A digital loyalty program costs a small business five things: the software, the card, the rewards, a few seconds of staff time per visit, and whatever the vendor charges outside its headline price. This page prices each one, with every competitor figure checked at the vendor's own pricing page on 2 October 2026.
The short version: a real loyalty program can start at nothing. Free plans in this category are genuine rather than teasers, and the paid tier a growing business moves onto is a flat monthly fee in the tens of euros, not the hundreds. What varies is not the price so much as what the free plan withholds, which is the part worth reading carefully.
The cost lines, one table
A loyalty program has five cost lines. Only one of them is the software.
| Cost line | What decides it | On Fideliya |
|---|---|---|
| Software | Your customer count and how many people scan | €0 for 20 customers and the owner scanning. €49.99 a month, or €39.99 billed yearly, for 2,500 customers, four locations and five team seats. From €99.99 a month for unlimited customers and locations and ten seats. |
| The card | Paper print runs, or a wallet pass | The Apple Wallet and Google Wallet pass is included on every plan, Free included. For comparison, 1,000 paper cards listed at €13, €25.99 and €40 (single-sided) at three online printers on 5 September 2026. |
| Rewards | What the reward costs you, times how many customers reach it | Set by you. The reward is the one cost that only appears when the program works. |
| Staff time | One scan per visit | The scanner runs in a phone browser. On Pro, each of five team members scans under their own login. |
| Hardware, setup, per-card and per-message fees | The vendor's model | €0 on every plan. Broadcasts come with the plan: one a month on Free, three on Pro, ten on Enterprise, and extra packs can be bought. |
Fideliya Pro for a year is 12 × €49.99 = €599.88 billed monthly, or 12 × €39.99 = €479.88 billed yearly. At the 2,500-customer cap that is about two cents per customer per month.
The price range landscape
Loyalty pricing falls into four tiers, and the gap between them is wider than most owners realize.
Paper stamp cards remain the cheapest entry point on the surface. A thousand plain cards on decent stock listed at €13, €25.99 before tax and €40 at three ordinary online printers on the day this was written, the last of those for a single-sided run and about €50 printed both sides. So the honest range is roughly €13 to €50, not the higher figures this category likes to quote. The recurring cost is design time plus reprints. What no invoice shows is the loss: a paper card that goes missing leaves no record, so the share of your cards that never come back is precisely the number you cannot compute. The full paper vs digital comparison covers that in more depth.
App-based loyalty platforms, the kind where customers download a mobile app, price by customer volume and sit above the wallet-native tier for comparable features. The real cost is not on the invoice. It is adoption: every app install puts a store, a download and an account between the customer and their first stamp, and each of those is a place to give up. You pay for seats that were never filled.
Wallet-native platforms put the loyalty card into Apple Wallet and Google Wallet without an app. Several publish a free plan outright. Among the vendors whose own pricing pages we checked on 2 October 2026, paid entry starts at €19 a month, Fideliya Pro is €49.99, and Fideliya Enterprise starts at €99.99. Two of the others publish monthly plans in US dollars, 39 USD and 25 USD a month, quoted as they publish them and never converted at an undated rate. A third, LoyaltyPass, now sells a one-time build from 9,500 USD instead of a monthly plan.
POS-locked systems, loyalty modules built into payment terminals, are usually priced per location on top of the terminal itself, and several do not publish that price at all. The cost that matters is not the monthly line. It is the lock-in: switch payment processors and the loyalty program goes with them, taking your customer history along. Useful if you are already deep in one ecosystem, expensive in optionality the day you want to leave.
What "free" actually means
Almost every loyalty platform advertises a free tier. Read the asterisks. The patterns repeat across vendors.
Customer caps are the most common gate, and they vary enormously: some free plans cap enrolled customers in the tens, others place no cap at all. Fideliya's own free plan covers 20. Whatever the number, work out how long your counter takes to reach it before you build anything on top, because hitting the cap mid-program is exactly when a free plan was designed to stop being free.
Time-limited trials are the second pattern. Of the vendors we checked on 2 October 2026, the one monthly plan without a free tier, Loopy Loyalty, runs a 15-day trial, and what matters is where you land when it ends. If the platform reverts to a stripped version or stops entirely, you were evaluating, not building, and the cards your customers are holding stop working. If it settles onto a free plan that still runs a real program, the trial was a preview and the program carries on.
Feature gates are the third. The free tier exists but excludes the things customers actually interact with: branded design, wallet passes, push notifications, analytics. You're paying nothing and getting nothing the customer can see.
Honest framing on Fideliya's own free plan: the wallet pass your customers actually hold is included, and the plan has no end date. Twenty customers, a real branded pass, for as long as you want it. New businesses also get fourteen days of Pro at signup so you can see the whole program before you choose, and when those fourteen days finish the account settles onto its plan and keeps running with the pass design intact. Pro at €49.99/mo is where the full program lives: the cover image on the pass, three broadcasts a month instead of one, advanced analytics, referrals, gift cards and five team seats. The free plan is a working program in its own right, and it is also the entry door to Pro.
The right question isn't "what's the free tier?" It's "what do I need to pay to get the program I actually want to run?"
The hidden costs nobody mentions
The headline price is the first cost. These are the second, third, and fourth costs that don't appear in pricing pages.
An Apple Developer Account is billed annually by Apple and is required separately on some developer-oriented platforms. Wallet-native platforms typically carry it for you. It is worth confirming before signing up, because when it is not bundled the bill arrives from Apple rather than from your loyalty vendor, and it is easy to miss in a comparison.
Per-scan or per-transaction fees apply on some platforms: a few cents per stamp added. Any single scan sounds trivial, which is the point. The fee scales directly with how well the program works, so the more your regulars come back the more the invoice grows, and the successful month is the expensive one. Multiply the per-stamp rate by a busy month on your own counter before you sign.
One-off setup and onboarding fees still appear on some enterprise-oriented platforms. For a small business this is friction at the worst possible moment, which is before you have any evidence the program works at all. A platform confident in its own product does not need to charge you for starting.
SMS messaging is billed per message by the carrier, whoever resells it to you. If your "loyalty program" leans on text messages, that per-message cost can quietly become the dominant line on the bill, and it grows with your customer list. Push notifications through a wallet pass carry no per-message charge. SMS rarely works that way.
Annual contracts with cancellation penalties are still common. If you sign a 12-month deal and the program isn't working, you owe the balance. Look for month-to-month plans even if the annual is cheaper headline-wise.
Hardware requirements show up on POS-locked systems. The "loyalty" cost is really the cost of the terminal plus the merchant rate plus the loyalty module. Disentangling them is hard.
Price-for-feature comparison
Without naming every vendor, here's the rough shape of what each price point gets you in 2026:
Free is a real tier in this category, not a teaser. Several wallet-native vendors publish one, and the differences between them are the whole story: one caps enrolled customers, another leaves the count open but makes the wallet pass itself a paid feature, a third gives you the pass and caps the list. Fideliya's free plan issues a real branded wallet pass to 20 customers with no end date.
From roughly €19 a month upward is where the full-featured wallet-native plans sit: Apple Wallet and Google Wallet passes, points, referrals, push notifications, custom branding, real analytics. Fideliya Pro is €49.99, or €39.99 billed yearly. This is the band most small businesses actually land in once the free plan runs out of room.
Around €100 a month buys bigger feature sets: multi-location support, deeper integrations, higher limits, and in some products prepaid cards or memberships. Fideliya Enterprise sits here from €99.99, or €79.99 billed yearly, with unlimited customers, unlimited locations and ten team seats. Fideliya Pro already covers four locations, so on Fideliya the step to Enterprise comes with a customer list past 2,500, a fifth location, a sixth person on the team or a second business.
Above that is genuine enterprise territory: heavy API access, formal security certification, dedicated account management. Much of it is not published at all, which is itself informative. For chains and franchises, not for a single cafe.
A number of platforms in this category publish no price at all and route you to a sales call instead. That is a pricing model, not an oversight, and it reliably costs more than the published alternatives. For a small business with a few hundred customers, a quote-only vendor should not be on the shortlist.
The cost of doing nothing
The most expensive option in loyalty isn't any of the platforms. It's running a leaky paper program for another year and never measuring it.
Run the arithmetic on your own numbers, because nobody else's will fit. Take your monthly revenue, decide what a plausible lift in repeat visits would be worth over a year, and set it against a platform fee you can read in advance: Fideliya Pro is €49.99 a month, so €599.88 a year, and the free plan is €0 while you are finding out. We are deliberately not supplying the revenue figure or the lift, because a worked example built on invented inputs is an argument dressed as arithmetic. Whether any lift is reachable in your shop is the thing worth testing. See our coffee shop loyalty page for the full vertical breakdown.
The platform fee is noise against the retention lift. The number that actually matters is whether customers come back twice instead of once. Start on a free plan and find out before you spend anything.
How to evaluate
When comparing platforms, the questions that determine the real cost are:
Is the pricing flat per month, or usage-based? Flat is predictable. Usage-based gets expensive precisely when your program is succeeding.
Are there location gates? Some platforms charge separately for each additional location. A flat-rate platform that covers multiple locations is often cheaper than a "cheap" platform with per-location pricing.
Are the features you need behind upgrade gates? Push notifications, referrals, analytics, branding: confirm each is in the tier you're planning to pay for.
What's the contract length? Month-to-month is friction-free if it doesn't work. Annual contracts are a commitment without proof.
Red flags: opaque pricing where you need to "talk to sales" before seeing a number, per-scan fees that scale with your success, required hardware purchases, mandatory setup fees, automatic upgrades with no warning when caps are hit.
The honest budget for a small business loyalty program in 2026 is nothing to start, a flat fee in the tens of euros once it is working, and the time to design the reward structure properly. Everything above that is either a teaser, a trap, or enterprise pricing that doesn't apply to you. The platform fee is the smallest line in your loyalty program. The actual cost is the customer relationships you are either building or losing every day.