Most articles about POS pricing are written by people selling subscriptions. We are in an unusual position to be honest: we build and sell our own point-of-sale product — Clikox, used by retailers in the UAE, Mexico and the US — *and* we build custom POS systems for clients. Sometimes the right answer costs a few hundred dollars. Sometimes it is a five-figure build. This guide is how we would explain the difference to a friend opening a shop.
The three price tiers, honestly
Tier 1 — Off-the-shelf software (roughly $50–$500, or a monthly subscription). If your shop sells products, prints receipts and tracks stock in a standard way, buy software, do not build it. A one-time-license product like our own Clikox lands in the low hundreds; cloud subscriptions run monthly forever. This is the right answer for most single shops, and any developer who tells a small retailer to commission custom software for standard retail needs is selling, not advising.
Tier 2 — Customised off-the-shelf (roughly $500–$3,000). Your workflow is mostly standard with a few sharp edges: a special receipt format, a loyalty rule, an import from an old system, a report your accountant insists on. The economical path is extending existing software rather than starting from zero.
Tier 3 — Fully custom POS (roughly $4,000–$25,000+). This is justified when the workflow itself is your edge: multi-branch operations with central control, industry-specific flows (repairs, rentals, restaurants with kitchen displays), unusual hardware, or POS as one part of a larger operations platform. Here you are not buying a till — you are buying software shaped exactly like your business, with full source code ownership.
What actually drives the cost up
Having built one commercially, we can tell you where POS budgets really go — and it is rarely the sales screen. Offline reliability is engineering-heavy: a counter must keep selling through internet outages and survive a power cut mid-transaction without corrupting data. Receipt printing looks trivial and is not; thermal printers speak dialects, and VAT-compliant formats have legal requirements. Multi-user roles and audit logs — who voided that sale? — add real schema work. Hardware (barcode scanners, cash drawers, label printers) each add integration time. And licensing, if you plan to sell or deploy across branches, is a discipline of its own — we build tamper-resistant licensing because our own products get attacked by people trying not to pay.
A realistic example
A three-branch retailer came to custom software because no subscription product handled their flow: central stock with per-branch pricing, VAT receipts in a specific hypermarket format, and owner dashboards across branches. That class of build — offline-first Windows POS, sync layer, role-based access, thermal printing — typically lands in the $8,000–$15,000 range over 10–14 weeks, delivered in escrow-protected milestones so each stage is verified before payment releases.
How to budget yours
Start with the honest question: is your selling workflow genuinely unusual, or does it just feel unusual? If standard — buy Tier 1 and spend the savings on inventory. If truly specific, our free cost estimator will turn your feature list into a realistic range in a minute, and we will tell you plainly if we think you should not build at all. We can afford that honesty; we sell the off-the-shelf option too.