Skai Solutions connects to Square, so a phone order arrives as a ticket the same way a counter order does, with no re-keying and no new hardware. Square for Restaurants itself is A$0 a month on the Free plan and A$129 per location on Plus, as published on 4 September 2026.
Square is the default for independent AU and NZ venues that wanted a POS without a salesperson, an install date or a contract. Cafes, small takeaways, food trucks, single-site restaurants.
Square venues tend to be the ones with nobody free to answer the phone - one or two people running the whole floor. That is exactly the case Skai Solutions was built for. Orders land in your Square dashboard and print like any other ticket.
Square publishes its Australian plan prices, which is unusual in this market and worth using. These are the figures on Square's own Australian restaurant POS page, read on 4 September 2026, in AUD and before card processing fees.
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Free | A$0 a month plus processing fees | Unlimited countertop POS devices, unlimited locations, phone support Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm AEST |
| Plus | A$129 a month per location plus processing fees | Adds unlimited Square KDS devices and 24/7 phone support. Add A$50 a month per location if the venue uses mobile POS |
| Premium | Custom | Square says businesses processing A$250,000 or more a year may be eligible |
Two details that catch operators. The mobile POS surcharge is per location, so a two site group taking orders on handhelds is A$358 a month on Plus, not A$258. And the 30 day trial is a trial of Plus: if you do not pick a plan at the end of it, Square downgrades the account to Free and you lose the Plus features rather than being billed. Neither figure is ours and both were current on 4 September 2026, so check them before you budget.
Free is enough to run a counter. The line that usually decides it for a phone-heavy venue is the kitchen display: unlimited Square KDS devices sit on Plus, and a phone order that lands on a screen in front of the section is treated differently from one that prints and gets moved. The other line is support hours. Free support runs 9am to 5pm AEST on weekdays, which is precisely not when a restaurant POS falls over. Plus carries 24/7 phone support.
If your phone volume is a handful of calls a day, Free plus a diverted number is a sensible place to start and you can move later. If Friday and Saturday nights are the problem, you are buying Plus for the support window as much as for the features.
This is the question that decides whether a phone agent is useful or a liability, and it is the one most integration pages skip. Square handles availability at the item level: item availability and counts update the menu automatically as stock moves, which is how a Square venue stops overselling on its own channels. Skai Solutions reads that same availability, so the agent stops offering the special at the point Square marks it out rather than at the point somebody remembers to tell the phone.
Modifiers are the other half of it. A phone order is spoken, not tapped, so the agent has to map "no onion, extra aioli, gluten free bun" onto the modifier set the item actually carries in Square. Where a modifier does not exist on that item, the agent does not invent one. It reads the constraint back to the caller and, if the caller insists, transfers rather than sending a ticket the kitchen cannot make. A wrong ticket at 7.30pm costs more than a transferred call.
Three things, and none of them are a surprise once you have run a service.
Square keeps taking card payments offline, but only for a fixed window, and the window depends on which piece of hardware is in your hand. This is the detail that decides what a venue can and cannot do during an outage, and it is worth knowing before it happens rather than during service.
| Hardware | How long you can keep taking offline payments | Deadline to upload |
|---|---|---|
| Square Register, Terminal, Handheld | Session continues until you reconnect | 72 hours from the start of the session |
| Square Reader (2nd gen), Reader (1st gen v3), Stand (1st or 2nd gen) | 24 hours, then the session ends | 72 hours from the start of the session |
Square Support Centre Australia, "Process offline payments", read 9 September 2026.
The 72 hours is hard. Square's own words are that pending offline payments expire after 72 hours if you do not reconnect and upload them, and that expired offline payments cannot be retrieved or reprocessed. That is money taken and then lost, not delayed. Square recommends uploading inside 24 hours to reduce chargebacks and declines.
There is also a list of things that stop working, and it matters for a venue taking phone and pickup orders:
One 2026 change worth checking your own settings for. Square has said that from April 2026 offline payments are enabled automatically on all devices unless the account takes action to opt out, with a review task appearing in Dashboard from March 2026. If nobody in your venue made that decision, the default may now be on, with whatever per transaction maximum is set behind it.
A phone agent is a cloud service. If the venue loses its connection, Skai Solutions can still answer the call, because the call arrives over the phone network rather than over your wifi, but the ticket cannot reach a terminal that is not reachable. It queues and lands when the connection returns, in the same way Square's own online orders do.
So the honest position is that an outage degrades a phone order into a written one, and the fix is the boring one: a printed or written pad for the duration, and someone checking Dashboard when the connection comes back so nothing that queued gets served twice or not at all. Anyone who tells you their phone product is unaffected by your internet going down is describing a product that does not touch your point of sale.
Worth knowing for contrast: offline tolerance is not a fixed property of point of sale software. Some Australian systems are built around a local database and publish figures in days rather than hours, because the terminal holds its own copy of the menu and the transaction log. Square is a cloud native system with an offline mode bolted to the payment path, which is a different design with different failure behaviour. Neither is wrong. They fail differently, and the plan on your wall should match the one you own. Our POS integrations hub sets out what "connected" means and where the boundary sits on every system we work with.
A$299 a month for 500 minutes, or A$599 for 1,500, plus a one-off A$499 setup that covers the Square connection and your menu build. In New Zealand that is NZ$325, NZ$649 and NZ$545. Month to month, no lock-in, 30 days' notice. Full pricing.
Before you buy anything, work out what your unanswered calls are actually worth. If the monthly loss is smaller than the fee, don't buy it - we'd rather you found that out now.
The arithmetic for that sits on the AI receptionist page, which turns a missed call into a contribution figure using the tax office cost of sales benchmarks rather than a vendor model. If the phone line itself is also up for renewal, price it separately with what a restaurant phone system costs in Australia.
Fifteen minutes, your Square menu, your hardest order. Bring the one your staff get wrong.
Book a Free DemoSkai connects to standard Square accounts. If you are on a plan that restricts API access we will tell you on the demo rather than after you have paid.
No. You keep your existing number and divert calls to Skai. The divert can be switched on and off - during service only, after hours only, or all the time.
Five days from sign-up to live calls. The one-off setup fee covers the menu build, the POS connection and voice tuning for your venue.
Skai transfers the call to your team. It takes the routine volume off your floor and escalates anything that genuinely needs a human.
See every POS Skai connects to, or Skai for New Zealand venues.