Abstract Our main result is the following: let $X$ be a normal affine toric surface without torus factor. Then there exists a non-normal affine toric surface $X^{\prime}$ with automorphism group isomorphic to the automorphism group of $X$ if and only if $X$ is different from the affine plane. As a tool, we first provide a classification of normalized additive group actions on a non-necessarily normal affine toric variety $X$ of any dimension. Recall that normalized additive group actions on $X$ are in correspondence with homogeneous locally nilpotent derivations on the algebra of regular functions of $X$. More generally, we provide a classification of homogeneous locally nilpotent derivations on the semigroup algebra of a commutative cancellative monoid.