How much does a POS system cost for a small shop?

Ask what a POS costs and you get a monthly figure. Twenty nine a month, forty nine a month, free for the basic tier.

That figure is real, and it is almost never the largest thing you will pay. For a shop taking a moderate amount of card, the software is somewhere between the third and fourth biggest line on the bill. Vendors know this, which is why the monthly fee is in large type on the pricing page and the rest is in a PDF.

So let us build the number up properly, biggest first, using figures that are current for a small shop in 2026. Adjust for your own currency and market, but the proportions hold almost everywhere.

First: card processing, which dwarfs everything

Card processing runs roughly 2.3 to 3.5 percent of every card sale. That is the whole cost, and it is worth sitting with for a second.

A shop taking 10,000 a month on card pays between 230 and 350 a month to process it. Against software at 30 a month.

Read that again. The fee nobody mentions in the sales call is between eight and twelve times the fee that the entire pricing page is about.

Which leads to the single most useful piece of arithmetic in this article. The gap between a good rate and a mediocre one is worth more than the software is. Half a percent on 10,000 a month is 50 a month, 600 a year. That is more than most POS subscriptions cost outright. If you spend your negotiating energy on one thing, spend it here and not on talking a software vendor down five a month.

This is also the trap in bundled deals. A POS that is free, or unusually cheap, is often free because it is welded to a processor whose rate is not negotiable. The software is the bait and the rate is the business model. Nothing dishonest about it as long as you do the sum, and the sum is: take the rate, multiply by your annual card takings, and compare that to what a paid system plus an independently shopped rate would cost. Run it before you sign, because it is much harder to move processors than to move software.

Second: hardware, if you buy the traditional bundle

The classic quote is a terminal, a receipt printer and a cash drawer, and it lands somewhere around 400 to 900, plus 100 to 300 for setup and installation if the vendor is doing it.

Cheaper routes exist. A handheld mobile terminal with a scanner and printer built in starts nearer 150 to 400. And if your POS runs in a browser, the honest number for the till itself is nothing, because a laptop or tablet you already own will do it. There is a whole article on which pieces of that bundle you genuinely need, but the short version is that the terminal is the expensive part and the terminal is the part you can usually skip.

Two costs inside hardware that people forget. Reusability: a proprietary terminal has no second life and no resale value, so when you outgrow it that money is simply gone. And replacement: a printer lasts years, a tablet on a counter lasts a couple of them, and neither is free the second time.

Third: the software

Now we get to the number on the pricing page. 25 to 100 a month covers most small business plans. Free tiers exist and are usually real, with the ceiling placed somewhere that only bites when you grow: product counts, staff logins, how far back the reports go.

At the top end, over 300 a month buys enterprise features that a single shop will never open.

Three things to check that change this number more than the headline does:

Per terminal fees. Many systems charge 10 to 40 a month per additional register. A shop with two tills and a stall at the weekend can quietly be paying triple the advertised price.

Modules. Loyalty, online ordering, advanced reporting, payroll, accounting sync. Each priced separately, each sounding essential in a demo. Ask which of the things you saw are included in the tier you are quoting.

Contract length. Early termination charges are common and unpleasant, and they are the reason a shop stays on a system it dislikes for another eighteen months. Between the per-terminal fees and the add-ons, the industry’s own guidance is that these extras can add 100 to 300 a month over the advertised price. That is not a rounding error.

Fourth: your own time, which has no invoice

Nobody quotes this and it is not small.

Loading a catalogue is a real afternoon, or two if the list only exists on paper. Training staff is a couple of hours per person, done properly. And if the system lives on a machine in your shop, somebody maintains it, patches it, and runs backups forever. In a small shop that somebody is you, on a Sunday, and the true cost of it only becomes visible on the day the backups turn out not to have been running.

A cloud system moves that last part to the vendor. Part of what a monthly fee buys is not being a system administrator.

The first year, totalled

Industry guidance puts a complete small business POS setup at 1,000 to 3,500 in the first year, hardware and software and setup together. That matches what shops actually report.

But that range assumes you buy the bundle. Here is the same shop, done the lean way:

	Traditional bundle	Browser based, lean
Till hardware	400 to 900	0, use what you own
Setup and install	100 to 300	0
Software, year one	300 to 1,200	0 to 300
Scanner	included, or 50	0 to 40
Card processing	the same either way	the same either way

Processing sits in both columns unchanged, because it has nothing to do with which software you picked. Strip it out and the difference between those two columns is most of a thousand, in year one, for a shop that is not yet certain it will still exist in year three.

Two shops, actual arithmetic

A small shop, 8,000 a month on card. Processing at 2.9 percent is 232 a month. Software at 30. Hardware amortised, say 25. Total around 287, and 80 percent of it is processing. For this shop, moving the rate to 2.4 percent saves 40 a month, which is more than the software costs. The software decision barely matters financially. Pick on whether the staff can use it.

A busier shop, 30,000 a month on card, two tills. Processing at 2.9 percent is 870. Software at 49 plus a 25 second-terminal fee is 74. Total around 944. Processing is now 92 percent of the bill. Half a percent off the rate is 150 a month, 1,800 a year, and it should be the only thing on the agenda.

The pattern does not reverse as you grow. It gets more extreme. Processing is the cost of a POS. Everything else is noise around it, which is precisely the opposite of how the industry presents it.

What to ask for in writing

Not a demo. A written quote with these six lines on it.

1. Monthly software fee, on the tier that includes the features I was shown.
2. Cost per additional register.
3. Every module that is extra, and its price.
4. Card processing rate, and whether I may use my own provider.
5. Contract length and the charge for leaving early.
6. Hardware I must buy from you rather than may buy from you.

A vendor who will put all six in an email is one you can plan around. One who will not is telling you which of the six is embarrassing.

Where StoreWave sits

StoreWave is five US dollars a month for the paid tier, with a free tier of five team members and twenty products and no card needed to start. There are no per-terminal fees, because a till is a browser tab and charging for tabs would be strange. There are no modules: reports, inventory, purchase orders, returns, loyalty and customer records are in both tiers.

On the big number, StoreWave records card payments rather than processing them. That is a deliberate choice with a real consequence for your bill: your processing rate stays a separate negotiation with a provider you chose, we cannot mark it up, and switching processors does not mean switching POS. Given that processing is 80 to 90 percent of what a POS setup actually costs, that seemed like the wrong thing to lock anybody into.

Hardware is whatever you own. There is nothing to buy from us and nothing to install.