Comparisons

Till and EPOS systems for a first cafe: what each one costs, and what it costs to leave

Seven options a first UK cafe would shortlist, with the monthly price, the card rate and the exit terms from each vendor's own pages. The subscription is the small number.

Alex Riesenkampff

8 September 2026 · 13 min read · Markdown

Every comparison of cafe tills leads with the monthly subscription, and for a cafe that is the wrong number to lead with. A venue taking £18,000 a month across the counter pays £3,780 a year at 1.75% and £2,366.40 on SumUp's 0.99% domestic rate once its £228 of subscription is counted. That £1,413.60 gap is larger than what any of these systems charges for software. The card rate is the decision. The subscription is a detail attached to it.

Which makes the next part more awkward than it sounds. Two of the seven will not tell you their card rate. Lightspeed publishes a chargeback fee and nothing else. Epos Now says it has "one flat rate for payment processing on Visa, Mastercard, Diners, and Discover" and never says what the rate is. You cannot finish the sum on either of them without booking a call, and a sum you cannot finish is not a comparison.

Then there is what it costs to leave. Four of these let you stop this month. One needs three months' notice or it renews for the length of the original term. One sells a care plan on a fixed thirty-six month contract whose early termination fee is the whole outstanding balance.

Who publishes this, and what connects us to it

Super44 publishes this page and is not one of the entries, because we do not sell a till. We read data out of several of the systems below, including SumUp, Square and Lightspeed, so a venue running one of them is a venue we can work with. Our founders came from SumUp and SumUp is in our partnership pipeline, which matters here, since SumUp comes out cheapest on cards at the turnover a busy cafe does. Check that against SumUp's own pricing page rather than against us.

Those are the numbers each vendor leads with, and most of them are doing some work. Two are sale prices, two are floors with a "from" in front of them, and one is a free tier that stops being free the moment you want the thing you were shopping for. Here is the same table with the marketing taken off.

None of that makes any of them a bad buy. It makes the headline a poor way to choose between them.

The card reader you already have

The option nobody sells you, and the right one for a surprising number of first months. A card reader, a notebook and a spreadsheet on Sunday evening will run a two-person cafe, and the whole cost is the reader you already bought.

What it does well is stay out of the way while the business is still changing shape. In the first months you are moving the counter, cutting three cakes and adding two, and working out whether the 7am opening pays. None of that needs an item-level report; it needs you standing in the room. Setting up a till around a menu you are about to change twice is work you will do again.

Who should not do this: anyone making the same decision more than once a month without data. The cost of this option is invisible and real. You cannot see which item earns its space on the counter, which hour carries the day, or that Tuesday has quietly been losing money since February. Owners usually discover all three at once, about a year in, from an accountant.

Cost: nothing beyond the card rate you already pay. Work out what that is before comparing anything below, because it is the number every entry here has to beat.

PayPal Point of Sale, formerly Zettle

Zettle is being renamed. PayPal's own help page describes "Zettle by PayPal, PayPal's in-person payments offering" as "getting a new name and look", the zettle.com page carries a notice that it "becomes PayPal Point of Sale", and paypal.com states flatly that "Zettle is now PayPal Point of Sale". Both names are in use, so search for either.

What it does well is the thing a counter-service cafe wants first: one account, one flat rate, no monthly bill. The till app costs nothing and the card rate is a single published 1.75% covering major cards and mobile wallets, American Express included. That last part is quietly unusual. Most providers price Amex separately and higher, and a cafe near an office does more Amex than it expects.

Who should not pick it: a cafe that needs table management, coursing or a kitchen display. This is a till and a card machine done well, and it is not a hospitality EPOS. If you are seating people and firing courses, start at Square.

Cost: £0 a month for the software, 1.75% in person, 2.5% on Zettle Invoice. Hardware is bought outright, from £29 for a reader, £149 for a terminal and £169 for a store kit, all excluding VAT. No contracts and no recurring fees.

SumUp

The cheapest place for a busy cafe's card takings to land, and the entry where the arithmetic is worth doing carefully. Pay-as-you-go is 1.69% in person with no monthly fee. Payments Plus is £19 a month and drops that to 0.99% for in-person payments made with domestic debit and credit cards.

What it does well is scale the discount with you. That 0.76 percentage point pays for the £19 at roughly £2,500 a month of domestic card turnover, and everything above that is yours. At £18,000 a month it is worth £1,413.60 a year against a 1.75% rate. SumUp also publishes what most card companies hide, offering "bespoke fees and flexible terms" above £10,000 a month, so there is a stated point at which asking for a better rate is normal rather than cheeky.

Who should not pick it: a venue whose card mix is heavy on American Express, commercial cards or overseas visitors, because the 0.99% covers UK domestic debit and credit only and everything else stays at 1.69% on both plans. A hotel-adjacent bar can find the discount much smaller than the headline suggests. Work it out from your own statement rather than from the plan page.

Cost: £0 or £19 a month for payments, £39 a month for POS Plus if you want table management and multi-printer setup. SumUp does not publish its reader and till hardware prices on the pricing page. No long-term commitments, cancel any time.

Square for Restaurants

The strongest hospitality software here that a cafe can start using for nothing. The free Restaurants plan gives you "basic functionality to take orders and payments"; Plus is £69 a month per location and adds table management, coursing and live sales reporting after a thirty-day trial.

What it does well is let you grow into it without a decision. You can open on the free plan, run the counter for six months, put tables in and move up when the tables exist, and nothing about the account changes. Its payment terms also carry something none of the others state: if Square raises its payment fees, you may terminate immediately and free of charge before the increase takes effect. That is a specific contractual protection rather than a promise about service.

Who should not pick it: a cafe doing serious card turnover on a thin margin. At 1.75% it is the joint most expensive published rate here, and £18,000 a month costs £1,413.60 a year more than SumUp's domestic rate. If your operation is a counter, a queue and no tables, you are paying the higher rate for hospitality features you will not open.

Cost: £0 on the Restaurants free plan and £828 a year on Plus. The free plan is genuinely free, but 1.75% on £18,000 a month is £3,780 a year, so the software price is the smaller half of the decision either way. 1.4% plus 25p online. Square's general POS Plus plan starts at £29 a month if the restaurant features are not the point. Reader £19 plus VAT, Terminal £149, Register £699. Custom pricing is offered above £200,000 of annual sales, and you can cancel at any time.

Loyverse

The one built on a different premise: free software, and you bring your own card processing. Its POS, dashboard, kitchen display and customer display are each listed at no cost, and the paid add-ons are stock and staff features rather than the till itself.

What it does well is separate the two decisions. Because Loyverse "doesn't directly process card payments" and connects to third-party providers instead, your card rate and your till are not the same contract, so changing one does not mean changing both. For an owner who expects to renegotiate card rates in two years, that is worth real money, and it is the opposite of how everything else on this page is sold.

Who should not pick it: anyone who wants one number to ring. You are assembling this yourself, and the pieces are yours to keep working. Its pages also make no claim about table management, coursing or floor plans anywhere, so treat it as a counter till with good stock control rather than a restaurant system, and confirm the payment providers available in the UK before you commit, because the list is behind a country filter.

Cost: nothing for the core apps, and that is real rather than a teaser. The add-ons are per store: £5 a month for unlimited sales history, £20 for employee management, £20 for advanced inventory, all before tax. A cafe that wants all three is at £540 a year, which is the number to compare, not the zero. Card costs are whatever your chosen provider charges. Subscriptions auto-renew and cancel any time.

Lightspeed Restaurant

A serious restaurant platform, and the one whose published price covers the smallest share of what you will pay. The subscription is clear enough: £79 a month for your first terminal, and £39 for each additional register. What it does not publish is the card rate or a single hardware price, which on this page are the two numbers that decide the bill.

What it does well is depth at a scale a cafe rarely needs but a restaurant does, with the payments, kitchen display, QR ordering, reservations and inventory sold as one estate. Lightspeed states that more than 200 Michelin-starred restaurants use it, which is its own claim about its own customers and a fair signal of where the product is aimed.

Who should not pick it: a single cafe, on the terms alone. Cancellation requires ninety days' notice before the end of the current term, and missing that window renews the contract "for a duration equal to the Initial Term". The agreement is governed by Quebec law with venue in Montreal. Combine that with an unpublished card rate and unpublished hardware prices, and a first cafe is signing a multi-year commitment whose largest component it cannot cost in advance.

Cost: £79 a month covers one terminal, so a cafe with a second till is at £118, which is £1,416 a year before hardware. Hardware carries no published price at all, and the only published payment figure is a £15 chargeback fee, so the subscription is the one part of the total you can work out before a call.

Epos Now

The most traditional thing here, and the one that arrives with an engineer. It sells hardware, software and support as a bundle. The headline is "Complete POS System for only £299", shown on the same page as "WAS £849, NOW FROM £299*", so treat it as a sale price rather than a standing one. It is conditional on "a 12-month payments, care and support subscription starting at £54 per month", with handhelds from £15 a month and a kitchen display from £19.

What it does well is remove the assembly. For an owner who does not want to choose a tablet, a stand, a printer and a processor separately, one supplier who installs it and answers the phone is worth paying for, and it states that it charges "no authorisation or PCI compliance fees", two of the small line items that routinely make a card bill bigger than the quote.

Who should not pick it: anyone who wants to be able to leave. The software licence runs a minimum of twelve months and renews for further twelve month periods unless you give thirty days' written notice before the renewal date. The ProtectNow care plan is a fixed thirty-six months, and cancelling it early costs the full outstanding balance. Epos Now also has no pricing page: the figures above come from marketing subpages and its terms document, and its card rate is not published anywhere.

Cost: about £947 across a first year, being the £299 hardware plus twelve months at £54, and the £54 is itself a floor rather than a price. The card rate is one flat rate whose number you get on a call. UK review sites that have asked put it anywhere from 0.55% to 1.7% on Visa and Mastercard and around 2.5% on Amex, with one operator reporting a rate that rose after signing. The spread is the point: whatever you are quoted is a negotiated number, so get it in writing with the review terms attached.

So which one

If you have been open under six months and the menu is still moving, do not buy a till. Use the reader you have, keep a written record, and spend the money on the coffee. Come back when you are making the same decision blind more than once a month.

If you are counter service and taking real money on cards, put SumUp Payments Plus next to your current effective rate and do the multiplication. At £18,000 a month it is the cheapest option on this page by over a thousand pounds a year, and that is a bigger number than any feature difference here. Our card fee calculator does the comparison at your own turnover and card mix, which matters because SumUp's discount only covers UK domestic cards.

If you have tables, a kitchen and a queue at eleven, start on Square's free Restaurants plan and move to Plus when the tables justify £69. It has the best hospitality software here that costs nothing to try, and no minimum term to regret.

If you want stock control and loyalty and you are comfortable choosing your own card provider, Loyverse is the one that keeps those two contracts separate, which is worth more in year three than it looks in year one.

And if you are being sold Lightspeed or Epos Now for a first cafe, ask for the card rate in writing before anything else. Both are capable systems doing real work in bigger rooms than yours. Neither will let you finish the sum on a website, and the exit terms on both are long enough that getting the sum wrong is expensive for years.

Whatever you pick, read the leaving clause before the feature list. Our guide to getting out of a POS without losing your data covers what to ask for in writing at the point you sign, when you still have leverage. If you want the fee detail on the three that publish, we keep a page each on SumUp, Square and PayPal Point of Sale.