Compare your loyalty options by the work they need to do.
No loyalty app is best for every shop. Compare four things: the mechanics you can actually run, where a visit gets recorded, what a plan costs in your own currency, and what the vendor has not shipped.
Four questions decide this, and price is only one of them.
Feature checkmarks do not tell you which tool hands work back to you at the counter. These four questions do, and you can ask them of any vendor.
| Ask this | Why it decides the outcome | How Rewardfinity answers |
|---|---|---|
| Which mechanics can I run at the same time? | A shop that outgrows stamp cards needs points, tiers and referrals without a second subscription or a second migration. | Rewardfinity gives you every loyalty type in one app. New web workspaces can try the loyalty, promotions, channel and game modules for 60 days, without a card. Connected-provider usage and reward funding are separate. |
| Where does a visit actually get recorded? | If recording a visit needs hardware you do not own, the program quietly stops at the counter. | QR scanning runs on a phone or tablet you already have. Square POS is native; Clover, Lightspeed, Loyverse, Zettle and Vend connect through Zapier webhooks. |
| What does it cost where I trade? | One global sticker price prices out every shop outside the currency it was set in. | Plans are indexed to local purchasing power across 36 countries. Grow is US$29, CA$39, £24, A$45, ₹499 or ₦9,900 a month. |
| What has the vendor not shipped yet? | A roadmap feature written in the present tense is the most expensive thing to discover after you migrate. | The unshipped list is on this page, with what you get today instead. |
If you have already shortlisted a vendor, the four named comparisons go feature by feature. If you have not, match the mechanic to the job first.
Nine mechanics, and the job each one is actually for.
Running every mechanic at once is not a strategy. Each answers a different question, and each has a case where it is the wrong tool. Read the third column first.
| Mechanic | The job it does | When it is the wrong tool |
|---|---|---|
| Points | Rewards spend across a varied basket, at a rate you set, with rounding, minimums and per-order caps. | When the basket barely varies. On a one-item menu, points are slower to explain than a stamp. |
| Stamp cards | Counts visits toward a free item. The easiest to explain across a counter in one sentence. | When order value varies a lot. Ten espressos and ten brunches earn the same reward. |
| Tiers | Gives regulars a reason to stay regular, with 1–10× earn multipliers per tier. | Below a few hundred members, nobody reaches the top tier and no one notices it exists. |
| Referrals | Turns one regular into two, and pays both sides of the introduction. | Before you can reliably deliver a good first visit. A referral spends your best customer’s credibility. |
| Promo codes | Time-boxes a push — a slow Tuesday, a new line — without changing the standing program. | As a permanent discount. A code that never expires is a price cut wearing a loyalty label. |
| Spin-to-win | Adds a variable reward to a routine action, for members, the counter and staff. | When the prize pool is not funded. An unfunded wheel is a promise you have to break in person. |
| Raffles | Concentrates one large prize into a single draw, which suits a slow season. | When members want a certain small reward now. A raffle pays almost everyone nothing. |
| Prepaid punch-down cards | Sells ten visits up front: cash today, and a reason to come back ten times. | When you cannot commit to honouring the remaining visits if your own prices move. |
| Staff incentives | Attributes counter actions — visits punched, purchases recorded, redemptions handled — to the person who did them, then converts those into spins on a staff wheel with an owner-set allowance. | Without normalising for shift length or transactions served, comparing two people is unfair and they will know it. |
The last row is the one to pause on. Most loyalty tools recommend a staff competition and ship nothing to run one with. Staff incentives and customer loyalty are one build here, not two subscriptions — and the boundary is real: attribution covers punches, purchases and redemptions, not member signups.
The subscription is the small half of the bill.
Comparison shopping fixates on the monthly fee, which is usually the cheaper line. Here is the arithmetic on one illustrative café, every step shown.
| Line | Working | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| Software — Grow, Canada | Grow price set for Canada, once billing starts | CA$39 |
| Reward payout | 120 members reach a 10-visit reward × CA$5 drink | CA$600 |
| Total program cost | 600 + 39 | CA$639 |
| Software share of the bill | 39 ÷ 639 | 6% |
| Cost per rewarded regular | 639 ÷ 120 | CA$5.33 |
Illustrative example — not a customer result. Substitute your own reward value and redemption count; the ratio is what matters, not these figures.
Software is about 6% of that bill; the reward is about 94%. So the question that decides your costs is not which vendor charges $10 less — it is whether the tool lets you set the earn rate, threshold, minimum spend and per-order cap precisely enough to control the other 94%. Reward payouts pass through at cost here. See plan prices for your country and what a loyalty program costs.
What is not shipped, stated before you migrate.
This is the column most comparison pages leave out. Everything below is either not built or not enabled; the third column is what you get instead today.
| Capability | Status | What you get today |
|---|---|---|
| Automatic gift-card payout | Not shipped | The reward is raised and stays pending until someone fulfils it. The merchant-owned vault is AES-GCM encrypted with a separate authorised reveal. |
| Apple Wallet and Google Wallet passes | Apple: standalone web programs; Google: configured path | Apple Wallet cards and updates are available for standalone web programs after program setup. Members must add their card to Apple Wallet. Shopify access is not enabled. Google Wallet is a separate configured path, subject to issuer approval. Members can use the hosted member card and PWA without either wallet. |
| Staff gift cards | Coming soon | The staff wheel and per-person attribution work now. Staff gift-card allocation needs a separate audited backend first. |
| Rewardfinity NFC reader | Planned, not purchasable | QR scanning on hardware you already own. No reader to buy, and no reader to wait for. |
| Owned email or SMS channel | Not shipped | Web push, the hosted member page, and lifecycle automations for birthday, win-back, welcome, anniversary and expiry. |
If a boundary above rules us out, that is a comparison page doing its job. What is shipped is on features, connection states on integrations, and the REST API for developers.
Bring your members with you.
Members and balances move by CSV. The importer shows a header mapping and waits for your review before committing, because an import that silently guesses a column is worse than no import.
Questions people ask before choosing
Which loyalty program software is best for a small business?
What loyalty software lets me run customer rewards and staff incentives together?
Is there a genuinely free loyalty program app for a small business?
What is the cheapest loyalty app for a small shop that also works with Shopify?
What is the best app to replace paper punch cards at my shop?
Do I need a POS to run a loyalty program?
Choose the loyalty operating model that fits your store.
The Free plan needs no card. The cheapest way to finish this comparison is to run a stamp card for a week and watch what your counter does with it.