Your POS Charges You Twice — And Square's Free Tier Means Most Shops Should Not Pay Either
Retail POS bills a monthly subscription per location on top of a percentage of every sale. Here are both published subscription prices, why the free tiers matter more than the paid ones, and the narrow case for a self-hosted till.
Point-of-sale pricing has a structure most retailers never separate out: you pay a monthly subscription for the software, and a percentage of every sale to process the card. Two meters, two invoices, one till.
The percentage is unavoidable if you take cards — somebody has to move the money and they charge for it. The subscription is a different question, and it is the one this article is about.
The published subscription prices
Square POS — from Square's own pricing announcement (read 2026-07-05):
"$49/month per location" for Square Plus — and a free $0 tier exists.
Lightspeed Retail — from lightspeedhq.com/pos/retail/pricing (read 2026-07-05):
"$89 USD /mo" for Basic, billed monthly (annual saves up to 18%), per location with one register included — extra registers and locations cost more.
Both are priced per location. A second shop doubles the software bill before it sells anything, and on Lightspeed a second till in the same shop is also extra.
| 36 months, 1 location | 36 months, 3 locations | |
|---|---|---|
| Square Plus $49 | $1,764 | $5,292 |
| Lightspeed Basic $89 | $3,204 | $9,612 |
| Square Free | $0 | $0 |
(Processing fees are additional in every row, including the free one.)
The most important row is the free one, and we are going to make it awkward for ourselves
Square has a $0 tier that takes card payments, runs a till, and manages basic inventory. For a large number of single-site shops, that is the correct answer and no further reading is required.
You are not paying $49 for the ability to take money. You are paying it for what sits on top — advanced inventory, staff permissions, deeper reporting, multi-location features. If you do not use those, the paid tier is buying you nothing, and moving off Square entirely buys you even less.
Any article that walks you from a free tier to a paid alternative without mentioning the free tier is not comparing; it is selling.
And the free open-source option, named
OSPOS (Open Source Point of Sale) is a web-based POS built in PHP with a MySQL or MariaDB backend, under the MIT licence. It came up as the leading self-hosted answer in every search we ran for this category on 1 August 2026.
If you want a self-hosted till, are comfortable installing PHP software, and want to pay nothing, OSPOS is the obvious first thing to evaluate. Also in this space: uniCenta (which offers paid support tiers — unusual and valuable in open source), Chromis, and Odoo POS Community.
So where does a paid self-hosted till fit?
Narrowly, and the narrowness is the point.
Vendra is a self-hosted POS and inventory system — $34.00, one time (product page, read 2026-08-01). Before any comparison, the two limitations that decide whether it is even a candidate, quoted from its own FAQ:
"Does it process card payments online?" — "No — it records cash/card tender and change; it doesn't process cards online."
"Can I run multiple stores?" — "Single store in 1.0."
Read the first one carefully, because it disqualifies most readers. Vendra is a till and a stock ledger, not a payment system. It records that a sale happened and what tender was taken. The card itself goes through something else — a standalone terminal from your bank or processor.
That means the honest comparison is not "Vendra versus Square." Square is a payment company that includes a till. Vendra is a till that assumes you have already solved payments. They are not substitutes.
The narrow case where that is exactly right
There is a real buyer here, and it is smaller than the category:
- A shop that already has a standalone card terminal from its bank and does not want a second payment relationship.
- A business that is mostly cash or invoice — a market stall, a workshop, a trade counter, a club bar.
- Someone who wants the stock ledger to be the point and the till to be a way of decrementing it.
- Anyone who wants the sales record on their own server, not in a processor's account.
For that buyer, the FAQ details that matter are mundane and correct:
"Does barcode scanning need special drivers?" — "No — keyboard-wedge USB scanners just work."
"What do I need to run it?" — "PHP 8.0+ with PDO and MySQL/MariaDB or SQLite, on an Apache/LiteSpeed shared host (mod_rewrite) or Nginx/VPS."
Keyboard-wedge scanner support with no drivers is the difference between "works on the counter this afternoon" and "a project." It is unglamorous and it is the thing that decides whether a till gets used.
The product's own headline claim is an oversell-proof stock ledger — which is the same class of guarantee as the double-lending prevention in equipment checkout: a rule the software enforces rather than a report you are supposed to read.
The fee you should actually go and check
Whatever you choose, the subscription is the smaller number. On a shop turning over £200,000 a year, a processing rate that is 0.3 percentage points higher costs £600 a year — more than the entire Square Plus subscription.
So the highest-value thing you can do after reading this is not to change your POS. It is to open your last processing statement and find your effective rate — total fees divided by total card turnover — and compare it against a competing quote. That number is usually worth more than every software decision in this article combined.
Take the rate from the statement, not from the processor's advertised rate card — the card excludes interchange and scheme fees, and the statement does not.
Choosing
Square Free — single site, standard needs, want payments and till in one. Start here. Most shops should not move off it.
Square Plus / Lightspeed — you genuinely use the advanced inventory, multi-location, or staff-permission features. Check you use them before renewing.
OSPOS or uniCenta — you want self-hosted, free, and can install PHP software. The default self-hosted answer.
Vendra — you have payments solved elsewhere, run one site, want an oversell-proof stock ledger and a barcode till on your own shared hosting, for one payment. A narrow case, honestly stated.
Nobody should buy a self-hosted till expecting it to replace a payment processor. It does not, and no amount of price advantage changes that.
The honest costs of self-hosting a till
A till that is down is a shop that cannot sell. This is a much sharper risk than any other product in this category — a leave tracker being offline is an inconvenience; a till being offline is a queue at the door. If you self-host, you need a fallback that works on paper, and you need to have practised it.
Backups are the sales record. A day's takings that exist only in a dead database are a tax problem, not just an inconvenience.
Single store in 1.0. If you might open a second site, note that now.
The short version
Retail POS charges twice: a subscription per location, and a percentage of every sale. Square's free tier removes the first charge entirely for most single-site shops, and that is where the majority of readers should stop.
If you want a self-hosted till, the free open-source options are mature and should be your first evaluation.
And if you already take cards through a standalone terminal and what you actually need is an oversell-proof stock ledger with a barcode till on your own server — that is $34 once, and it is a genuinely different product from the ones it is usually compared against.
Then go and check your processing rate. That is where your money actually is.
Next steps
- Open the live Vendra demo — no sign-up, already signed in, resets itself
- Vendra product page and licence options
- The SaaS Price Observatory — Square, Lightspeed and 80 others, quoted from their own pages and dated
Subscription prices are quoted from each vendor's own page with the date read. Card processing rates are not quoted here because they are negotiated per merchant — yours is on your statement, not on a website.