08 · Contracts and pricing
Five monthly bills and a rate that quietly went up
A hardware lease you can’t exit, an auto-renewal you didn’t notice, and a module you need that turned out to be an add-on.
“They renewed me for a year because they had my credit card on file and never asked permission.”John M., Owner — Capterra review of Lavu, March 2026
Why it happens
POS economics moved from software margin to payments margin, so the subscription is really a customer-acquisition instrument and the processing spread is the business. That makes lock-in structurally necessary: hardware financing, auto-renewal windows and proprietary terminals all exist to push switching cost above the annoyance threshold.
What we'd do about it
Count what you’re actually paying, across everything
Most operators have never added it up. Subscription, per-terminal, per-module, the integration fee, the processing spread. Start there.
One database, not five that sync overnight
Every module writes to the same records. There’s no integration to break, because there’s no integration.
Stop being the integration
One product list, priced once. One record moving from sale to stock to COGS to the ledger, instead of you carrying numbers between five systems.
The objection this page has to beat
“Your low headline price becomes a big bill once I need the modules I actually need.”
So publish the whole list, including every module, and say month-to-month in plain words. Say you own your data and show the export. Then build the one thing nobody in Australia has built: a calculator that names the specific products this replaces and their real list prices.
What we can actually stand behind
Every claim below is labelled by how solid it is. The grey ones are where we looked and found nothing credible — those stay off the page rather than getting rounded up into a statistic.
- Operator
“Not transparent on prices: you pay a yearly fee of about $1,000 for basic subscription and on top of that they bill you 'Legacy Hosting' every 36 months.”
Matt A., Owner — Capterra, April 2025 - Operator
“Their pricing for implementing integrations… have a hard time justifying the additional spend over necessary expenses.”
Allie H., Founder, Hospitality — Capterra review of Toast, January 2026 - Vendor study
Published market structure: software $50–$250 per site per month, $40–$70 per additional terminal, $10–$100 per add-on module per month, $500–$2,000 install, processing 2.5–3.5% plus a fixed fee.
Industry pricing summaries - No data
No independent data on total monthly software spend for a typical Australian venue across its whole stack. This is the single most useful number you do not have.
See the strategy note — this is the one to go and create.