06 · Switching cost
Toast’s own documentation says four to six weeks
You know the system is holding you back. You also know changing it means six weeks of menu building and a Saturday night where nothing works.
“Onboarding took about 5 months vs what was told us 3 weeks.”Jason R., Owner — Capterra review of Lavu, July 2023
Why it happens
Menu and modifier trees, tax settings, floor plans, printer routing, staff permissions and historical data all get rebuilt by hand, because none of it has a portable format. Vendors then quote onboarding timelines based on the happy path.
What we'd do about it
A till screen a casual can use on shift one
Everything two taps away, nothing hidden behind a manager code that isn’t genuinely a manager’s job.
Stop being the integration
One product list, priced once. One record moving from sale to stock to COGS to the ledger, instead of you carrying numbers between five systems.
One database, not five that sync overnight
Every module writes to the same records. There’s no integration to break, because there’s no integration.
The objection this page has to beat
“'Sign up in minutes' means a demo account, not my venue trading tomorrow night.”
Then define “running” before you claim it. Menu imported, staff added, printers routed, first payment taken — say which of those is included. Film one real venue doing it with the clock visible. And name the comparison, because the strongest line here isn’t a claim about Woosh at all: it’s a quote from Toast’s own support site.
What we can actually stand behind
Every claim below is labelled by how solid it is. The grey ones are where we looked and found nothing credible — those stay off the page rather than getting rounded up into a statistic.
- Independent
Toast’s own published onboarding guide states a typical implementation takes four to six weeks, covering kickoff, menu build, staff training, hardware install and go-live.
Toast support documentation — the vendor’s own timeline, which makes it unarguable - Operator
“The installation is complicated and take too long to get the menu.”
Hernan F., Owner, Restaurants — Capterra review of SpotOn, January 2026 - Vendor study
53% of operators switched or purchased a new POS in the past year, down from 71% the year before.
TouchBistro, 2026 — high churn, cooling, consistent with switching fatigue - Vendor study
On-site installation is typically quoted at $500–$2,000 on top of software.
Industry pricing summaries