Why "free" POS isn't free.
Square built its business on a brilliant insight: give the POS software away for free and charge a percentage of every transaction instead. For a brand new operator doing $3,000 per week, this makes perfect sense. The fee is invisible, the setup is instant, and there is zero financial risk to start.
The problem is what happens as you grow. That same percentage model that felt invisible at $3,000 per week becomes $2,496 per year at $3,000/week. At $10,000 per week it is $8,320 per year. At $30,000 per week, a modest Sydney restaurant on a busy strip, it is three times that again.
Square's fee is not going anywhere. It compounds every year, every week, on every single transaction. It is not a penalty for poor performance. It is a levy on your success. The more your venue grows, the more Square earns from you.
The October 2026 surcharge ban makes it worse.
Until now, many Square operators have been passing the 1.6% fee to customers as a surcharge, effectively making the customer pay the Square Tax rather than the venue. This ends on 1 October 2026.
The Reserve Bank of Australia has confirmed a ban on card payment surcharges for consumer eftpos, Mastercard and Visa transactions. From that date, surcharging is illegal. Square's 1.6% fee becomes a direct operating expense you absorb. If you have been offsetting Square's fees through surcharging, your effective POS cost just increased to 1.6% of all card revenue with no way to pass it on.
What zero-commission actually means.
Foodhub, Impos, OrderMate and Lightspeed all charge a flat monthly subscription rather than a percentage of sales. On Foodhub's model, there is no per-transaction commission at all, you pay a setup fee (which MarginCompare can get waived) and then nothing per sale.
At $10,000 per week in card revenue, the maths look like this: Square costs $8,320 per year. A zero-commission POS typically costs $99 to $189 per month depending on provider and plan (both Foodhub and Lightspeed are quote-based in Australia, contact them or use MarginCompare to get exact pricing). At the lower end of $99/month that is $1,188 per year. Annual saving at $10k/week: $7,132, simply from changing your POS.
The setup cost and switching effort is real. Moving POS systems takes a few days of setup, staff training and menu migration. But at $6,520 per year, that effort pays for itself in under 6 weeks of fee savings.
How we can help.
MarginCompare has a commercial relationship with Foodhub, one of Australia's leading zero-commission hospitality POS providers. That means we can negotiate exclusive terms on your behalf: waived setup fees, extended onboarding support, and in some cases preferential hardware pricing.
The process takes under 2 minutes. Tell us about your venue, we brief Foodhub, negotiate the opening terms and introduce you when we have their best deal confirmed. You show up to one conversation with everything already on the table.
Disclosure: Foodhub is a preferred supplier. We receive a fee when venues sign up through our introduction. Square, Lightspeed and other products mentioned are independently reviewed with no commercial relationship. The calculator above uses publicly available Square Australia pricing.