Loyalty software pricing is quoted per month, but the monthly fee is rarely the largest line. This breaks down all four real costs and gives you the arithmetic to decide whether a programme pays for itself in your business.
What does loyalty software cost per month?
Loyalty software for a single-location small business costs between nothing and about €99 per month in 2026, depending mostly on how many customers you enrol and whether you need multiple locations.
| Tier | Typical monthly price | Usually includes |
|---|---|---|
| Free | €0 | One card design, a capped number of customers, basic stamps |
| Entry | €15-€35 | Unlimited customers, your branding, push messages |
| Growth | €40-€99 | Multiple locations, segmentation, campaign automation |
| Enterprise | €150+ | API access, no POS integration needed, several brands |
Price alone is a poor filter. A free plan capped at 50 customers costs nothing and delivers nothing once you reach customer 51, and a €99 plan is cheap if it replaces an hour of admin a week.
What are the hidden costs?
The three costs that surprise people are SMS delivery, reward margin, and staff time, and reward margin is almost always the largest of the three.
- SMS. Enrolment by text costs a few cents per message in most markets. At 200 new customers a month that is single-digit euros, but check whether your platform includes it or bills it separately.
- Reward margin. This is the real cost. A free coffee at ten visits discounts the whole relationship by roughly 10% of gross, before you count customers who would have come anyway.
- Staff time. Seconds per enrolment, multiplied by every customer. This is why enrolment method matters commercially and not just cosmetically.
How do I work out the reward cost properly?
You work out reward cost using the marginal cost of the reward, not its menu price, because you are giving away a coffee rather than losing a sale.
A €3.50 coffee might cost €0.60 in beans, milk and a cup. On a ten-stamp card, the customer spends €31.50 across nine paid visits and you hand back €0.60 of cost. That is a discount of under 2% of revenue, not the 10% the menu price implies. Businesses that model this with retail prices routinely conclude loyalty is unaffordable when it is not.
When does a loyalty programme pay for itself?
A loyalty programme pays for itself when the additional margin from extra visits exceeds the software fee plus the reward cost, which for most cafés means around twenty customers making one extra visit per month.
| Input | Example |
|---|---|
| Average ticket | €6.00 |
| Gross margin | 65% → €3.90 |
| Extra visits needed to cover a €29 plan | ~8 per month |
| Extra visits to cover plan + reward cost | ~20 per month |
| Customers required, at 1 extra visit each | ~20 |
Twenty customers changing behaviour slightly is a low bar for a shop serving hundreds of people a week. The bar that is hard is enrolling enough customers in the first place, which is a function of how much friction sits between the counter and the card.
What should I not pay for?
- Per-customer pricing that punishes the growth you are paying to create.
- Setup or onboarding fees for software you configure yourself in an afternoon.
- Hardware. A loyalty programme that needs a terminal is solving the vendor's problem, not yours.
- Long contracts before you have seen your own enrolment rate for a month.
What does Loonine cost?
Loonine's paid plans run from €24.99 to €84.99 per month, billed through the App Store or Google Play, with a free month included on every paid plan and cancellation from your store account at any time.
There is also a free plan, and it is worth being precise about it: it lets you design a card and see how the product works, but not enrol real customers. That is stated here rather than discovered after setup, because the most common complaint in this category is a free tier that turns out to be a demo.
SMS enrolment is included in the paid plans rather than metered separately, which matters when comparing against platforms that quote a low monthly fee and bill messages on top.
How do I compare plans that are priced differently?
Convert every plan to cost per enrolled customer per month, using your own realistic enrolment count rather than the vendor's cap. A €29 plan and a €79 plan are not comparable until you know how many customers each will be carrying.
Estimate your enrolled count as a share of your regulars, not your footfall. A café serving 500 people a week might have 150 regulars and enrol most of them over six months, so model 100 to 150, not 500.
| Plan | Monthly | At 150 customers | At 600 customers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry | €25 | €0.17 each | €0.04 each |
| Growth | €50 | €0.33 each | €0.08 each |
| Upper | €85 | €0.57 each | €0.14 each |
Monthly price divided by 150 enrolled customers, from the table above.
Against an average ticket of €5 or €6, every figure in that table is negligible per customer. The question is never really whether the software is affordable: it is whether the programme will enrol enough people to make the denominator large.
What does SMS enrolment cost by market?
SMS pricing varies by destination country, and it is the one cost that scales directly with new customers rather than total customers. In most European markets a message costs a few cents; Gulf destinations are typically somewhat higher; US and Canadian numbers are usually among the cheapest.
The volume is smaller than owners expect, because enrolment is a one-off per customer. A business adding 150 new loyalty customers a month sends 150 messages, a cost measured in single-digit euros, not a line item worth optimising.
Where SMS cost does become significant is marketing campaigns sent by text to the whole base every month. Wallet push avoids this entirely: updating the card notifies the customer at no per-message cost, which is why a wallet-based programme's running cost stays flat as the customer list grows.
How do I work out my own break-even?
Break-even is the number of extra visits per month that cover the subscription plus the rewards, and you can calculate it in four steps with figures you already know.
- Take your average ticket and multiply by your gross margin. That is the margin per extra visit.
- Divide the monthly plan cost by that figure. That is the extra visits needed to cover the software.
- Add the reward cost: roughly the marginal cost of one reward for every completed card.
- The total is your monthly break-even in extra visits. Compare it against your enrolled customer count.
For most cafés the answer lands somewhere near twenty extra visits a month, which is one additional visit from twenty customers. If your enrolled base is in the hundreds, the programme clears break-even on a small behaviour change across a minority of members.
If the arithmetic says you need more extra visits than you have enrolled customers, the problem is not the price of the software. It is that too few customers have joined, and no plan change fixes that.
Is a free loyalty programme ever enough?
A free plan is enough for evaluating a platform and almost never enough for running a programme, because the free tiers in this category are built as demonstrations rather than as products. Read the specific limit before you build on one.
The three restrictions to look for are a customer cap low enough to hit within a month, messaging removed entirely, and enrolment of real customers disabled. Any of the three makes the free tier a trial by another name, which is legitimate, as long as you know before training your staff on it.