Pub till quotes: the tier sets the price, not the till count

The price you were quoted for a pub till is the entry tier. Most bars cannot run on the entry tier.

This is the part of EPOS pricing that catches publicans out, and it has very little to do with how many tills sit on the bar. Hospitality software is sold in tiers, and the features a bar actually leans on through a Friday night live above the bottom one. So the number that decides your bill is not the till count. It is which tier your must have features sit in.

Here is how that works on two systems that publish their prices openly, and what the step up costs over a year.

What the entry tier actually buys

Lightspeed publishes its restaurant pricing in three tiers. Basic is listed at €89 a month and comes with 1 licence. Core is €159 a month with 2 licences. Pro is €249 a month with 3 licences.

Basic covers the till itself, kitchen operation, reporting and 24/7 chat and phone support. That is a working point of sale, and for a dry led site with one serving point it may be all you need. For most pubs it is not the plan you end up on, and the demo you were shown probably was not running on it either.

The features a bar needs are a tier up

Look at what Lightspeed puts in Core rather than Basic. Mobile EPOS for taking orders at the table. A kitchen display system. QR code ordering and payment. Inventory management. Gift cards and loyalty.

Read that list as a publican rather than as a feature grid. Getting orders away from the bar on a handheld is in there. Stock control, which in a pub means the cellar, is in there. If you serve food, the kitchen screen is in there. Three of the handful of reasons anyone changes till system at all are the reason you cannot stay on Basic.

Moving from Basic to Core is €89 to €159. That is €70 more a month, or €840 a year, and not one penny of it is because you added a till.

Pro, which is where Order Anywhere for click and collect and delivery sits, along with third party online ordering integrations, is €249. Measured against Basic that is €160 a month, or €1,920 a year.

The till count is the smaller number

Now add the tills. Lightspeed prices an extra register at €49 a month on every plan, so a second serving point on the bar is €588 a year.

That comparison is the useful one. Going up a single tier costs more per year, at €840, than putting a whole extra till on the bar, at €588. Tier is the bigger lever and it is the one nobody raises on the call.

It is also a different question from the one about how many screens a venue ends up paying for, which is worth reading separately. Device count and tier are two independent ways the same quote grows.

A second price list, the same shape

Toast publishes UK pricing in a comparable structure. Starter is listed as starting at £80 a month, Essentials at £150 a month, and anything above that is a custom quote.

Starter to Essentials is £70 a month, or £840 a year. Two unrelated price lists, and the gap between a till that works and a till that does what a bar does lands in very nearly the same place on both.

Toast also prints a line on that page worth reading twice: "Pricing includes first hardware terminal subscription. Additional charges apply for subsequent devices." The headline covers one terminal. The second one is a separate conversation that has not happened yet.

One thing to check on the page itself

Lightspeed's restaurant pricing for the UK is published in euros rather than sterling. €89, €159, €249 and €49 are all euro figures. If you are setting that next to a quote written in pounds, the two are not comparable until you convert, and the rate you convert at moves. Worth a line in your notes rather than a surprise on an invoice.

What this does not fix

Tier pricing tells you about software. It leaves several things untouched, and it is worth being plain about them.

Card processing sits outside all of it. The tier you land on has no bearing whatsoever on what you pay to take the money, and across a year that is usually the larger of the two numbers. The fee stack behind a processing quote works on its own logic and needs checking on its own terms.

Published tier prices are also list prices. What lands in your inbox after a call may differ in either direction, so treat the published figure as the start of the conversation rather than the end of it.

And a module appearing on a tier does not mean it does your job. Inventory management on a price list and cellar stock control in a pub are not automatically the same piece of work. The only way to find out is to describe your actual stock process, line by line, and ask to be shown it running.

Free hardware offers do not change any of this either, because the hardware was rarely the expensive part. That is a separate thing to unpick.

What to ask for

Four questions, answered in writing, before you put two pub EPOS quotes next to each other.

• Which tier contains handheld ordering, the kitchen screen and stock control, and what is the monthly price of that tier rather than the entry one.
• What each additional till costs per month on that specific tier.
• Which currency the published price is quoted in.
• Which of the features demonstrated to you sit in the tier you were quoted, and which sit above it.

Then ask for one number: the annual total, in pounds, for the exact tier and till count you will genuinely run.

Where we sit on this

The technology is Shift4's.

We price by module rather than by tier, and the prices sit on our pricing page in full. SkyTab POS is £39 a month, the kiosk is £39 a month, the kitchen display is £27 a month. You switch on what you need instead of buying up a tier to reach one feature. Hardware is free, installation is free and there is nothing to pay upfront. There is no terminal rental, no subscription on the terminal and no PCI compliance fee.

We do charge an authorisation fee, priced per contract, and there are terms that are not published on this website. Ask and we will put them in writing before you commit to anything.

If you want the processing side of the sum rather than the software side, the savings calculator on our pricing page will give you an annual figure from your own card takings.