Free vs paid POS: what you actually give up

Free point of sale plans are not bait. Most are real software that a small shop can run on for a year without paying anything, and plenty of shops do exactly that.

But every free plan has a ceiling somewhere, and the vendor chose where to put it. So the useful question is not whether the free plan is a trick. It is which ceiling you hit first, and what it costs you on the day you hit it.

The limit is rarely the transaction count

Most people expect a free plan to cut them off after a certain number of sales a month. Almost no plan does. Sales volume is the cheapest thing for a vendor to hand out, and capping it would make the free plan useless as a shop window for the paid one.

What free plans cap instead is everything that grows with the business. How many products you can list. How many people can log in. How many locations. How far back your reports go. Those are the numbers that only move when things are going well, which means a quiet shop can sit on a free plan indefinitely and a growing one walks into a wall made of one of those four things.

What usually runs out first

The product catalogue cap. Free plans commonly allow somewhere between twenty and a few hundred products. That sounds like a lot until you remember that most systems count every variant as its own product. Three sizes and four colours of one shirt is twelve products, not one. Adding a single new supplier can eat a whole allowance.

The team member cap. This is the one that bites, and it bites at the worst possible moment. The free plan is fine while you are the only person behind the counter. Then trade picks up, you hire your first part-timer, and you discover you have one login to share between two people. Sharing a login works, in the sense that sales still go through, but it costs you the one thing a POS is uniquely good at: knowing who rang up what. Voids, discounts and till differences all become anonymous on the day you most need them not to be.

Report history. Thirty or ninety days is common. That is enough to see last month, and not enough to compare this December against last December, which is the comparison that tells a seasonal shop what to order.

Integrations. Accounting exports, online store sync and some hardware support are frequently held back for paid tiers, even when the core selling features are not.

The costs that are not on the pricing page

Some of the real cost of a free plan never appears next to the word free.

Payment processing. A free plan is often free because it is attached to a card processor, and the rate is not negotiable. If that rate is half a percent above what you could get elsewhere, a shop taking a moderate amount of card volume every month can pay far more in processing than a paid plan would have cost. Work it out against your own monthly card takings, not against the headline.

Hardware. Some systems only run on a terminal, printer or cash drawer the vendor sells. It is a real cost, and not one you can carry to a different system later.

Getting your data back out. This is the one to check before anything else. Can you export your product list and sales history as a file, on demand, without asking anyone? If the answer is no, or if it is yes but only on the paid tier, then the price of leaving is rebuilding your entire catalogue by hand. A system you cannot leave is not really free, whatever the plan says.

When paying is clearly worth it

You do not need to pay for a POS just because the shop is growing. There are three points where it stops being optional.

• More than one person works the till. Separate logins are the whole point of the audit trail.
• You need stock figures you can trust across the full catalogue. Accurate stock needs a system that holds every product, not the first twenty. A rolling stock take only works if the expected figure is current for everything on the shelf.
• You need history longer than the retention window. Year on year comparison is not a luxury for a shop with a season.

Questions to ask before you commit

Ask any vendor these, and insist on plain answers.

1. What happens to my data if I stop paying? Is it deleted, frozen, or still exportable?
2. What is the product limit, and are variants counted separately?
3. How many logins do I get, and what happens when I need one more?
4. How far back do reports go on this plan?
5. Can I export products and sales to a file myself, today, without contacting support?

Where StoreWave sits

StoreWave’s free tier is five team members and twenty products, which covers a small shop with a couple of staff rather than a solo owner. Pro is five US dollars a month with no limits on products or people, and no card is needed to start. Every report exports to a file on either plan, because the answer to question one above should never depend on what you are paying.