Fixed monthly POS pricing vs the hidden fees in UK EPOS quotes
No sales quotes and no surprise line items. The thinking behind transparent pricing, and why it works out better for you.
Hospitality software has a reputation for opaque pricing: per-device fees, hidden add-ons and contracts that are easier to enter than to leave. We set ours up the opposite way and published everything.
“What you see is exactly what you pay. No setup fees, no proprietary till to buy, no surprises.”
Month to month, on purpose
There's no long contract to hide behind. If the product stops being worth the money, you can leave the next month. That keeps the pressure on us to keep improving.
Publishing our pricing this way is a commitment that the relationship stays honest after you've signed up.
What opaque pricing actually costs a venue
We’ve done the maths in public. In our UK POS cost guide, a full-service venue on £40,000 of monthly card sales pays between roughly £1,002 and £1,092 a month for a comparable feature set depending on provider (Servio Growth sits at £999 with £0 hardware). That is a spread of about £1,368 a year. Almost none of that spread is visible on the pricing pages. It hides in add-ons (£95-£134/month to bolt on what should be included), in hardware (£699 for a single proprietary till), and above all in card fees, where routing orders through an add-on app can quietly raise your effective rate by half a point. Opaque pricing is a margin strategy, and the margin comes out of yours.
The four numbers to demand from any provider
If you take one thing from this post, make it this. Before signing anything, get all four numbers in writing, at your volume: the software price at the tier that actually has your features; the monthly cost of every add-on needed to match a full platform; the hardware bill including replacements, spread over a year; and the effective card rate on your real monthly takings. Providers who price honestly can answer in minutes. The ones who can’t will usually offer you a demo call instead.
“Providers who price honestly answer in minutes. The others offer you a demo call, which is itself the answer.”
Why we can afford to do this
Publishing prices only works if the prices hold up when people compare them, and that discipline is the point of doing it. It’s why QR ordering and the kitchen display are in every plan rather than sold twice, why payments run through Stripe at Stripe’s published rates with no markup, and why the comparison page and our head-to-head pages against Square, Toast, Lightspeed and Revel cite public prices and say so when a competitor wins a row. The founding-venue pilot follows the same rule: 30 days free, then £109/month for the first six paid months, then £219, with every number printed before you spend a minute with us.
How to read a POS pricing page
Once you know the tricks, opaque pricing pages become genuinely funny to read. “From £X/month” means the tier nobody buys, because the “from” price usually lacks the features that made you look. “Per device” in small print multiplies everything: a till, a handheld and a kitchen screen is three devices before Saturday needs a fourth. “Contact us for pricing” on anything below enterprise scale means the price gets decided on the call, based on what they think your venue will pay. “Free POS” means the margin lives in the card rate, so check the percentage twice. And “integrates with” is not “includes”: an integration is usually a second subscription from a second company.
None of these are lies, exactly. They just take time to decode, and anyone actually running a venue is too busy to spend an evening decoding pricing pages. A published price with everything included is also the only format you can genuinely compare in the ten minutes you have. That’s the format we committed to, and it’s why the whole cost guide can exist as a public document with our own numbers sitting in the table next to everyone else’s.
Common questions
Why do UK EPOS quotes hide the real cost?
Software is often the smallest line. Add-ons for QR ordering, kitchen display, inventory, per-device fees and card rates move the monthly total far more than the headline plan price.
What does fixed monthly POS pricing mean at Servio?
One published price per plan with the core hospitality stack included. Starter £89, Growth £219, Enterprise from £449, month-to-month, with card fees at Stripe's published rates and no Servio markup.
Where can I compare real UK POS costs?
Use our restaurant POS cost guide and the assumptions page behind every figure on the comparison table, then check live plan pages before you sign anything.