Restaurant POS with free hardware: what "free" actually means

What "free hardware" usually means

Almost every restaurant POS company will hand you hardware at no upfront cost. The equipment is genuinely free in the sense that no money leaves your account on the day it arrives. It is almost never free in the sense that it costs you nothing, because a terminal, a printer and a card reader represent real money that the vendor has to recover somewhere. There are only three places it can come from, and knowing which one a vendor is using tells you more about the offer than the word free does.

The first is the payment processing rate. This is the most common arrangement and the hardest to see, because the cost is spread across every transaction you will ever run. A rate that is half a percentage point above what you could otherwise get, on $40,000 a month in card volume, is about $2,400 a year. That is more than most of the hardware it is paying for, and unlike a lease it never ends.

The second is the contract term. Free hardware tied to a two or three year agreement is a lease with the payments moved elsewhere on the invoice. The equipment arrives at no charge and the commitment is what you actually signed for. The relevant question is not what the hardware costs but what leaving early costs, and that number lives in the termination clause rather than on the pricing page.

The third is recurring fees that are not the software fee: per-device annual charges, processing minimums that bill you when volume is light, and payment-industry fees that appear on the statement rather than the quote. These are individually small and collectively not.

Figures are from each vendor's own pricing page except SkyTab, where Shift4 publishes nothing and every number is from named 2026 third-party reviews, and Toast and Clover hardware prices, which are from NerdWallet's 2026 reviews. Read September 2026.

What Ginger supplies, precisely

For restaurants processing more than $40,000 a month in card volume, Ginger supplies the hardware: the Ginger Box, which is the small server the system runs on inside your restaurant, up to two thermal printers, and a credit card terminal. It is supplied rather than sold, there is no lease, and there is no contract term attached to it. Below that volume threshold the honest answer is that it depends, and we work something out rather than turning the restaurant away.

What pays for it is the processing, and we would rather say so plainly than pretend otherwise. The difference is the structure of the rate. Ginger's processing is interchange-plus, which means you pay what the card networks actually charge plus a small fixed margin, and both halves are visible on the statement. Flat rates bundle those two numbers into one and the margin is wherever the vendor decided to put it. Ours runs as low as about 2% + 5¢ depending on volume, and there is no monthly software fee sitting on top of it.

What is not included is worth stating too. Screens are not included, because they do not need to be. Extra printers beyond the two, additional card terminals for a second station, and networking equipment are yours to supply or ours to quote. The two paid add-ons, AI phone ordering at $250 a month and delivery-app integration at $99 a month, are separate from all of this and entirely optional.

Why the hardware question mostly dissolves

The reason Ginger can include hardware without financing it through a long contract is that there is much less hardware involved. Ginger runs in a web browser. Any device that has one — an iPad you already own, an Android tablet, a laptop, a spare computer in the back office — becomes an ordering screen by opening a page. There is no app to install from a store, no device to enroll, and no proprietary terminal that only works with one vendor's software.

This changes what switching costs. With a proprietary system, the terminals are the switching cost: they are specific to that vendor, they have no resale value to you, and replacing them is the reason a migration gets postponed for years. With a browser-based system the screens are ordinary consumer devices. Adding a fourth screen for a busy Friday means picking up a tablet, not placing an order and waiting for shipping. Replacing a screen that someone drops means replacing a tablet.

It also changes who can start. A restaurant that already has two iPads and a thermal printer can run Ginger on what is sitting on the counter today. That is the actual answer to the question people are really asking when they search for a POS that does not require buying new hardware: not whether the vendor will give you equipment, but whether the equipment you already own is allowed to do the job.

How the Ginger Box works during a service

The Box is a small server that sits in your restaurant, usually next to the router, and it is where the system actually runs. Your screens are browsers pointed at it over your own network. The database lives on the Box, on the premises, not in a data centre somewhere. That architecture is the reason the offline story is what it is.

When the internet goes out, you keep serving. Taking orders, sending items to the kitchen, printing tickets, splitting checks and taking cash all keep working, because none of them need to leave the building. Card payments and incoming online orders do need a connection, and they resume on their own when it returns. Nothing has to be re-entered afterwards, because the Box has been recording everything all along and syncs to the cloud once the link is back.

What this means in practice is that the parts of service that must not stop are the parts that do not depend on anything outside the building. A table can be opened, items can be fired to the kitchen, a check can be split six ways and cash can be counted, all without a working internet connection, because all of it happens between your screens and the Box on your own network.

Printers, and sharing the ones you already have

Kitchen printing is where a POS either earns its keep or creates work. Ginger routes each item to the station printer it belongs to, so a ticket for a table with sushi, a wok dish and a drink prints at the sushi bar, the wok station and the bar rather than as one list somebody has to read across. Stations can be defined as you actually run them, including expo and fryer, and items can be parked to fire later so a course lands when it should rather than when it was typed.

The more useful fact for anyone weighing a switch is that Ginger can share printers with the POS you already run. It does not integrate with your existing system, ask its permission, or need its vendor to approve anything. It simply drives the same thermal printers alongside it. That is what makes a gradual move possible: you can put online ordering on Ginger this week, keep your current POS on the floor, and have both printing into the same kitchen without the kitchen noticing anything except more tickets.

Printers are ordinary ESC/POS thermal units, the same category almost every restaurant already owns. If yours work, they work here. If you need them, two come with the hardware for eligible restaurants.

If you want to keep your POS entirely

Some restaurants are not looking to replace anything. They have a POS that works, staff who know it, and a single problem: online orders cost too much through the delivery platforms. Ginger Direct is that case. You keep the POS you have and Ginger handles only online ordering, with the Box printing those orders to the printers you already own, in the kitchen and at the counter.

Because it shares the printers rather than integrating with the POS, the age of your current system does not matter and your vendor has nothing to approve. There is no monthly fee to the restaurant; the $1 per order is paid by the customer. The honest trade-off is reporting: your online sales report in Ginger while your in-store sales stay in your old system, so the two do not add themselves together into one number.

The Box that runs Direct is the same Box that runs the full POS. If you later decide to consolidate, you switch it on. There is nothing to install and nothing to migrate, which is a deliberate design choice rather than a coincidence.

Five questions to ask any vendor offering free hardware

These are the questions that turn a hardware offer into a number you can compare. Ask for the answers in writing, in one document, before signing anything.

A vendor that answers all five in one written document is telling you something useful about how the relationship will go. So is a vendor that will not.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides

• Hidden POS Costs
• Restaurant POS Costs Explained (2026)
• Online Ordering Without Switching Your POS
• How to Switch POS Systems
• SkyTab POS Pricing (2026)
• SpotOn Pricing (2026)