What a Points Program Costs When You Rent It — and the Case Where Free Wins Outright
Smile.io, LoyaltyLion, Loyverse and Square Loyalty, quoted from their own pages on 22 August 2026, with the monthly figures multiplied out over three years. One of the four gives the loyalty program away, and we say so plainly.
Loyalty software is priced in a way that catches people out, because the meter is usually not attached to the thing you think you are buying.
You think you are buying a points ledger — a record of who has how many points and what they can have. What you are actually billed against, in most of this market, is how many orders your business takes. The ledger is trivial. The order volume is the price.
Here is what four vendors published on 22 August 2026.
The four figures
| Vendor | Published price | Metered by |
|---|---|---|
| Loyverse | Free. The loyalty program is included with the point of sale at no cost. Optional add-ons from $5 USD/month per store or per employee | Nothing, for loyalty |
| Smile.io | Essential $15 per month; Standard $79; Growth $199; Plus $999 (annual). A free tier covers 200 monthly orders | Monthly orders |
| LoyaltyLion | Classic $199 / Month, and the page states it "Includes 500 orders per month" | Monthly orders |
| Square Loyalty | No published price. The product page offers "Try Square Loyalty free for 30 days." and a sales contact | Not published |
(All four read 22 August 2026.)
Multiplied out
Arithmetic on the figures above, not a quote from anyone.
| Plan | Per month | Per year | Three years |
|---|---|---|---|
| Smile.io Essential | $15 | $180 | $540 |
| Smile.io Standard | $79 | $948 | $2,844 |
| Smile.io Growth | $199 | $2,388 | $7,164 |
| LoyaltyLion Classic | $199 | $2,388 | $7,164 |
The number that tends to surprise people is the last one. LoyaltyLion's Classic plan is the entry tier, and it is $199 a month with a 500-order-per-month allowance included rather than unlimited. Seven thousand dollars over three years, to start.
The mechanism to understand before you sign anything
Read Smile.io's own tier descriptions and the design becomes clear:
Usage 1 integration 500 monthly orders 15 specialized reports
Free covers 200 monthly orders. Essential covers 500. Standard covers 1,000. Growth covers 2,500.
Nothing about a points ledger gets harder as order volume rises. Storing the ten-thousandth entry costs a vendor no more than the tenth. What the tiers actually price is your success — the plan you need is decided by how well your business is doing, and the bill climbs on that basis rather than on cost of service.
That is a legitimate business model and it is not a scandal. But it is worth knowing that it is what you are agreeing to, because it means the cost of your loyalty program is indexed to your revenue for as long as you run it.
The case where free wins, said plainly
Loyverse gives the loyalty program away. Its pricing page lists the point of sale with "Manage multiple stores, sales analytics, inventory management, loyalty program" at no cost, and charges instead for surrounding add-ons — employee management at "$5 USD/month per employee", advanced inventory per store, and so on.
If your decision is purely about the price of running a points scheme, Loyverse wins outright and there is nothing to break even against. A counter business that wants a till, stock and loyalty in one free hosted account should take it. That is the honest recommendation, and it does not sell anything.
The case against it is not financial. It is that the customer list and the points ledger live in a hosted account under somebody else's terms — terms that can change, tiers that can be reorganised, and an export path that exists at the vendor's discretion. If that does not worry you, it should not be made to.
Square Loyalty, meanwhile, publishes no figure at all on its own product page. It is an add-on to a Square account, and the only routes shown are a free trial and "Start your free trial Contact sales". We are not printing a number, because none renders publicly, and a number we could not read is a number we will not invent. What Square unmistakably does have is the till: "Customers can sign up at your point of sale, through your Square website, via an invoice." Points attaching automatically to a card tender is a real advantage and no self-hosted register replaces it.
What owning the register buys, and what it does not
Loyalora is a loyalty and rewards register you buy once and run on your own server. Points, rewards, redemptions, one customer's card with the full history behind it. No order ceiling, no tier ladder, no per-store meter.
It is also emphatically not a marketing tool, and that limitation is deliberate enough to be worth stating before anyone buys. It has no campaigns, no mailing lists, no segments and no send-to-all. The only message it produces is one customer's own balance, to that customer, and only if you switch it on. If you want campaigns, export the customers you choose and use a tool built for it, with whatever consent record that requires. Making campaigns easy is how a loyalty database quietly turns into a mailing list nobody agreed to join.
It holds no card numbers, takes no payments and connects to no till. Compared with Smile.io it has no storefront widget and no e-commerce integration; compared with LoyaltyLion it sends no Klaviyo flows; compared with Square it will never award a point automatically from a card payment.
What it does instead is get the ledger right, which is a smaller claim and a harder one than it sounds — the guide on why a balance should never be a stored number is the argument for why that is the part worth caring about.
Deciding
- Under 200 orders a month, or you already run Loyverse? Free is the right answer. Take it.
- Shopify or BigCommerce storefront, and you need points awarded on orders automatically? Pay for the integration. That is what you are buying and it works.
- Counter business, and the thing that actually matters is that the balance is right and defensible across the counter for years? That is the register case, and it is what owning one is for.
Every figure above links to the page it came from and carries the date it was read. Check us.