Toast QR menus costs $29+/mo — and unlike a tool you buy once, that bill never stops. Over three years that's roughly $1,044 for software doing a job your own hardware could just as easily do.
Where the subscription actually goes
$29+/mo is the sticker price. It compounds: cancel and you typically lose access to your own history, and most plans ratchet the price up as you add usage, seats or storage — the bill rarely stays flat for long.
Menuly: the pay-once alternative
Menuly does the same core job for $24, once. Self-hosted QR digital menu builder for restaurants and cafes with printable table tents.
| Menuly | Toast QR menus | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $24 once | $29+/mo |
| Cost after 1 year | $24 | $348+ |
| Your data | Your SQLite file | Their cloud |
| Locations | Unlimited | Per-location pricing |
| Menu page speed | Server-rendered HTML, no JS | Bloated hosted pages |
| Works offline (builder) | Yes — desktop mode | No |
| Source code | MIT, on GitHub | Closed |
Menuly pays for itself in under one month of a QR-menu subscription — and it never charges you per location.
Is the subscription ever still worth it?
If you need Toast QR menus's specific ecosystem, integrations or managed infrastructure and that's genuinely load-bearing for you, the subscription earns its keep — that's a real trade-off, not a trick. Menuly is for everyone else: people paying every month for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.
Try Menuly — $24, once
Self-hosted QR digital menu builder for restaurants and cafes with printable table tents.