Most small restaurants should stay on the included Toast IQ first. Choose Toast IQ Team if hourly labour, payroll and tip pooling are your pain, and Toast IQ Grow if quiet nights need marketing that someone else runs. Grow was reported at $499 a month at launch, before ad spend; Team pricing is not published, so get both quotes in writing.
The two products solve different problems, so "Team or Grow?" is usually the wrong question. Team is a set of labour tools. Grow is a marketing service built around four AI agents and a named human. Neither headline price is the whole cost either: Toast's Grow page says ad spend and per-delivery fees are charged on top of the monthly fee, and Team's price only appears in a sales quote. The break-even sum further down is what to run when that quote arrives.
What each product is, in one paragraph apiece
Toast IQ (the included assistant). The base Toast IQ comes with Toast POS. It answers questions about your own sales and operations data. If you have not used it for a month, you do not yet know what problems it leaves unsolved, and that is the information you need before buying either add-on. What Toast IQ can and cannot tell you about sales and labour covers its limits.
Toast IQ Team. A labour bundle sold at one price. Toast's product page lists a Scheduling Agent that drafts schedules from staff availability and projected sales (you review and publish), payroll with an Auto Payroll option and payroll tax filing, Tips Manager for tip pooling, the MyToast staff app for viewing schedules, swapping shifts and checking earnings, clock-ins that sync with the POS, and named Payroll Success Partners for support. Toast's own footnote says only select features in the bundle are AI-integrated. It is aimed at restaurants with plenty of hourly staff and shifts.
Toast IQ Grow. Announced in May 2026. Toast's page lists four agents (Marketing, Reviews, Digital Growth for search visibility, and Offers) that draft work for your approval, plus a Marketing Success Manager who plans the monthly calendar, launches campaigns and meets you monthly to review results. The package also bundles email and text marketing, loyalty, gift cards, a guest CRM, a website with commission-free online ordering, ad campaigns on Google, Facebook and Instagram, and two professional photoshoots a year. Launch coverage gave the price as $499 a month; Toast's page asks you to book a demo instead of showing a figure.
What they cost, and what is still unclear
| Toast IQ (included) | Toast IQ Team | Toast IQ Grow | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Included with Toast POS | Not published; quote needed | $499 a month reported at launch; not shown on Toast's page |
| Main job | Answers questions about your data | Rotas, payroll, tips, staff app | Marketing campaigns across channels |
| Human support | Standard Toast support | Named Payroll Success Partners | A Marketing Success Manager, monthly review meeting |
| Unclear points | Limits of what it can answer | Per-employee fees, contract length | Ad spend and delivery fees (both extra), minimum term |
Be careful with Team figures you see quoted online. Toast's public pricing page does show a POS-and-payroll bundle at $69 a month plus $9 per employee, but that is a different product from Toast IQ Team, and Team itself has no published price as of October 2026. Treat any Team number as a prompt to ask, not a quote. For Grow, Toast's footnote settles one question: ad spend and the flat per-delivery fees are charged separately from the monthly fee, although Toast takes no fee on the ad spend itself. What I could not confirm is Grow's contract length. Ask for a written quote that lists the monthly fee, the term, your ad budget and the cancellation notice.
Worked example: a 40-seat restaurant with 14 staff
An illustrative restaurant takes $38,000 a month, spends 31 per cent on labour ($11,780) and runs a 70 per cent gross margin after food costs. Its two pains: overtime creeps up when two cooks call in sick, and Monday to Wednesday evenings run at about half capacity.
The Team case. Suppose a better rota trims overtime and over-staffing by 2 per cent of sales. That is $760 a month. If the Team quote came in at, say, $200 a month (a test number, not a Toast price), the net would be about $560 a month. If the quote comes in at $400, the net drops to $360. The point is to find the price at which it stops paying: $760 a month. Any quote under that has some room, and any quote over it does not, unless it also saves you accounting time. Also check the 2 per cent: it is an assumption, not a Toast claim.
The Grow case. At $499 plus, say, $300 a month of ad spend, the cost is $799. With a 70 per cent margin, the restaurant needs about $1,141 a month in extra sales just to break even ($799 divided by 0.70). That is about 76 extra covers a month at a $15 average spend, or roughly 19 a week. Is that realistic on quiet nights? Maybe, but only if the campaigns bring new bookings rather than discounting the guests who would have come anyway. Look at it in covers, not in clicks.
The two cases show how different the decision is. Team's value is a labour-cost saving you can measure from your own payroll reports. Grow's value is extra revenue that you can only separate from normal trade by watching quiet nights before and after.
Labour tools versus a marketing agent: how to choose between them
Ask yourself which of these sentences you would say to a friend.
- "We pay too much in overtime and I spend Sunday night building the rota." That is a Team problem. Pull last quarter's labour percentage by week and see how much of it is avoidable. Restaurant labour cost percentage: test rota changes with AI first shows a way to test changes before you pay for software.
- "We are fine when we are full but dead on Tuesday." That is a marketing problem, and Grow addresses it, but so can a weekly email and a quiet-night offer. See a weekly restaurant email written by AI for the low-cost version.
- "I don't know what's wrong." Then buy neither. Use the included Toast IQ and your own reports to find the problem first.
The strongest reason to pick Team is that its data already lives in your POS: clock-ins and sales feed the schedule. The strongest reason to pick Grow is that you have no one to do marketing and are willing to pay for the human. If you could do the work yourself in two hours a week, you are paying $499 for time you have, so the sum is hours against fees.
What the human support covers, and what it does not
Both products come with people, but the people do different jobs. With Team, the named Payroll Success Partners help with payroll: setting up, processing and filing. That is valuable if you are tired of running payroll yourself, but they are not scheduling consultants, and the rota is still yours to review before it is published. With Grow, Toast says the Marketing Success Manager plans your monthly calendar, drafts copy with the agents, launches campaigns and meets you once a month to review results. It is more like a part-time account manager than a creative agency, and the photography and website are the parts closest to agency work.
Questions to put to the Toast representative, and the answers you would want:
- How many hours a month of the manager's time do I get? Look for a number, not "as needed".
- Who approves campaigns before they go out? Toast says you approve anything the agents produce; confirm how that works when you are busy and slow to reply.
- Can I see every message sent in my name, with its offer and cost?
- If I cancel, what happens to my customer lists and audiences?
- For Team: can I keep my current payroll provider and use only the scheduling parts?
Those five questions will separate a sensible fit from an expensive hope.
Realistic mistakes with each product
A Grow mistake. A restaurant accepts the agent's first campaign, a 15 per cent off offer for lapsed guests. Redemptions look good, but when the owner checks the till reports, most redeemers were regulars who would have come on a full-price Friday. The discount cost more than it earned. The fix is simple: ask for offers aimed at quiet nights only, and compare covers on those nights to the same nights a month earlier.
A Team mistake. A café with six staff switches on auto-built schedules and finds that the AI schedules a cook for four hours on a Sunday that only the owner knows is closed for a private event. The software works from sales projections and staff availability. It cannot see an event not in the system. Put events, holidays and one-off closures in the calendar the schedule reads, and read every draft before publishing it.
A staffing mistake. A restaurant allows shift swaps through the app without a rule. Two juniors swap, leaving no one who can close the till. Set approval rules so that a swap needs a manager's tick for key roles. Toast describes a swap feature but I did not verify how its approval settings work, so check them in the demo.
A baseline sheet filled in for the Team decision
Team only earns its fee if your current rota process is wasteful, and you can measure that from numbers you already have. Fill in a table like this one from the last four weeks. The figures below are illustrative, for the 14-person restaurant above.
| Week | Sales | Labour cost | Labour % | Overtime hours | Manager rota hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | $8,900 | $2,760 | 31.0% | 9 | 3.0 |
| 2 | $9,400 | $3,010 | 32.0% | 14 | 3.5 |
| 3 | $8,200 | $2,710 | 33.0% | 11 | 3.0 |
| 4 | $11,500 | $3,300 | 28.7% | 6 | 2.5 |
Read it for patterns rather than averages. Weeks 2 and 3 show labour above 32 per cent with overtime above 10 hours, which suggests the rota did not match demand. Week 4 had high sales and low overtime, so staffing worked when the place was busy. The restaurant's problem is therefore the quieter weeks, where people were scheduled for sales that did not come. A tool that forecasts sales from past weeks could help there, but only if the forecast is better than your manager's gut. You can test that without buying anything: ask the manager to guess next week's sales for each day on Sunday, write the guesses down, then compare with the actuals. If the manager is within 10 per cent most days, the forecast is not your weak link, and the saving from Team will be smaller than hoped. If the guesses are 25 per cent out, a data-driven forecast has room to help.
Also count the manager's three hours a week of rota work. At $25 an hour, that is $75 a week, or about $325 a month. If Team halves that, it is worth about $160 a month before any labour saving, which is a number to add to the 2 per cent estimate earlier. It is a modest figure, which is why the labour saving is the main driver.
A prompt for reviewing a Grow campaign before it goes out
Whoever approves Grow's campaigns needs a short checklist, and a chat assistant can help you review a draft against it, using text you paste in. Use a plan that does not train on your content, and keep customer names out.
Here is a marketing message a restaurant agent drafted.
Check it against these rules and list every breach:
1. Any discount only applies Monday to Wednesday evenings.
2. No claim about ingredients, allergens or awards that I have not given you.
3. The offer, dates and booking link are stated once and match the facts below.
4. No more than 90 words for text messages.
Facts: 2 courses for $29 Monday to Wednesday, 5 to 9 pm, until 30 June.
Booking link: [link]
[paste draft]An illustrative result might say: "Breach 2: the draft says 'our award-winning pasta', but no award is in your facts. Breach 3: the draft says the offer runs 'all month', but your facts end on 30 June. Breach 4: the text version has 112 words." The value here is the second pair of eyes. The AI does not know whether the claim is true, only that it is not in your list, which is exactly the check you need. You can still ask the Marketing Success Manager to put the same rules into the brief, so the agent works within them from the start.
Five Toast IQ contract points to get in writing
Whichever product you choose, five contract points decide whether a bad month is cheap or costly. Ask for each in writing, since sales calls and pricing pages do not always match the paper.
- Term and renewal. Is it monthly, annual or tied to your POS agreement? Does it renew automatically, and with how many days' notice?
- What the fee excludes. For Grow, ad spend and any delivery fees; for Team, per-employee charges, payroll filing fees and anything for extra locations.
- Data you keep. Can you export your customer list and campaign history on leaving? Can you export schedules and payroll records?
- Approval controls. Who must approve a campaign or a published schedule, and can you require it?
- Price changes. Is the quote fixed for the term? Grow's $499 came from launch coverage, not a Toast price list, so assume nothing is fixed until it is on paper.
Keep the signed quote with your records. If you later see a charge you did not expect, you have the document to point to.
Three small-restaurant sketches
These illustrations show how the same two products land very differently.
A neighbourhood bistro, 10 staff, full at weekends. Labour is steady and the owner builds the rota in 40 minutes. Team saves little. Quiet Mondays and Tuesdays are the issue, which points to Grow, but the owner can run a Tuesday offer by email for free. Verdict: neither yet; try a two-week email test, then reconsider Grow.
A café with 22 staff, mostly part-time students. Availability changes every term, shift swaps are constant, and the owner spends hours each week sorting it out. This is the strongest Team case, because the staff app and availability handling attack the actual pain. Marketing is steady through foot traffic. Verdict: ask for a Team quote, run it for one term.
A takeaway with 8 staff and a thin delivery margin. Marketing money is risky when each delivery order barely clears costs. Grow's campaigns could bring orders that lose money after fees. Verdict: skip Grow, look at menu pricing, and use the included Toast IQ to find which items carry the margin.
In each sketch, the decision came from a named problem and a number, not from the product's feature list. That is the habit worth keeping.
Who should skip both
- A restaurant with fewer than about eight staff and a stable rota. You probably gain little from forecast-driven scheduling. A spreadsheet or the cheaper rota tools in six AI restaurant scheduling tools compared by cost may do the job.
- A restaurant already full on every service. Marketing money does not fix a capacity problem. Look at prices or menu mix instead.
- Anyone in the first three months on a new POS. Your data is thin, so forecasts and audiences are weak. Wait for a season of history.
- Anyone unwilling to review the output. Both tools produce drafts you should check. If nobody has the time, a paid tool becomes a source of errors.
If you already pay a payroll provider you like and run your own email list, you have the two things these bundles replace. In that case, keep what works and look elsewhere for the next improvement.
How to test either one without burning a quarter
Ask for a month-to-month term or a trial. If neither is offered, write down your baseline first so you can judge afterwards.
- Baseline. For Team, record four weeks of labour percentage, overtime hours and manager hours spent on rotas. For Grow, record covers and sales on each quiet night over four weeks.
- Change one thing. Use Team for scheduling only in the first month. Use Grow on one offer for one quiet night first.
- Compare like with like. Same nights, same season. A public-holiday week will flatter anything.
- Decide with a number. Put the saving or extra margin next to the fee. If it is under the fee, cancel or renegotiate.
Our break-even figures, $760 for Team in the example and about $1,141 of extra sales for Grow, give you the finish line. Redo them with your own labour, margin and quote.
The wider question of whether to rely on your POS vendor's AI or add another tool is covered in AI software for restaurants: POS-built AI or an add-on tool. If you would rather work through your own figures with someone, that is what my AI implementation consultation covers; see the contact page.
Questions restaurant owners ask about the two Toast IQ products
Is Toast IQ free with Toast?
The base Toast IQ assistant is included with Toast POS. Team and Grow are separate paid products on top of it. Ask your Toast representative for the current price, contract length and cancellation terms in writing before you agree to either.
Does Toast IQ Grow include ad spend?
No. A footnote on Toast's Grow page says ad spend and flat per-delivery fees are charged separately and are not part of the monthly fee. Toast says it takes no fee on the ad spend itself. Agree a monthly ad budget, and any minimum, in writing before the first campaign runs.
Can I use Toast IQ Team without Toast payroll?
The product is sold as scheduling, payroll, tips and employee-app tools together. Ask whether scheduling can run on its own if you keep another payroll provider, and what that does to the price.
Which one should a very small restaurant try first?
Neither, until the free Toast IQ has been used for a month and you can name a specific labour or marketing problem. If the problem is labour cost, look at Team. If it is empty tables on quiet nights, look at Grow, and compare it with doing the marketing yourself.
Further reads
- How to Build a Restaurant Staff Rota With AI Demand Forecasts — Shows how to build forecast-based rotas by hand.
- AI Food Insights Tool: Toast IQ, Square AI or a Spreadsheet? — Compares POS insight tools with a spreadsheet.
- AI Consulting for Restaurants: What to Ask and What to Expect — A sample scope of work, the questions to ask, and the deliverables a restaurant should expect from an AI consultant in the first month.
- AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.
Sources: Toast's Toast IQ Grow and Toast IQ Team product pages and Toast's POS pricing page (checked October 2026); launch coverage of Toast IQ Grow (May 2026) for the reported $499 price. Team pricing is not published.