Virtual punch card apps: what a cafe actually pays

What six virtual punch card apps charge, and what they charge for

Square is the awkward row. It no longer sells loyalty on its own, because its October 2025 repackaging folded the feature into Square Plus at "$49/month per location" alongside staff management, marketing and the point-of-sale features, so a cafe already running Square is choosing a plan rather than adding a line item.

Two smaller limits matter. Loopy Loyalty's $25 Starter plan covers "1 card design", so a second card, a lunch card sitting next to the coffee one, means moving up to the $69 Growth plan. Stamp Me publishes two programs on any plan and charges "a one-time setup fee of $15" for each one after that.

The same cafe at 200, 800 and 2,500 customers

Five of those six bills never move. Only digiPunchCard's does, because it is the one that counts heads: its tiers stop at 150, 600, 1,500, 3,000, 10,000 and 20,000 customers, and crossing a line costs another $10 or $15 a month. Sign up four people a day and you pass 1,500 in about a year.

That reverses the usual warning. Per-customer pricing is meant to be the trap, and at cafe scale it is the cheapest paid row on the page, still cheapest at 3,000 customers, by which point most single shops have stopped worrying about the software bill at all.

Locations are the number that actually moves your bill

Run the same arithmetic for three shops with roughly 800 active customers each and the order falls apart. digiPunchCard's $40 Elite plan covers 3,000 customers across three locations, so its bill does not move at all. Loopy Loyalty's Growth plan covers three locations for $69, and our Pro plan covers three for $71, or $59 billed yearly. Square charges $49 per location by its own published unit, which makes $147. Loop charges $79 per venue: $237.

Stamp Me is harder to price. Its pricing page lists "Single location" on all three plans and publishes no multi-location rate, so three shops means either three subscriptions at $49 each or a conversation with their sales team before you commit to anything.

Same three shops, same card, $40 at one end and $237 at the other, and the entire gap comes from what each company decided to count.

Price is only half of what a second shop changes, though. The other half is whether the two shops share one card at all, and who absorbs the free coffee when it gets redeemed at the site that never sold the stamps, which is the argument in one loyalty program for multiple locations, or two.

Check the date on every punch card comparison, this one included

One of the comparison pages that comes up for this search quotes Square at $45 a month per location for up to 500 loyalty visits. That price was real once. Square retired it: the press release of 6 October 2025 announced three tiers, Free at $0, Plus at $49 and Premium at $149, all per location, in a change it described as one that "replaces 18 different à la carte subscriptions".

Square's own December post described a "predictable per location price" for each tier, and a Square moderator told a merchant on 6 November 2025 that they "can safely cancel your separately billed legacy Loyalty plan" now that Plus carries it.

For some sellers the unit stings. A trader who runs weekly and quarterly market stalls wrote in March 2026 that the change would be "10x more expensive than the previous subscription", because every pitch they trade from counts as another location.

Square is not the only stale number in circulation. Capterra's listing says Stamp Me "Includes Free Version", while Stamp Me's own page offers a 30-day trial and starts at $49. CandyBar still ranks for punch card searches, and its pricing URLs returned 404 when I checked on 21 August 2026, so the $45 those directories quote is theirs rather than CandyBar's. None of that makes these products worse. It makes the date part of the price, which is why both tables above carry one, and why it is worth opening two vendor pages yourself before you pay for anything.

What free actually covers on a digital punch card

Three have no free plan. Loopy Loyalty, Stamp Me and Square each offer a trial instead, of 15, 30 and 30 days, which is a different promise: you build the card, you hand it to your customers for a few weeks, and then you pay or you stop.

The three real free tiers are each bounded by something different, and the bound is the whole story. digiPunchCard's stops at 50 customers, and it is also "Limited to 90 days". FaveCard's runs forever with unlimited customers, but its Apple and Google Wallet passes sit on the paid tiers, so a free customer gets a card in a browser rather than in the wallet already on their phone. Ours covers one location and 200 active customers with the wallet passes included, and leaves push notifications to the paid plans.

Work out which bound you hit first. A cafe signing up ten people a day is past 200 customers in three weeks and past digiPunchCard's 90 days inside a quarter, while a barber with forty regulars on the books may never reach any of them.

The line item nobody prints on a pricing page

Whether your customer has to install something appears on none of these pricing pages, and it changes sign-up more than $20 a month does.

Stamp Me is direct about it. Its site says "Customers first download the Stamp Me app to create their account and join your loyalty program", and adds that Apple Wallet and Google Wallet work when its own merchant app validates the transaction. Loopy Loyalty leads with "no app required" and both wallets. Square lets a customer sign up at the point of sale and add the pass to Apple Wallet. Ours is a QR code that drops a pass into the wallet already on the phone, and the mechanics of that are worth understanding whichever app you pick.

Building the pass yourself is what people reach for when they see these prices. It has a price too. Apple requires that "passes must be signed with an Apple-issued certificate associated with your Apple developer account", and the Apple Developer Program is a "$99 annual membership", so that is $8.25 a month before anyone writes a line of code, hosts a server, or answers a support email at seven in the morning.

When the pricier row is the right one to pick

Nothing above says buy the cheapest.

If you already run Square, Square Plus at $49 is probably your answer, and not really because of the loyalty part. It stamps the card at the checkout without your staff scanning a second thing, and it arrives with the staff and marketing tools you would otherwise buy separately. What that $49 nets out at depends on your card volume, because Plus cuts your processing rate as well. Our card adds a second scan. On a Saturday morning with six people waiting that is a real cost, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

If your program runs on text messages rather than push notifications, Stamp Me Pro at $79 includes unlimited SMS, while digiPunchCard's campaigns need message credit bought on top of the subscription. If you want unlimited customers at a flat price and no free tier in the way, Loopy Loyalty at $25 is the cheapest honest version of that. Then there is the ordinary case. If you have one shop, fewer than 3,000 customers and no plan to open a second, the unit question mostly collapses, because five of the six bills are flat at that size. Choose on the free plan and on whether your customers have to install an app.

One more number belongs in this decision. Read what the free coffee itself costs you, because for most cafes the reward is the larger of the two figures and it is the one no pricing page will ever quote.