Migration Guide
How to Switch from Square: No Contract, So It Is Pure Math
Last updated: August 2026
Square is the easiest POS to leave. It is month-to-month at every tier, there is no early termination fee, and there is no hardware lease to settle — the iPads you bought stay yours and stay useful. Nothing is holding you in.
Which means this guide is not about escaping. It is about whether moving is worth the afternoon it costs — and that comes down to three numbers.
The Processing Rate
Square's published card-present rate for restaurants is a flat 2.6% + 15c — the same whatever card is tapped. Ginger passes through interchange-plus: the networks' actual cost plus a fixed margin, as low as ~2% + 5c, so your effective rate follows your card mix. Ask both for an effective rate on your own volume — on $40,000 a month, every half point is about $2,400 a year, larger than any software fee either system charges.
Bilingual Operation
This is the clearest functional difference. If your kitchen reads Chinese, Square does not print Chinese kitchen tickets or run a Chinese staff interface. Ginger is bilingual throughout — staff POS, kitchen tickets, online menu, receipts — built in rather than bolted on with a translation plugin.
Phone Orders
Square has no voice AI and no phone-order automation, so every call is keyed in by hand. Ginger's optional $250/month add-on answers the phone, takes the order including modifiers, and drops it into the POS and onto the kitchen printer. Whether that matters depends entirely on how much of your volume arrives by phone.
Actually running the numbers
Square for Restaurants publishes a flat card-present rate of 2.6% + 15¢, the same whatever card is tapped. The virtue of a flat rate is predictability. The cost of it is that you do not benefit when your average ticket rises, or when your customers happen to use debit cards, whose interchange is far lower than a rewards credit card’s.
Take a concrete case: $40,000 a month in card volume at a $35 average ticket, which is about 1,143 transactions. At Square’s flat rate that is $1,040 plus $171 in per-transaction fees, or $1,211 a month. The effective rate is 3.03%, higher than the headline, because 15 cents weighs heavily on smaller tickets.
The same volume at the low end of an interchange-plus range, as low as about 2% + 5¢, comes to roughly $857 a month. That is a difference of about $354 a month, or roughly $4,250 a year. Your real figure depends on your card mix and ticket size, which is exactly why it is worth running against your own statement rather than anyone’s example.
What to take with you before you go
Because there is no contract to escape, the only real risk here is sequence. Export while your Square account is still active: monthly sales and tax reports, the full menu with modifiers, the employee list with roles, gift card balances, and the customer list with phone numbers. After you cancel, those screens stop loading for you.
One point worth getting precise on hardware: the iPads you bought are generic devices, they stay yours, and they work with whatever comes next. Square Register and Square Terminal are Square’s own hardware and do not come with you, which is the one part of the estate that strands on the way out.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there a fee to leave Square?
No. Square for Restaurants is month-to-month at every tier with no early termination fee, and there is no hardware lease to settle. You can cancel at the end of a billing period without a penalty, which makes the timing of a switch entirely your choice.
Can I keep my iPads?
Yes, and that is a genuine advantage of having been on Square. The iPads are ordinary hardware, not locked to the platform, so they carry straight over to any browser-based POS. Ginger runs in the browser, so the same devices become your ordering screens with nothing to buy.
What data can I take out of Square?
Export your sales and tax reports, your item library, and any customer directory while the account is active. As with any POS change, historical transactions do not import into the new system — they stay in Square — so treat the exported reports as your permanent record for accounting.
How long does the switch take?
Short, because nothing is blocking you. AI menu extraction rebuilds the menu in about 30 minutes plus a manual pass over modifiers, then run both systems side by side for a few days so staff practice on real orders, and cut over on a slow day. No closure, and you can stop at any point.
Should I switch at all?
Be honest about it: if you are an English-only operation with a simple menu and few phone orders, Square is a solid system and the rate difference may not justify the afternoon. The case for moving gets strong when you need Chinese kitchen tickets, when phone volume is high enough that a person is tied to the handset, or when your card volume makes the processing gap material.
Want to See It Before You Decide?
Open the live demo and try the real POS — no signup. Hardware included for eligible restaurants, and no contracts.
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