You are about to be quoted by three or four POS vendors, and every quote will arrive in a different shape. One will be a monthly figure per outlet. One will be an annual licence plus hardware. One will be "let's get you on a call." None of them will be directly comparable until you take them apart.
This guide puts the published numbers in one place, names what is missing from them, and gives you the questions that make the quotes comparable. Every figure below links to where it came from and the date we retrieved it. Where a vendor does not publish pricing, we say that rather than guess.
We build restaurant software, so the section near the end about our own pricing is interested. The rest is not — and where a competitor is the better answer for your venue, we say so.
What vendors actually publish
Very few POS companies publish a dirham price list for the UAE. Here is what was publicly visible in August 2026.
| Vendor | Published price | What the page does not say |
|---|---|---|
| Foodics | AED 199/mo (Starter), AED 375/mo (Basic), AED 556/mo (Advanced) — all billed annually | Whether the price is per branch or per cashier, contract length, VAT treatment, hardware and add-on prices |
| Lightspeed Restaurant | USD 69/mo (Starter), USD 189/mo (Essential), USD 399/mo (Premium), per location; Enterprise quoted | No dirham price list. Payment processing rates are not disclosed on the pricing page |
| Supy | From USD 385/mo, tailored by number of locations | This is inventory and procurement, not a POS — it integrates with your POS rather than replacing it |
| DineOpen | ₹299 / ₹899 / ₹1,799 per month, ~17% off annually | Prices are published in Indian rupees, not dirhams — convert before comparing |
| Sapaad | Does not publish pricing publicly. States only that it is "subscription-based with monthly, yearly, or multi-year plans" with a 14-day free trial | Everything. The number comes from a quote |
| Oracle Simphony | Oracle's pricing page was not publicly retrievable when this guide was written. We are not quoting a figure we could not verify | — |
| Restroworks (formerly Posist) | No published price list we could load | — |
| Square | Not available for card acceptance in the UAE | — |
Sources, all retrieved August 2026: Foodics UAE pricing page · Lightspeed Restaurant pricing · Supy pricing · DineOpen pricing · Sapaad · Square: our own check — Square operates no UAE country site and publishes no dirham price list, and its support article on international availability has been retired, so we are attributing this to ourselves rather than to a link that no longer says it
Two notes on that table. Foodics' own page ends with a line worth reading twice — "We'll follow up with a price quote built just for you based on your ideal hardware and software" — which tells you the published tiers are the software starting point, not the invoice. And comparison blogs circulate Foodics figures that differ from the vendor's own page; when they disagree, the vendor's page wins.
Also worth knowing for context: Foodics acquired POSRocket, announced in January 2022, so POSRocket is no longer an independent option in the region. Posist rebranded to Restroworks in 2024 — same company, different name on the quote.
Sources: Foodics press release, January 2022 · QSR Magazine on the Posist rebrand
Note: a plan price is not a system price. Every vendor above sells modules — inventory, loyalty, table management, API access — that sit outside the entry tier. Foodics lists Inventory, Table Management, Loyalty and API Access as optional add-ons on its Starter bundle. If those are the reasons you are buying a POS, price the tier that includes them, not the one on the billboard.
The costs that are not on the pricing page
This is the section that decides your actual annual number.
Hardware. Almost nobody publishes it. DineOpen is a rare exception, listing an Android tablet from ₹8,000 and a thermal printer from ₹3,000 as required extras. Everyone else quotes. Ask for a written bill of materials — terminals, receipt printers, kitchen printers or screens, cash drawers, card readers, mounts, and the network switch and cabling if the vendor is supplying it. Ask separately whether you own the hardware or rent it, and what a replacement costs in year three.
Source: DineOpen pricing page, retrieved August 2026
Per-device and per-screen fees. The clearest published example is Lightspeed, which lists a kitchen display charge of USD 30 per screen per month on top of the plan. A single-screen kitchen and a four-screen kitchen are different products at that rate. Ask every vendor: what is charged per outlet, what per till, and what per screen?
Source: Lightspeed Restaurant pricing, retrieved August 2026
Installation, menu build and training. Rarely published, always real. A 250-item menu with modifiers is days of data entry by someone. Establish who does it, whether it is included, and what a menu re-build costs later when you change the concept.
Card processing. This is usually the largest technology line item in a restaurant and it is almost never in the POS quote, because it comes from an acquirer. For a public UAE benchmark, Stripe publishes 2.9% + AED 1.00 per successful transaction on domestic cards, plus 1% for international cards and a further 1% where currency conversion is required. Your acquirer's card-present rate will differ — but if a vendor quotes you a rate materially above a published benchmark, ask why.
Source: Stripe UAE pricing, retrieved August 2026
Delivery aggregator commission. If you take delivery orders, this dwarfs the POS. Reliable, dated public reporting on UAE rates is thin; the most credible we could find is Khaleej Times quoting UAE operators at 25–30%, and one adviser at "up to 35 per cent" — but that article is dated 26 April 2020, so treat it as historical context and get current terms from each platform directly rather than from us.
Source: Khaleej Times, 26 April 2020
Support tiers and the contract. Ask three questions in writing: what is the minimum term, what is the notice period, and what is the maximum annual increase at renewal? A price that is competitive in year one and uncapped in year two is not a competitive price. Also ask what happens to your data if you leave — specifically, whether you get a CSV export of menu, customers and sales history without a fee.
VAT. Every figure above is before 5% UAE VAT unless the vendor states otherwise. Add it before you compare.
The quote request that makes vendors comparable
Send the same email to all four. Ask each to return, in writing:
- Total software cost for 12 months, per outlet, with every module you need included by name.
- Whether pricing is per branch, per till, or per user.
- A hardware bill of materials with unit prices, and whether you own or rent.
- Installation, menu build and training — included or extra, and how much.
- Every per-device recurring fee (kitchen screens, handhelds, customer displays).
- Minimum contract term, notice period, and the cap on renewal increases.
- The card processing rate, and whether you are free to use your own acquirer.
- What happens when the internet drops — full offline mode, partial degradation, or a hard stop.
- What integrations cost: accounting, delivery aggregators, inventory.
- Your data export terms on exit.
Question 8 is the one people skip and regret. Get a specific answer, not "it's all in the cloud."
Where Shareabill sits, honestly
We do not charge a monthly licence, per-till fee or annual contract. Our model is a 5% guest fee plus 5% VAT on that fee, charged on the gross items total of a dine-in bill, and a location fee of 1% plus 5% VAT applied per payout. Takeaway orders carry no Shareabill guest processing fee. The full line-by-line comparison against a traditional POS stack is on our pricing page.
That is a percentage model, not a free one. On a high-volume venue it can total more than a fixed AED 556/month subscription, and you should model it against your own covers and average spend before switching. What you get for it is QR ordering, bill splitting, inventory, loyalty, AR menus, delivery and third-party orders, takeaway, and POS and terminal payments in one system, with guest apps in nine languages including full right-to-left Arabic, and 5% VAT handled throughout. We do not claim FTA certification, because the Federal Tax Authority does not certify POS systems — and neither does anyone who tells you otherwise.
Shareabill has no offline mode. It is cloud and socket based; if your connection drops, ordering and payment stop until it returns. If your site has unreliable connectivity — a basement unit, a beach club, a food truck — a traditional POS with local offline caching is genuinely the better buy, and several of the vendors named above provide exactly that. We would rather say so now than have you discover it mid-service.
Related reading
- Opening a restaurant in Dubai: the technology decisions — the full pre-opening picture
- Do you need a traditional POS to open in Dubai? — including when the answer is yes
- The 90-day pre-opening tech checklist — when to sign, and when not to
Prices change. Every figure here is dated and linked; verify against the vendor's own page before you sign anything. Nothing in this guide is tax, legal or financial advice.