How Much Does a Loyalty Program Cost? Honest Pricing Breakdown for 2026
Feb 10, 2026
It's the first question every small business owner asks before committing to a loyalty programme — and it's the one that gets the most confusing answers.
Search "how much does a loyalty program cost" and you'll find numbers ranging from £0 (paper punch cards) to £1 million+ (enterprise airline systems). That range is technically accurate but practically useless if you're running a café, salon, gym, or restaurant and just want to know what you'll actually pay.
This guide cuts through the noise. We'll break down what loyalty programmes genuinely cost at each level, what you get for your money, the hidden costs most guides don't mention, and how to figure out whether the investment makes financial sense for your specific business.
The Four Tiers of Loyalty Programme Cost
Not all loyalty programmes are built for the same businesses. Understanding which tier matches your needs prevents you from either overpaying for features you'll never use or underspending on a system that can't deliver results.
Tier 1: Paper Punch Cards (£0–£150 per year)
This is the most basic form of loyalty programme and the cheapest to start. You design a card, print a batch, and hand-stamp it every time a customer makes a qualifying purchase.
Typical costs:
Design: £0 (using free templates from Canva) to £50–£200 (freelance designer) Printing: £30–£60 for 1,000–2,000 cards through services like Vistaprint Stamps or hole punches: £5–£15 Reprints: £30–£60 every few months as cards run out
Annual cost: roughly £80–£150, assuming you reprint two to three times per year.
What you get: A basic reward mechanism that customers understand immediately.
What you don't get: Any customer data, any way to contact members between visits, any insight into visit frequency or redemption rates, any protection against fraud (customers stamping their own cards), or any ability to send promotions or reminders. When the card is lost — and most are — the customer's progress resets and often so does their motivation. If you're weighing up whether to stick with stamps or upgrade, a detailed comparison of paper punch cards versus digital loyalty cards shows exactly how much revenue that lost-card problem costs over a year.
Paper cards work as a starting point for businesses testing the concept of loyalty rewards. But they're a blunt instrument. You're spending money on printing with no way to measure whether it's actually driving repeat visits.
Tier 2: Digital Loyalty Platforms for Small Businesses (£12–£60 per month)
This is where most small businesses land — and where the cost-to-value ratio is strongest.
Digital loyalty platforms replace paper cards with a digital card on the customer's phone. Depending on the platform, this might be a standalone app the customer downloads, or a wallet-based card that saves directly to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet without requiring an app.
Typical costs:
Setup fee: £0 for most modern platforms (many offer free trials) Monthly subscription: £12–£60 per month depending on features and plan tier Per-member fees: Some platforms charge per active member; others include unlimited members
Annual cost: roughly £144–£720, depending on the platform and plan. If you want a deeper dive into how these subscription models actually work — including per-member fees, notification caps, and the fine print that inflates costs — our breakdown of loyalty card software pricing explained covers every model side by side.
What you get at this tier varies significantly between providers, but a strong small business loyalty platform should include:
Digital loyalty cards (stamp, points, or other structures) A customer database and CRM Push notifications to communicate with members Analytics and reporting Custom card design Sign-up tools (QR codes, branded sign-up pages) Some form of automation (birthday rewards, lapsed customer reminders)
To give you a concrete example, Perkstar — a platform designed specifically for small-to-medium businesses — offers three plan tiers:
Starter: £15/month (or £12/month on an annual plan). Includes a digital loyalty card in Apple and Google Wallet, unlimited members, push notifications, analytics, and a custom card design builder.
Growth: £30/month (or £25/month annually). Adds features like advanced behavioural segmentation, automated notifications, geo-fenced push notifications, Google Review Rewards, and referral programmes.
Pro: £60/month (or £50/month annually). Includes everything in Growth plus additional staff accounts, advanced CRM features, and priority support.
All plans come with a 14-day free trial and no credit card required, so you can test the full platform before committing.
The important thing to note at this tier is what's included versus what costs extra. Some platforms advertise low base prices but charge additionally for push notifications (per message), SMS, member capacity, or design support. Always check what the quoted price actually covers.
Tier 3: POS-Integrated Loyalty Systems (£50–£500 per month)
If you want your loyalty programme to run directly through your point-of-sale system — automatically applying rewards at checkout without any separate scanning step — you're looking at POS-integrated solutions.
Typical costs:
Monthly subscription: £50–£500 per POS terminal per month Setup and integration: £0–£500 depending on the system Custom development (for older POS systems): £100–£250 per hour, potentially weeks of work
Annual cost: roughly £600–£6,000+, depending on the system and number of terminals.
What you get: Seamless checkout integration where loyalty is applied automatically. This can be powerful for businesses processing high volumes of transactions where scanning a separate loyalty card would slow the queue.
The trade-offs: POS loyalty modules are often designed by companies whose expertise is in payments, not loyalty. The features tend to be more limited than dedicated loyalty platforms — basic points accumulation and simple rewards, but often lacking the communication tools, segmentation, automation, and customer engagement features that actually drive repeat visits. Before committing to a POS-integrated module, it's worth understanding how a custom app compares to a wallet-based loyalty card — because wallet cards often deliver the same checkout convenience at a fraction of the cost, without locking you into a single POS vendor.
For most small businesses with one or two locations, a standalone digital loyalty platform offers better features at a lower price than a POS-integrated system. POS integration becomes more relevant for businesses with five or more locations or very high transaction volumes where checkout speed is critical.
Tier 4: Enterprise and Custom-Built Solutions (£10,000–£1 million+)
For completeness, it's worth acknowledging the top end of the market — though if you're reading this article, it almost certainly isn't relevant to your business.
Enterprise loyalty solutions are built for large retail chains, airlines, hotel groups, and franchise networks. They involve custom software development, dedicated infrastructure, ongoing technical support teams, and integration with multiple business systems.
Typical costs:
Custom development from scratch: £100,000–£500,000+ for initial build Customisation of an existing platform: £10,000–£40,000 setup plus £2,000+ per month Ongoing support: £10,000–£15,000+ per month
These are the programmes behind Tesco Clubcard, Starbucks Rewards, and airline frequent flyer schemes. They generate enormous value at scale — Starbucks reports that loyalty members spend three times more than non-members — but the investment only makes sense when you're operating at that scale.
The Hidden Costs Most Guides Don't Mention
The subscription price of a loyalty platform is only part of the cost. There are several other factors that affect what you'll actually spend — and what return you'll see.
Staff time
Every loyalty programme requires some staff involvement — asking customers to sign up, scanning cards at checkout, and occasionally troubleshooting. For a well-designed digital programme, this adds roughly 5–10 seconds per transaction. For more complex or clunky systems, it can be significantly more.
The best way to minimise this cost is to choose a platform that's genuinely fast at the point of sale. Wallet-based cards (where the customer already has the card on their phone and staff scan it in seconds) are faster than systems requiring customers to open an app, search for their account, or type in a phone number. Modern digital stamp card software reduces this further by letting customers present a wallet card that staff scan in a single tap — no app to open, no account to look up, no manual entry required.
The cost of rewards
This is the one most businesses forget to budget for. If your loyalty programme offers a free coffee after 8 stamps, and your coffee costs you £1.20 to make, that's £1.20 per redemption. If 50 customers redeem per month, that's £60 in reward costs — potentially more than your platform subscription.
The trick is setting reward thresholds that make the economics work. A good rule of thumb: calculate the total revenue a customer generates across all their qualifying visits before earning a reward. If a customer spends £4 per visit and needs 8 stamps, that's £32 in revenue before you give away a £1. For a worked example of how these reward economics play out in practice, our café loyalty programme cost breakdown walks through the exact maths for a business serving 150–300 customers per day.20 coffee. That's a 3.75% reward cost — very healthy for a retention tool.
Opportunity cost of not having one
This is the hidden cost that works in reverse. Every day you operate without a loyalty programme, you're missing the chance to capture customer data, send targeted communications, and incentivise repeat visits. If a loyalty programme increases an average customer's visit frequency by even one additional visit per month, the revenue it generates almost certainly exceeds its cost many times over.
Modern Take: How to Calculate Whether a Loyalty Programme Is Worth It for Your Business
Most cost guides list prices and leave it at that. Here's how to actually work out the ROI for your specific business.
Step 1: Estimate your current repeat visit rate. What percentage of customers who visit once come back within 30 days? For most small businesses without a loyalty programme, this sits somewhere between 20% and 40%.
Step 2: Estimate the lift a loyalty programme provides. Industry benchmarks suggest a well-run digital loyalty programme increases visit frequency by 20% to 35% among enrolled members. For a conservative estimate, use 20%.
Step 3: Do the maths.
Say you have 200 customers per week with an average spend of £8. That's £1,600 per week, or roughly £83,200 per year.
If your loyalty programme increases visit frequency by 20% among the 60% of customers who enrol, the revenue impact looks like this:
Enrolled customers: 120 per week
Additional visits generated: 120 × 20% = 24 extra visits per week
Additional weekly revenue: 24 × £8 = £192
Additional annual revenue: £192 × 52 = £9,984
Subtract your platform cost (say £300/year for Perkstar's Starter plan on annual billing) and your reward costs (say £720/year), and you're looking at roughly £8,964 in net additional revenue from a £1,020 total investment.
That's nearly a 9x return.
These are conservative estimates. Many businesses see higher enrolment rates and larger frequency lifts, particularly in the first year when the programme is new and exciting to customers. If you want to stress-test these numbers against different business types and pricing models, our analysis of the real cost of digital loyalty programmes includes worked examples for barbershops, salons, and retail shops alongside cafés and restaurants. The point isn't the exact number — it's that the maths overwhelmingly favour investing in a loyalty programme, even at the most conservative end of assumptions.
What to Prioritise When Comparing Costs
When you're evaluating different loyalty platforms, price is important — but it's not the only factor. Here's what to compare alongside the monthly fee:
Unlimited members vs. per-member pricing. Some platforms charge based on how many members you have. This punishes growth — the more successful your programme, the more you pay. Look for platforms with unlimited members included, like Perkstar.
Push notification limits. Push notifications are your primary communication channel with loyalty members. If the platform limits how many you can send or charges per notification, your ability to drive repeat visits is capped. Unlimited push notifications should be standard.
Free trial terms. A genuine free trial with no credit card required tells you the provider is confident enough in their product to let you test it without commitment. Be cautious of platforms that require payment details upfront for a "free" trial.
Support quality. When you need help, can you reach a person? Phone, email, and WhatsApp support beats a ticketing system or chatbot-only setup. Some platforms, including Perkstar, assign a personal account manager — which makes a real difference when you're setting up for the first time. Beyond these feature comparisons, it's worth understanding the broader pros and cons of loyalty programmes so you can weigh not just what a platform offers, but whether the programme structure itself suits your business model and customer base.
Design and setup assistance. Some platforms offer hands-free setup where the team builds your card for you. Others are entirely self-service. If you're short on time, setup support can be the difference between launching this week and putting it off indefinitely.
Getting Started
For most small businesses, a digital loyalty platform in the £12–£60 per month range offers the strongest combination of features, simplicity, and return on investment. The days of needing a five-figure budget to run a professional loyalty programme are long gone.
Perkstar offers a free 14-day trial with no credit card required. You can have a fully branded digital loyalty card live and saving to customers' phone wallets within 15 minutes. Plans start at £12 per month on annual billing, with unlimited members and push notifications included on every plan.
