Dripos vs Toast for Coffee Shops: Cost and Fit

TLDR: Toast is a strong restaurant system that also works for cafes. Dripos is built only for coffee shops, with light hardware for counters where people order at the register. Dripos costs a flat $160 a month plus 2.6% + 15¢ on card-present sales. In our experience Toast usually ends up costing more once add-ons, hardware and fees are included, so get both quotes in writing.

I run Dripos, so read this with that in mind. I'll tell you where Toast is the better pick, and I'll link every number I use so you can check it yourself.

Dripos is used by about 3% of US coffee shops and has processed over $1B in payments. Toast is much bigger and has been around longer. Both are good companies. They just started from different places. Toast started with restaurants. We started with coffee.

What you get with Dripos

Built for the counter. Dripos is for shops where customers order at the register, and the line is the whole game. The hardware is lightweight and looks good on a counter. No pile of boxes, and no kitchen printer setup for a shop that doesn't have a kitchen.

A team you can talk to. Our team is in NYC, and support is 24/7 from the same office that builds the product. If your printer dies at 6:50 a.m., you reach a person who works down the hall from the people who can fix it.

Built for coffee. Modifier-heavy drinks, morning rushes, regulars with a usual order. The Dripos coffee shop POS was designed around a line of ten people who all want something different.

Built in-house, all of it. Scheduling, payroll, inventory, marketing and ordering were all built by our own team to work together, not bolted on. The $160 core plan includes the order system, team manager (scheduling and time clocks), marketing tools, and admin features. Payroll, bookkeeping, a branded app, and delivery integrations are add-ons. You can see all of it on our pricing page.

Fast shipping. We release every two weeks, and the release notes are written by the people who built the features. The October 20 update added a Review Agent and a rebuilt order app, for example.

What Toast does well

Toast's own cafe and bakery page lists a lot, and most of it is real:

• Kiosks, handhelds, and kitchen display screens
• Offline mode, so you can keep taking orders and cards during an internet outage
• Integrated loyalty and email marketing
• Payroll, scheduling, inventory, and food costing
• Toast Capital loans from $1,000 to $300,000
• 24/7 support through Toast Care, included with every software subscription

If you run full table service or have multi stage kitchens, Toast's restaurant depth can be a real advantage. A restaurant with four different seating areas has different needs than a two-person espresso bar offering sandwiches.

That depth comes with more equipment. Kiosks, handhelds, kitchen screens and printers are great in a dining room. At a coffee counter with a ten-person line, it's more hardware than you need, and more to set up, learn and train every new hire on.

What it costs

Toast doesn't publish its processing rates or most hardware prices, so those come from quotes and third-party write-ups. Treat the Toast numbers below as a starting point and ask for a written quote. We're comparing against the Point of Sale plan most shops actually run, not the entry-level plan.

• Monthly software: Dripos is $160 flat. Toast is about $69 on the Point of Sale plan (per UpMenu).
• Card-present rate: Dripos is 2.6% + 15¢. Toast is about 2.49% + 15¢ (per UpMenu). Not published, so rates can vary by quote.
• Online/app rate: Dripos is 2.6% + 30¢. Toast is about 3.5% + 15¢ or more (per UpMenu).
• Add-ons: Dripos has marketing and scheduling in the base plan, and payroll is $30 + $6 per employee. Toast gift cards run about $50/mo and the payroll bundle about $90 + $9 per employee (per UpMenu). Add-ons stack up fast.
• Hardware: Dripos hardware is quoted by Dripos, not listed on the pricing page. Toast is Toast hardware only: pay now, or a 180-day lease repaid as a share of card sales (Toast).

Notice what the list leaves out. Toast's monthly fee can look lower than our $160. But Toast's pricing is not very transparent, and you may end up paying onboarding fees, hardware costs per device, and be locked out of core features unless you pay for them. Rates move from quote to quote, and add-ons get expensive once you start using them. In our experience, Toast almost always ends up costing more once everything is added up.

A shop doing $30,000 a month in card sales pays about $780 in processing at 2.6%. Half a point on that is $150 a month, which is more than the gap between the two monthly fees. So the rate matters as much as the software line.

If you're a cart or a very small shop, ask us about Dripos Lite, our discounted plan for smaller operations.

Built together vs added on

Toast has grown partly by buying companies. It bought Sling in 2022 to add employee scheduling, and food costing came from its xtraCHEF acquisition. That's a normal way to grow, and the tools work. But it does mean some features started life as separate products.

We built scheduling, payroll, inventory and ordering ourselves, on one platform, so a shift you schedule shows up in payroll and in your labor cost with no handoff in between.

Who should pick what

Pick Dripos if you run a coffee shop, a cafe with a light food menu, a cart, or a small group of shops, and customers order at the register. You want light hardware that looks nice on the counter, a team that picks up the phone, and software built around drinks.

Pick Toast if you run a full-service restaurant that happens to serve coffee, or a cafe with a real kitchen, table service, kiosks, and handhelds. Its restaurant tools go deeper than ours, and we're not built for that.

If you're running a coffee shop, Dripos was built for you. One platform, hardware that looks good and stays out of the way, a team in New York that answers the phone any hour, and a product that gets better every two weeks. We'd love to show you how it looks with your own sales. Book a demo and we'll walk through it together.

Pricing checked October 29, 2026 from the Dripos and Toast websites and the third-party sources linked above. Prices change, so confirm before you sign anything.