Avoid Toast: long term not worth it.
Canadian Issue:
We were massive fans of Toast.
We installed Toast across several of our restaurants, recommended it to other owners/operators, and genuinely believed in the product and the direction of the company.
Which is why the current situation is so frustrating.
Less than a year and a half after purchasing Toast handhelds for one of our locations (and less than 6 months for some units), we are now dealing with constant issues including:
- Double charging guests
- Frozen bills during service
- Payment processing failures
- Ongoing operational slowdowns during peak volume
After extensive troubleshooting, updates, and network analysis, we were told the issue appears tied to the handheld hardware itself.
Toast’s solution?
Buy the newer hardware.
That’s where this becomes a serious concern for operators.
Our existing handhelds worked properly until recent Toast updates and newer hardware releases. If software/system updates effectively make previous-generation hardware unreliable after such a short period of time, that creates a brutal long-term business model for restaurants.
We are not talking about replacing one or two devices. Across multiple locations, this becomes thousands and thousands of dollars every few years just to maintain stable operations.
And beyond the cost, the operational disruption is significant:
- Guest trust gets damaged through duplicate charges
- Staff lose confidence in the systems
- Service slows down
- Managers lose countless hours troubleshooting
- Restaurants absorb the fallout during busy periods
At some point, it becomes more logical to consider moving to a competitor rather than continuously reinvesting into hardware cycles that appear tied to platform updates.
Whether you are a small operation, or multi unit, avoid Toast due to the long term cost.
Edit: added that this is a known issue in Canada. So may not apply elsewhere, specifically due to the handhelds originally brought into Canada vs the recent upgrades. My apologies for not clarifying that earlier.