Choosing a POS · verified September 2026
Kitchen display systems: what they cost, and whether to switch
A kitchen display system replaces the printed ticket with a screen on the line. Whether that is worth doing depends on how many stations you run, and what it costs depends almost entirely on something nobody puts in the headline: most POS systems bill a KDS per screen, every month, and sell you the screen as well. This page covers what a KDS actually changes in a kitchen, the reasons not to switch, what each major system charges, and why the hardware question has a simpler answer than vendors suggest.
Square, Clover, Lightspeed and Rezku figures are from each vendor's own pricing pages; Toast, Lavu and Chowbus are from named 2026 third-party reviews or their tier descriptions and are labelled as reported. Ginger's behaviour is from its own source, including the station routing, hold and rush, line-level marking, the bilingual board and the local polling that survives an internet outage. Read September 2026.
What a kitchen display system actually replaces
A kitchen display system is a screen on the line that shows incoming orders in place of printed tickets. The POS sends the order to the screen instead of, or alongside, the printer; a cook reads it, cooks it, and taps it away when the dish goes out. That is the whole idea, and the reason it matters is not the screen. It is that a ticket on a screen can carry information a strip of paper cannot: how long it has been waiting, which items are already done, whether the table is dining in or the order is going out the door.
What it does not replace, and this is where a lot of write-ups on the subject overpromise, is the kitchen's judgement about sequencing. A screen will show you that a ticket has been open eleven minutes. It will not decide which of the four open tickets should fire next. That remains a human call, and a KDS is useful to the extent that it gives the person making that call better information faster.
The honest case against switching
Take the objections first, because most restaurants that regret the switch regret it for one of these reasons and none of them are unreasonable.
A screen is a bigger single point of failure than a printer. When a printer jams you lose one ticket and you hear about it. When a screen dies mid-service the whole station goes blind at once, and the recovery is not obvious to a cook who has never had to do it. Paper also has properties people underrate: a ticket can be moved, annotated, clipped to a rail in the order the kitchen wants to cook, and handed to the person carrying the plate.
There is also the kitchen itself. Heat, steam and grease are hard on consumer tablets, and a screen positioned where a cook can actually read it is often a screen positioned where it will get splattered. And if your kitchen is one or two people working a short menu, a KDS may genuinely add nothing that a printer and a rail were not already doing.
The reasonable answer to most of this is not to choose. Ginger runs the kitchen display and the printers together rather than as alternatives, so a station can have a screen and still print, and the paper fallback is there on the night the screen is not.
Where a screen genuinely beats paper
The clearest gain is elapsed time. Every ticket on a screen carries how long it has been open, which is the single number a paper rail cannot show you and the one that predicts a complaint. The second is partial completion: on a ten-item ticket a cook can mark the four dishes already plated, so the person who picks it up next is not re-reading the whole thing to work out what is left.
Then there is everything that follows from the ticket being data rather than ink. A dish can be 86'd from the line and the POS stops selling it immediately, rather than after the third table orders it. A ticket can be put on hold or rushed and the change is visible to everyone at once. An order can be routed to several stations and each one sees only its own items, while the expo screen sees the whole thing.
And a screen can be read from further away than a receipt. That sounds trivial until you watch someone at a wok range squint at a curled strip of thermal paper that has been sitting under a heat lamp.
What a kitchen display costs, per screen
This is the part most comparisons skip, and it is where the real money sits. Nearly every major POS charges for a kitchen display twice: a monthly fee per screen, and proprietary hardware you have to buy from them. Both compound with the number of stations, which means a KDS is one of the few POS features that gets more expensive precisely as your kitchen gets more organised.
| System | Monthly per screen | Screen hardware | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ginger | $0 | bring your own | included in the POS; no per-screen fee |
| Square KDS | $30 on Plus, $20 on Premium | your own iPad or Android device | requires a paid Square for Restaurants plan |
| Lightspeed | $30 | not published | charged on every plan tier, Starter to Premium |
| Clover | $25 per device | $799 for 14-inch, $899 for 24-inch | proprietary hardware |
| Toast | about $25 (reported) | about $499 to $899 (reported) | proprietary hardware |
| Lavu | only in Optimize, reported ~$279/mo | not published | KDS is the reason to move up two tiers |
| Chowbus | only in the top Growth tier | not published | Starter and Efficiency use printed tickets |
| TouchBistro | quote only | quote only | KDS is one of a dozen unpriced add-ons |
| Rezku | included | not published | included in the $99 subscription |
Square, Clover and Lightspeed figures are from each vendor's own pricing; Toast and Lavu are from named 2026 third-party reviews and labelled as reported. Read September 2026.
Three screens, three years
Per-screen pricing is easy to wave away at one screen and impossible to ignore at three. Take a kitchen running a hot line, a cold or sushi station and an expo screen, which is an ordinary setup for a full-service restaurant, and carry it over a three-year POS term.
At $30 a screen that is $90 a month and $3,240 over three years, for the software alone. On Clover the same three screens are $2,397 of hardware plus $75 a month, which is about $5,100 across the term. On Ginger it is $0, and the screens are devices you already own or buy once from anyone.
There is a second cost that only shows up when you leave. Proprietary kitchen displays have no resale value and do not work with the next POS, so that hardware spend is written off entirely on the day you switch. A tablet is a tablet, and it will run whatever comes next.
Can you use an iPad as a kitchen display?
With Ginger, yes, and that is the design rather than a workaround. The kitchen display is a web page the box serves on your own network, so anything with a browser can be a station screen: an iPad you already have, an Android tablet, a cheap laptop, a TV with a stick on the back of it. There is no app to install from a store and no device model on an approved list.
Setting one up is a one-time thing. A manager mints the screen from the console, you open the link on the device once, and it enrolls itself and stays enrolled. After that the screen just runs; it does not ask for a password every morning, and it can be given a home-screen icon so a cook taps one thing rather than hunting through a browser.
One practical note that has nothing to do with software: buy the cheap tablets and treat them as consumable. A screen in a kitchen lives a hard life, and the advantage of using ordinary hardware is precisely that replacing one costs a couple of hundred dollars rather than $899 and a support ticket.
What Ginger's kitchen display does
The board is a dark, large-type screen meant to be read from several feet away, and it refreshes every two seconds. Tapping a card bumps it when the dish goes out, and a tray along the bottom undoes recent bumps, because the most common mistake on any KDS is bumping the wrong ticket.
Beyond that: tickets route to the station they belong to and each screen shows only its own, while expo sees everything; a ticket can be held or rushed; an item can be 86'd from the line so the POS stops selling it immediately; individual lines can be marked done on a long ticket; course separators show as dividers and are excluded from the made counts, so a coursed ticket does not read as unfinished forever. Dine-in dishes tell the floor when they are ready to run, and a separate lobby screen can show guests a Preparing and Ready list next to the pickup counter.
Two things worth knowing that are consequences of the architecture rather than features. The board is bilingual Chinese and English, matching the kitchen tickets. And because it polls the box on your own network rather than a server on the internet, the kitchen display keeps working through an internet outage, which is the moment a cloud-hosted board goes blank.
So should you switch?
Rather than a verdict, the cases where the answer is reasonably clear.
| If this is you | Probably |
|---|---|
| One or two cooks, a short menu, one station | Stay on paper. A rail already does what a screen would. |
| Several stations that each need part of a ticket | Switch. Routing plus per-station views is the clearest win a KDS offers. |
| High volume where ticket times decide the night | Switch. Elapsed time on every ticket is the number paper cannot give you. |
| A lot of to-go and delivery mixed with dine-in | Switch, for the channel colour-coding alone. |
| Worried about the screen dying mid-service | Switch, but keep the printers running alongside it. |
| Being quoted per screen by your current POS | Price it across three years and three screens before agreeing. |
The one recommendation that holds in every row: whatever you choose, do not let the kitchen display be the thing that cannot fall back to paper.
Frequently asked questions
What is a kitchen display system?
A kitchen display system, or KDS, is a screen on the kitchen line that shows incoming orders in place of, or alongside, printed tickets. The POS sends each order to the screen; a cook reads it and taps it away when the dish goes out. The advantage over paper is that a ticket on a screen can also carry how long it has been open, which items are already done, and whether the order is dining in, going out or being delivered.
How much does a kitchen display system cost?
Most POS systems charge per screen per month plus proprietary hardware. Square KDS is $30 a month per device on Plus and $20 on Premium and requires a paid plan; Lightspeed is $30 per screen per month on every tier; Clover is $25 a month per device plus $799 for a 14-inch or $899 for a 24-inch display; Toast is reported at about $25 a month plus $499 to $899 of hardware. Ginger charges nothing per screen and you supply your own devices. Over three years a three-screen kitchen at $30 a screen is $3,240 in software alone.
Can I use an iPad as a kitchen display screen?
With Ginger, yes. The kitchen display is a web page served by the box on your own network, so any device with a browser works as a station screen: an iPad you already own, an Android tablet, a laptop or a TV with a stick. There is no app to install and no approved-device list. A manager mints the screen once from the console, you open the link on the device, and it stays enrolled without asking for a password each morning.
Is a kitchen display system better than printers?
For a kitchen with several stations, high volume, or a mix of dine-in and to-go, generally yes: routing, elapsed time on every ticket and partial completion are things paper cannot do. For one or two cooks on a short menu, often no. The strongest answer is not to treat it as a choice. Ginger runs the kitchen display and the printers together, so a station can have a screen and still print, which keeps a paper fallback for the night a screen fails.
Does a kitchen display keep working if the internet goes down?
It depends where the board is hosted. A cloud-hosted kitchen display goes blank when the connection does. Ginger's board polls the Ginger Box on your own restaurant network rather than a server on the internet, so it keeps showing and bumping tickets through an internet outage. What it does need is your in-restaurant network, since the screen reaches the box across it.
Can one order show on several kitchen screens at once?
Yes. Items route to the station they belong to, so the sushi bar sees its rolls and the wok station sees its dishes, while an expo screen sees the whole order. On a long ticket individual lines can be marked done, and course separators appear as dividers that are excluded from the made counts, so a coursed ticket does not read as unfinished after everything on it has gone out.
See the kitchen board in the live demo
The demo opens in your browser with no signup. Ginger is $0 a month with online ordering, the kitchen display is included with no per-screen fee, and the screens are devices you already own.