Talos vs ChowNow
Both platforms put your restaurant on its own ordering site. The difference is what every order costs you, what it costs your customer, and what you actually own.
$99/mo vs $229–$409/mo.
ChowNow restructured plans in Spring 2026. The entry tier (Launch) is now $229/mo on annual billing — capped at 500 marketing contacts. Grow ($319/mo) bumps you to 2,000. Elevate ($409/mo) tops out at 5,000.
Talos is $99/mo flat on both plans, no contact-count tiering. Add the Marketing Suite ($39/mo) and you're still under any ChowNow plan — without a contact cap. Add the Mobile App ($29/mo) on Flex and you're at $167/mo, still cheaper than Launch.
ChowNow charges your customers a 7.5% “Support Local Fee.”
Every diner ordering through ChowNow's marketplace or app pays 7.5% on top of the subtotal. Your $20 order shows up as $21.50 before they even get to delivery and tax. The fee is visible at checkout — and it's yours, attached to your restaurant.
Talos doesn't charge your customers anything. Your menu price is the price they pay.
“Commission-free” isn't quite commission-free.
ChowNow's own restaurant agreement spells it out: a 15.5% Marketing Fee on every order routed through their Discovery / Order Better Network (Google, Apple Maps, Yelp partners). Plus a $0.99 Direct Service Charge on every direct order. Plus 2.95% + $0.29 processing.
Talos charges $0 commission on pickup. No per-order service charge. Just your subscription and payment processing — line items you can predict.
English and Spanish on the same link.
ChowNow ships English-only. With Talos, customers tap a language toggle and order in the language they actually speak — and your kitchen ticket still prints in the language your staff reads. One link, two audiences, no second site to maintain.
Your operation is unique. Your platform should be too.
ChowNow gives every restaurant the same templated experience. Talos is code-built. If your restaurant runs a workflow no one else does — one of our clients delivers lunch directly to nearby schools, so we built them a parent pre-order module — we build around it. That's not something a template platform does.
Marketing tools that don't cap your audience.
ChowNow gates marketing by contact count: 500 on Launch, 2,000 on Grow, 5,000 on Elevate. Outgrow your tier, pay more. Talos Marketing Suite is $39/mo flat. Run email campaigns, win-back automations, review-request emails, push notifications via the Mobile App, share links — no per-contact wall.
Plus full attribution: every order is tied back to the campaign or automation that drove it, so you see real revenue, not vanity opens.
The Full Picture
Talos
ChowNow
ChowNow pricing and fees from get.chownow.com/pricing and their published Restaurant Agreement, verified May 2026.
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