Software pricing is a story about who carries the risk. A subscription says: pay us a little every month, forever, and we will carry the servers, the updates and the support. A one-time licence says: pay us once, run it on your own infrastructure, and the ongoing cost is yours.
Neither is dishonest. But for a shop with three tills, the difference over five years is not a rounding error, and most people compare the two badly — by looking at the monthly number rather than at what the monthly number multiplies by.
How hosted POS platforms actually charge
Published prices change, so treat this as a shape rather than a quote — check the current pricing page of anyone you are evaluating. The recurring costs typically stack like this:
- A base subscription per location. The headline number on the pricing page.
- An additional fee per register beyond the first. This is the one that scales with your growth.
- Payment processing. A percentage of every sale, often on the platform’s own rails with no option to bring your own acquirer.
- Add-ons. Advanced reporting, loyalty, employee management — frequently separate line items.
The structural point is that two of those four scale with your success. Open a second store and the bill doubles. Add a till for the Christmas rush and the bill grows. The software does not cost the vendor more to run because you sold more jackets; the pricing model simply captures a share of your growth.
What a self-hosted POS costs instead
Being fair to the alternative means counting everything, not just the licence.
- The plugin licence. Paid once. OpenPOS includes lifetime updates.
- Hosting. You need a WordPress host that can carry your catalogue and your traffic. A busy shop should not be on the cheapest shared plan.
- Support renewal, if you want it. The plugin keeps working when a support period lapses; you are buying access to help, not permission to run the software.
- Payment processing. Your own rates, with your own acquirer, because you chose the terminal.
- Your time. The honest line item everyone omits. Somebody keeps WordPress updated and takes backups.
Crucially, none of these scale per register. A fifth till costs a tablet. A second outlet costs a tablet and a printer.
Do the arithmetic on your own numbers
Rather than trusting a comparison table written by a vendor — including this one — spend ten minutes with a spreadsheet:
- Write down your number of locations and tills, today and in three years.
- For the subscription option, multiply the per-location and per-register fees out over 36 months.
- For the self-hosted option, add the one-time licence, 36 months of hosting, and any support renewals.
- Add processing fees to both, using each option’s actual rate on your actual monthly card volume. On a shop turning over meaningful card revenue, a half-point difference in processing rate can dwarf the licence question entirely.
- Add a line for your own time, honestly.
The answer flips depending on the business. A single till doing modest volume, run by someone who does not want to think about servers, may genuinely be better off on a subscription. Three tills across two stores almost never is.
The costs nobody puts on the pricing page
Where your data lives
On a hosted platform, your customer list and sales history live in someone else’s database, exportable on their terms. Self-hosted, it is in your WooCommerce database, and you can query it with SQL at two in the morning if you want to. This matters most on the day you decide to leave.
Being locked to a payment processor
Several hosted POS platforms require their own payment processing. If your card volume is significant, the rate you cannot negotiate is a larger annual cost than the software you are comparing. OpenPOS supports Stripe Terminal, Square, Authorize.net, BlockChyp, Clearent, Vipps and LayBuy, and takes no cut of any of them.
The price rise you have not had yet
A subscription is a price the vendor may revise. A one-time purchase is a price you already paid. Over five years that asymmetry is worth naming.
What “lifetime updates” means, precisely
Words worth pinning down, since the industry abuses them. With OpenPOS, updates to the plugin — including new features, not only security patches — are included in the one-time purchase. Support, meaning a human answering your question, runs for a period and can be renewed when it lapses.
The distinction is important: if you never renew support, your shop keeps trading and keeps updating. You simply queue behind customers who did.
When a subscription is the right answer
Choose a hosted platform if you have no interest in running a website, you want the hardware to arrive in a box that works, you need a phone number to shout down when the till breaks on Black Friday, and your volume is low enough that per-register fees stay small.
Choose self-hosted if you already run WooCommerce, you want one inventory rather than two systems synced by a nightly job, you intend to add registers or locations, or you want to own your data and your processing relationship.
Frequently asked questions
Are there per-transaction fees with OpenPOS?
None from us. You pay your payment processor and nothing else.
Is one licence per site or per till?
Per site. Registers, cashiers and outlets are unlimited on that site.
What happens when my support period ends?
Nothing to your shop. The plugin runs and updates as before. You can extend the support service whenever you need help again.
Do I need a licence for a staging site?
Ask before you set one up — most sensible policies allow a non-trading staging copy, and it is better to have the answer in writing than to guess.
Compare the field yourself in the best POS plugins for WooCommerce, or open the live demo (admin / admin123) before you spend anything. OpenPOS is a single payment, per site, with lifetime updates.