the menu with every modifier group, modifier tree, forced modifier and price level; recipes and item costing if you keep them in the system; employees with roles, permissions, wage rates and job codes; the floor plan and table map per location; tax configuration and jurisdictions, which multiply if you cross state or municipal lines; discount, comp and void reason codes; gift card balances, which are a real liability and must reconcile to the dollar; loyalty accounts and point balances; guest records; and item level historical sales, which is the one people forget until the first time they want a year over year comparison and cannot get one.

Gift card balances and loyalty points deserve their own sentence, because they are the two items where a migration error is a customer facing failure rather than an internal one. A guest presenting a card that no longer works is the worst possible way to announce a system change.

The parallel run is not optional

The pattern that works is to run one location on the new system while the rest of the group stays on the old one, through at least one full weekend and ideally one full month end close. One location, not one shift, and one that is busy enough to break things. What you are looking for is not whether the new system can take an order; it is whether your reports reconcile, whether the tax comes out right, whether the kitchen gets the ticket in the right order, and whether your Monday numbers match what the old system would have said. Cutting the whole group over on the same night to save on the parallel period is the mistake that turns a migration into an incident.

Timeline honesty

We cannot give you a sourced duration for an Aloha migration specifically, and we are not going to invent a range. What we can tell you is what drives it: the number of locations, whether your menus are consistent across them, whether hardware is being replaced at the same time, and whether your team can absorb training during a busy season. What we would push back on is any vendor timeline that does not include a parallel run, a month end close on the new system, and a rollback plan.

Do not migrate during your season

Whatever your busiest ten weeks are, that is when your staff has the least capacity to learn a new system and the most to lose from a bad night. Every operator knows this and a surprising number of migrations still get scheduled by someone looking at a fiscal calendar rather than a service calendar.

What a commissioned build changes about all of this

Less than you might hope, and in a specific direction. If you commission the operations layer and keep your point of sale, you are not doing a point of sale migration at all: the terminal, the card reader, the printers and the staff training on order entry all stay exactly as they are. What moves is the layer above, which is a smaller and much lower risk migration because it is not customer facing on a Friday night. If you are also changing point of sale vendors at the same time, do them in sequence and not together. Two simultaneous migrations is not twice the risk; it is considerably more, because when something breaks you cannot tell which change caused it.

If your restaurant group also runs a delivery and digital ordering layer, Olo alternatives runs this same sourced cost model on the ordering and fulfilment side, which is the layer most likely to be sitting on top of your Aloha stack right now. For the pricing evidence behind this page and every other category we track, the vertical software pricing index carries the dated ledger. Two adjacent pages use the identical method against incumbents whose pricing is equally opaque: CDK Global alternatives for franchised dealer groups, which is the closest structural analogue to a multi unit restaurant operator, and ServiceTitan alternatives for field service, where the per technician fee behaves exactly like a per terminal one. For the underlying decision rather than the vendor comparison, renting AI versus owning it lays out what renting really costs against a build over the same horizons, and off the shelf versus a custom commission is the five test framework we run on every diagnosis call, including the tests that send people back to buying. The full comparison library holds the rest, how the fixed fee is set explains where a number inside $45,000 to $180,000 comes from, the process page walks through what the weeks after a signature look like, and the industries page is honest about which verticals we have shipped in and which we have not.