The subscription is the first number you see on a loyalty app. In the café example below, the rewards cost almost four times as much as the subscription. Write down every line of the year before you compare prices.
Subscription
Check whether the price includes VAT, how much the annual plan saves and whether the price rises with your member count. Ask what you pay at 300 members and what you pay at 1,500.
At Rubik the stamp plan is free for the first month, with no credit card. After that, plans with unlimited members, messages and automatic win-back start at €23/month billed annually, before VAT, and the price stays the same however many members you collect.
Setup and equipment
Some providers charge separately for setup, staff training or the connection to your till. Get it in writing. If stamping needs a scanner, a terminal or an NFC device, add it to the first year’s cost, along with who pays when it breaks.
With Rubik your employee types the customer’s mobile number in the admin from a computer, tablet or phone you already own. The magic stamp that touches the customer’s screen is optional and costs €25 + VAT once. The setup cost is listed on the pricing page.
Messages
At Rubik push, email, SMS and Viber are billed per recipient, and SMS costs the most. The bill comes from one multiplication: recipients × messages per month × price per message.
In Greek, one SMS holds 70 characters. A longer message splits into 67-character parts, so ask the provider whether it charges per message or per part. The rules for SMS are in the guide on SMS marketing.
Rewards
You won’t find this line on any price list. Work it out from what the reward costs you in materials, not from its selling price. A free coffee costs you the coffee, the milk and the cup.
Example: a café with 300 members
Assumptions: a coffee sells for €3 before VAT and costs you €0.60 in materials. The card gives one free coffee for every 8 stamps. The 300 members pay for 1,200 coffees a month between them, one a week each. You send two pushes a month to every member and one SMS of up to 70 characters every three months to the 200 who gave consent. For the messages we use €0.02 per push and €0.07 per SMS, before VAT.
- Subscription: €23 × 12 months = €276
- Push: 2 × 300 × 12 = 7,200 messages × €0.02 = €144
- SMS: 4 × 200 = 800 messages × €0.07 = €56
- Rewards: 1,200 / 8 = 150 free coffees a month, 1,800 a year × €0.60 = €1,080
- Total: €1,556 a year, before VAT
The rewards cost almost four times as much as the subscription. If you want to bring the total down, the number of stamps makes a bigger difference than the plan you pick. With 10 stamps instead of 8, rewards drop to €864. The card fills more slowly, though, and Ran Kivetz, Oleg Urminsky and Yuhuang Zheng measured that customers far from the reward come in less often (Journal of Marketing Research, 2006).
How many extra visits you need
Each coffee leaves you €2.40 gross profit (€3 minus €0.60). To cover €1,556 you need about 650 coffees a year that you wouldn’t sell without the program. Spread over 300 members, that’s a little over two extra coffees each in a year. The guide on loyalty program ROI explains how to measure the “extra” without counting the customers who would have come anyway.
What to ask for before you sign
- The subscription price with and without VAT, monthly and annual.
- Whether the price changes with your member count.
- The price of each message channel, and how a long SMS is charged.
- What equipment you need and who pays when it breaks.
- Whether there’s a free plan or a trial period.
For the criteria beyond price, see how to choose a loyalty app. You can see what each Rubik plan includes on the pricing page.