How we source POS prices

When a vendor blocks automated access, the tempting shortcut is to take the figure from a comparison site that appears to have it. We do not, for three reasons. Several of the sites that publish POS pricing also sell or rank POS systems, so they are not neutral parties. None of them is the vendor, so none of them can be held to the number. And POS pricing moves: tier names get retired, rates get repriced, and a figure that was right when a reviewer wrote it goes on circulating long after the vendor changed it. A price is worth publishing when it comes from the company that charges it, on a page you can open yourself, on a date we can state. SpotOn is the model here, publishing both of its software-and-rate pairs, $0/station with 2.79% + 20c, and $55/station with 2.45% + 15c, on one page, which is why its row needs no caveats at all.

Live-verified (6 of 10) means we read the figure off the vendor's own pricing or fees page, and the vendor page is linked on the vendor's detail page. Vendor-blocked (2) means the vendor does publish prices but its site refuses automated requests from our infrastructure, so we publish no figure at all rather than a substitute: currently Toast and Heartland Restaurant. Quote-only (2) means the page loads and publishes no per-location price: currently Revel (now Shift4 SkyTab), NCR Aloha (NCR Voyix). An empty cell in our matrix is information, not an omission.

Three labelling habits that change what a number means. A price written "starting at" is a floor, and we say so rather than presenting it as the price. A software fee and a card rate quoted together are one price, not two, because vendors trade them against each other, so we give both or neither. And a per-location or per-station fee is reported as such, because the single most common budgeting error we see is multiplying a plan price by nothing and forgetting the add-on that scales with sites.

Hardware midpoint × terminals, plus monthly software × terminals × 12, plus monthly card fees, where monthly card fees = (your card volume × the percentage rate) + (your transaction count × the flat fee). Every input is either a published price or something you supply. What it leaves out: setup fees, training, integration work, and the recurring account fees (statement, gateway, PCI assessment, monthly minimum) that vendors disclose in contracts rather than on pricing pages. Our calculator marks any total that excludes hardware with a +, because several vendors publish no device prices and silently treating that as zero would flatter them against the vendors that do publish.

The four bands on the home page are this site's own estimate and are labelled as such. There is no public survey of small-business POS total cost of ownership to cite, and rather than attribute an estimate to a report nobody can open, we state that it is ours. Use them as a sanity check on a quote. The per-vendor figures in the matrix are the sourced numbers and the bands are not a substitute for them.

Shift4 completed its acquisition of Revel Systems on 13 June 2024 for $245.3 million of total purchase consideration, per Shift4's annual report, and routes new buyers to its own SkyTab. NCR split in October 2023 and Aloha sits with NCR Voyix. Square consolidated 18 per-vertical subscriptions into unified plans in October 2025 and has since added a custom-priced Pro tier. Clover has retired the Register Lite and Register Premium names. Each of these dates the coverage you may be reading elsewhere, so we flag them at vendor level.

Quarterly, with the full roster last read on 2026-10-03. A pre-deploy check refuses to publish if any row's read date is more than 90 days old, which is what forces the re-read rather than leaving a stale date in place. Dates on this site move only when someone has actually re-read the source.

No vendor sponsorship, no payment-processor referrals, and no affiliate links anywhere on the site. Outbound links go to vendor pricing pages and carry no tracking. If that ever changes, the links will be labelled and this page will say so before the first one ships.