Restaurant Loyalty Software Cost in 2026: Why Prices Don't Match

If you run a restaurant or bar in Medford, Burlington County or anywhere in South Jersey, the restaurant loyalty software cost you find online depends on who you ask. One vendor posts a monthly number. Another says "contact us." A third folds loyalty into your POS plan. Here is what we could confirm on October 8, 2026, and what we could not. The one clear published figure we retrieved is Square's, which lists Square Plus at $49 per location per month with a loyalty program included. Everything else needs a written quote. This post is one spoke of our guide to restaurant loyalty program software and guest data for South Jersey. Start by getting your quotes into the same shape.

What we could confirm, and what we could not

We searched for current published prices from the vendors owners ask us about most. Square publishes. For Toast and FiveStars, we did not retrieve a current price page we could cite this month. So we print no Toast or FiveStars number here. A number we cannot source and date is worse than no number.

Loyalty pricing we could and could not source, as of October 8, 2026

Vendor	What we found	Status
Square (Plus plan)	$49 per location per month, loyalty rewards program listed in the plan, plus card processing fees	Published on Square's pricing page
Square (Free plan)	$0 per month; loyalty is listed under Plus, not Free	Published, same page
Toast	No current figure we could cite	Get a written quote
FiveStars	No current figure we could cite	Get a written quote
Standalone and wallet-card tools	Vary widely by member count, location count and contract term	Compare quote to quote

The Square pages we pulled today may be cached copies of older versions. Confirm the live page before you sign anything. We also don't know whether your Toast or FiveStars quote will include setup fees, because that depends on your contract.

Why the prices don't match

Two vendors can both say "loyalty" and be selling different things. These are the pricing shapes you will run into.

• Bundled in a POS plan. Square's pricing page lists the loyalty program inside the Plus plan. You pay for the whole plan and loyalty comes with it. That makes loyalty look cheap and the POS look expensive, or the reverse.
• Sold as an add-on. A vendor quotes the POS first and loyalty as a separate line. Two quotes for the same restaurant can differ by what was bundled, not by what the software does.
• Priced by member count. Standalone tools often scale with how many guests are enrolled. Your bill rises when the program works.
• Priced by location. Square's figure is per location. A second bar or a seasonal shore spot doubles it.
• "Contact us." No public price. The quote depends on your size, contract length and what the rep is trying to sell that quarter.

Square itself shows how a price can drift. Its developer documentation for Loyalty still describes sellers subscribing to Square Loyalty as its own product. The current pricing page lists the program inside a plan. Older comparison posts we saw quote a standalone add-on a few dollars below $49, which is likely why you hear a range rather than one figure. We cannot tell you which one your account would show, so ask.

The Square math, worked through

Square is the only vendor where we can do arithmetic on published numbers. Treat this as an illustration, not a quote.

• Per Square's pricing page, Plus at $49 per month is $588 a year for one location. Two locations is $1,176.
• The same page lists Premium at $149 per location per month, which is $1,788 a year per location.
• Per Square's restaurant pricing page, in-person card rates are 2.6% + 15¢ on Free and 2.5% + 15¢ on Plus.

That rate gap is 0.1 percentage points. To make the $49 pay for itself through the lower rate alone, you would need about $49,000 a month in tap, dip and swipe sales. Most single-location restaurants will not clear that. So for most, the $49 is really the price of the loyalty program and the extra POS features, not a processing discount.

The same page lists a 30-day free trial on Plus and Premium, and says you can cancel or switch plans at any time. That is a fair way to test whether your guests enroll before you commit a season to it.

Costs that never show up on the quote

The reward itself

Software fees are small next to the discounts you give away. A "redeem 10 points for $1 off" rule, the sort of example Square's Loyalty documentation uses, is a real margin cost on every redeemed order. Run your reward math on your own food and liquor cost before you pick a platform. No vendor can do that for you.

Staff time

Someone has to ask for the phone number at the host stand and explain the program to a table of six. Someone also has to fix the duplicate profiles. That is hours per week in a busy shore-season month, and it never appears on an invoice.

Who owns the guest list

This is the cost that matters most and gets priced least. If your loyalty data lives inside a vendor's account, leaving means starting over. Before you sign, ask three questions in writing:

1. Can I export every guest record, with visit history and contact consent, as a file I can open myself?
2. What happens to my guest data if I cancel or switch POS?
3. Is there a fee, or a delay, for that export?

If the answers are vague, price that risk in. Owning that list is the idea behind the custom CRM work we do for restaurants and bars. We cover the mechanics of moving a program in our winter cutover checklist for switching loyalty or POS. Winter is the quiet season, so a switch is less likely to break June.

When building your own starts to make sense

For one location at $588 a year, a custom build will not save you money on loyalty alone. We would tell you to stay on the plan you have. The math changes when loyalty is one piece of a larger guest system: reservations, events, private-party inquiries, follow-up emails and a single guest profile that your team actually opens.

That is the shape of the restaurant CRM we build. It connects guest profiles, reservations, events, tasks and follow-up in a system you own under the project agreement. A loyalty feature can sit inside that system, but we have not published a loyalty-specific price, and we won't guess at one here.

What we have published: custom apps from iOLab range from $15,000 to $100,000+ depending on tier. A loyalty layer would be scoped inside that, once we know your POS, your guest volume and what you need to report on. Hosting, third-party subscriptions and ongoing support sit outside the build and are scoped separately in the proposal.

If you are weighing the POS itself, our post on when a custom POS beats Square or Toast walks through that decision. Most restaurants should not replace the POS. Many should own the guest data that sits beside it.

How to get quotes you can compare

Send the same short brief to every vendor, then put the answers in one sheet.

1. Locations and seasons. State how many sites you have and whether any are seasonal.
2. Monthly guest count. Give a rough number of unique guests, since this can change the price.
3. What is bundled. Ask for POS, loyalty, email, online ordering and gift cards as separate lines, even if sold as a package.
4. Processing fees. Ask what card rates apply with and without the loyalty product.
5. Any percentage of sales. Ask whether the vendor takes a share of loyalty-driven revenue.
6. Term and exit. Get the contract length, renewal terms and the export answer in writing.
7. Year-two price. Ask what the price becomes after any introductory period.

Then compute a 12-month total and a 36-month total per vendor. The 36-month number is where an add-on that looked cheap and a bundle that looked expensive finally swap places, or don't. If you want to see how we think about the owned side of that comparison, the booking site and captain's CRM we built for Sand Bar Joe's is a published example of guest and booking data kept in a system the business controls. It is a booking and CRM build, not a loyalty program.

What we'd do in your position

If you already run Square and want to test a program, the published 30-day trial is a low-risk way to learn whether guests enroll. If you run Toast, ask for the loyalty line in writing and compare it with a standalone tool. If you have a quote you can't decode, send it to us and we will tell you what it covers. We are not going to say a competing tool is wrong for you, because the right choice depends on your POS, your volume and your plan for the guest list.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does restaurant loyalty software cost per month?

It depends on the vendor and the bundle. The one price we could confirm is Square's, which lists its Plus plan at $49 per location per month with a loyalty rewards program included. Other vendors, including Toast and FiveStars, we could not confirm from a current published page, so ask for a written quote.

Why do restaurant loyalty quotes differ so much?

Vendors price loyalty in different ways: bundled in a POS plan, as an add-on, by member count, by location, or by a private quote. Two quotes can describe different scopes. Compare them by asking each vendor for the same line items and then totaling 12 and 36 months.

Is Square Loyalty free?

No. Square's pricing page lists the loyalty rewards program under the Plus plan, not the Free plan. Plus is $49 per location per month with a 30-day free trial. Confirm the live page before you sign, since plan contents and prices change, and ask whether your account shows loyalty as part of the plan or as a separate line.

Is custom restaurant loyalty software cheaper than a subscription?

Not for one location running a single points program. A subscription is usually cheaper there. A custom build starts to make sense when loyalty is part of a guest CRM you want to own. Our published custom app range is $15,000 to $100,000+, with hosting and support scoped separately.

Prices in this article are starting ranges published on iolab.co/pricing. Hosting, third-party subscriptions and ongoing support are scoped separately in your proposal.

Next step

If you are staring at two loyalty quotes and can't tell what each one covers, talk to us about a custom CRM that keeps your guest list in your hands. We will tell you plainly when a subscription is the better buy.