Independent Retail Operating System · US · UK · Australia
We deploy a point-of-sale system you own outright, build the online store that shares its inventory, and set up the automation that posts your new arrivals to Google Maps, Instagram and Facebook. You pay once. There is no software rent and no markup on your card processing.
On tax: we configure your rates so the register charges the right amount, in any of the three markets. Filing is separate — UK Making Tax Digital submissions require HMRC-recognised software, which Odoo Community is not, so your accountant or a bridging tool still files. We would rather say that here than have you discover it in April.
A touchscreen till running Odoo 18 Community on a server you own. It caches your catalogue locally, so a dropped connection does not stop you ringing sales.
The website and the counter read the same stock. Sell the last one in store and the site stops offering it that second — no nightly upload, no selling something you no longer have.
When you scan new stock in at the back door, a post about it goes out the same day — to your Google Maps listing, Instagram and Facebook. This is the job most owners never get to, which is why it is worth automating.
On the review side we notify and draft; we do not publish replies to reviews automatically. An unattended reply to an angry customer does more damage than a slow one, and platforms take a dim view of automated review responses. You press send.
Pick your currency, move the two sliders. Everything is per year, because that is how you close your books.
Assumptions you can check against your own invoices, per market rather than converted from dollars, because these vendors price differently by country rather than at an exchange rate. Card processing fees are NOT counted as savings: you pay a processor whichever software runs the register, and a calculator that counts them is padding its own number.
Three ways of paying for a register, and what each one actually costs over three years.
| What it costs you | Square / Clover | Shopify POS Pro | Odoo consulting partner | This service |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Software, per register, per month | $60 – $89 | $89, plus the Shopify plan | $35 – $45 per user | $0, forever |
| What you pay to get started | Nothing, plus their hardware | Nothing, plus their hardware | $5,000 – $20,000 | $399 or $699, once |
| How long before you are selling | A day or two, you do it | A day or two, you do it | 6 to 12 weeks | 24 to 48 hours, we do it |
| Who processes your cards | Theirs only | Extra fee if you use anyone else | Whatever they integrate | Whoever gives you the best rate |
| Store and website share one stock | A paid add-on | Included, on their platform | Custom development | Included in the $699 package |
| Posting to Google Maps and social | Not offered | Third-party apps, billed monthly | Not offered | The $149 monthly plan |
| Who owns it in three years | They do | They do | You, if the contract says so | You, on a server in your name |
| Three years, two registers | $7,400+ | $9,800+ | $12,000+ | $699 + $432 of hosting |
About the first three columns: those are published list prices as advertised in September 2026, for the plans a single-location store would actually buy. We have not purchased any of them, so treat them as a starting point and check the current pricing yourself before you decide — vendors change it, and a comparison table is not a quote. The last column is ours and we hold to it: $699 once, plus a server at roughly $12 a month, which is the $432 over three years. Card processing is excluded on every column, because you pay a processor whichever system runs the register.
Two setups you buy once, and one optional monthly plan. Nothing else appears on your bill.
$399
once, then nothing
For a shop that needs a dependable checkout and is done paying rent for one.
$699
once, then nothing
For a shop selling in person and online, from one shared stock.
$149
per month, optional add-on
For an owner who wants foot traffic and never wants to think about a server.
One recurring cost, and it is not paid to us. You open a hosting account in your own name and pay the hosting company directly — about $12 a month for a server that runs all of this. We never touch that card, and the setup packages carry no licence, so there is nothing further to pay us at all. The $149 plan includes the server; without it, that $12 is yours.
We are new at selling this, and pretending otherwise would be the first thing you caught. There are no customer photos on this page and no testimonials, because we have not installed enough of these to have earned them. Here is what you can verify instead.
Every number we quote came from running this on a server we pay for. 19 guides on this site show the commands, the results and the mistakes — including a figure we published and corrected the same day when a second measurement proved it wrong. Ask any other supplier for theirs.
This is the part that should matter most to you. The server is rented in your name, the software is free and open, and you hold the keys from the first day. If we turn out to be useless, you have paid once for an installation that keeps running without us — not a subscription you now have to escape.
The section below names five cases where we tell you to keep your current till, including a leased card reader you will not be able to reuse and the UK MTD filing this software does not do. A supplier who cannot name what they are bad at is selling, not advising.
Being early has a price and it should be yours, not ours: if you are among our first installations, tell us and we will agree what happens if it does not work out — before you pay, in writing.
We would rather lose the sale than install this in a shop it does not suit. Five cases where the honest answer is to keep what you have.
A reader supplied by Square, Shopify, SumUp or Zettle is generally tied to that company. Assume it will not work with anything else and that you will be buying a new one. If the lease still has a year to run, moving now costs you twice.
This software records your sales properly, but it does not file your VAT return and it is not certified for UK Making Tax Digital, nor for the fiscal-printer rules in Italy, Germany, Poland or Portugal. If your accountant needs a certified chain from the till, stay where you are.
The register runs in a browser against your own server. It keeps taking sales through a short drop and syncs afterwards, but a shop that loses connection for hours at a time should not run its till this way.
We are a small operation. We answer on working days and we say so rather than printing a support badge we cannot honour. If a till failure at 2am would cost you the trading day, buy a contract with a guaranteed response time — from us only if we have agreed one in writing, otherwise elsewhere.
If your current system works, your staff know it and the monthly fee does not bother you, changing your till is a week of disruption for no gain. This is worth doing when the fees have become the problem — not because self-hosting is virtuous.
Nothing here is locked to a brand. The register speaks three open standards — ESC/POS for printers, keyboard mode for scanners, and Stripe Terminal for card readers — so equipment that speaks them works, whoever made it.
ESC/POS over network or USB
A network printer prints as the sale completes, with no dialogue to confirm. Ethernet models are worth the small premium over USB once you have more than one register.
Stripe Terminal
Chip, contactless, Apple Pay and Google Pay. The reader talks to Stripe directly — card numbers never reach your register, and the money lands in your own bank account.
USB or Bluetooth keyboard mode
The scanner simply types the barcode and presses Enter. There is no driver to install and nothing to configure beyond setting the suffix to Enter.
Any modern browser
The register runs in Chrome or Safari. The work happens on your server, so a modest tablet is enough — which is the point of this architecture.
Already have hardware from Square or Clover? Send us the model numbers and we will tell you what works before you spend anything — including when the honest answer is that a device is locked to its old system and cannot be reused.
A note on the model names above: they are the devices we most often see in shops, listed because they speak these standards — not because we hold each one on a test bench. We check your specific model against your setup before you buy, which is the only assurance worth giving.
Ownership, what happens when things go wrong, and how the money reaches you.
The register keeps working. Odoo 18 POS loads your catalogue into the browser when the session opens, so scanning, cash payments and receipts continue while the connection to the internet is out, and every sale syncs automatically when it returns. One honest caveat: your receipt printer is reached over your shop network, so a dead router stops printing even though a dead internet line does not. If continuity matters that much to you, the server belongs in the building rather than in a data centre.
You do, entirely. The system runs on a private server rented in your name, and you hold the keys to it from day one. You can export the whole database at any moment without asking us, and there is nothing to migrate away from because nothing of yours sits on our infrastructure. That is the difference between owning a system and renting access to one.
Your register carries on exactly as before. There is no kill switch, and there could not be one — the software is open source and it is installed on your machine. We hand over anything you do not already hold, disconnect the marketing automation, and you continue paying only your server, about $12 a month, directly to the hosting company. The software stays yours permanently.
Through your own Stripe account, using a Stripe Terminal reader. The money moves from Stripe to your business account on the payout schedule Stripe sets for you, which depends on your country and how long the account has been open — check yours in the Stripe dashboard rather than trusting a number on a sales page. We take no cut and add no gateway markup; our fee is the one-time setup.
Yes, and it is included: up to 2,500 products in either setup package. We export from Square, Shopify, Clover, Lightspeed or a spreadsheet, clean the file, and import it with your SKUs, prices, barcodes and current quantities intact. Larger catalogues are quoted separately rather than quietly truncated.
Yes. Odoo Community is published under the LGPLv3 open-source licence, so there is no per-seat and no per-register charge — add cashiers, add registers, ring up as many sales as you like. What you pay for is our work installing and configuring it, and the server it runs on. Odoo Enterprise is a separate paid product; we do not deploy it and you do not need it for a shop.
We reply within one business day with a price and a date. No sales call unless you ask for one.
Before writing a word about this stack, we deployed it on our own server and wrote down what it consumed — including the parts that went wrong. That work is public: the full Odoo 18 deployment, measured, and the comparison that says which figures we did not measure. If you are comparing quotes, ask the others for their numbers.
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