Zoho opens restaurant POS in India with a free plan for outlets billing under Rs 12 lakh

Zoho has launched Zoho POS for Restaurants in India and is offering the product free to outlets whose annual billing on the platform stays under Rs 12 lakh. YourStory and ET Now both report that Kolkata sweet shop Asha Sweets became the first customer during the festive rush, after co-founder Sridhar Vembu announced the free plan as a Deepavali gift to small food businesses at Zoholics India.

The cloud POS is built for quick-service restaurants, cafes, bakeries, cloud kitchens, casual dining and multi-outlet groups. YourStory says it pulls dine-in, takeaway and aggregator orders from Swiggy and Zomato into one view, supports QR digital menus, table management and kitchen order tickets, and keeps billing working offline until the connection returns. It runs on Windows and Android, links to Zoho Books for accounting, and plugs into Zoho Payments, Paytm, Pine Labs and PhonePe.

Zoho's own product blog, published when the restaurant POS was introduced in India, describes the same core stack: menu and KOT routing, unified channel orders, floor and waiter apps, recipe-level inventory, and kiosk self-ordering. Plans are Free, Essentials, Signature and Premium, with aggregator links, table tools, kiosks and loyalty sitting on paid tiers. The launch sits inside Zoho's wider vertical SaaS push across retail, restaurants and other sectors.

For bharat.digital readers, the story matters because a domestic SaaS giant is putting payment-ready store software in front of the same MSME restaurants that already live on UPI and food aggregators. A free tier under Rs 12 lakh lowers the first bill for kirana-scale sweet shops and QSRs, while paid plans and Zoho Books integration aim to keep growing outlets inside one Indian software stack rather than a patchwork of imported POS tools.