Lately I’ve noticed that cloud POS prices have been increasing. Wait, that’s a lie. I didn’t notice anything: resellers of cloud systems and noticed that merchant product costs are going up, but their payouts are staying flat. They told me this, so I investigated.
This had me wondering: are cloud POS prices going to continue rising? Are we at the end of a venture-subsidized bubble and do POS prices rebound? Or are the cloud ISVs simply fiddling with their business models because penetration isn’t happening as fast as they had hoped?
Any POS company worth their salt understands the revenue potential in having SKU data available. The clever cloud companies know this model to be the future of their survival. What they’re betting on is the time it takes them to get there.
If you’re taking venture capital money today, you need to be cranking out $100M in annual revenue very quickly. If not, investors are on to the next one. And if you can’t increase the number of accounts to reach those lofty revenue goals, you have to increase the average sales price to the existing accounts.
This is a press release announcing Shopkeep’s pricing at $50/mo, screenshot below.
But Shopkeep’s prices are no longer that low. Today, Shopkeep charges $69/month. That’s a 40% jump.
NCR has also raised prices on its cloud Silver product. What was once $59/mo has increased in various tiers. Here are some screenshots of their new pricing with #6 explaining how to handle subscribers of the original $59/mo plan.
Who knows what NCR is doing, considering they had a botched acquisition, are saddled with another billion dollars in debt on top of their existing $4B, and have cultural issues galore.
Are there other cloud systems that are following this trend? I’ve only spent a small amount of time pulling this data, but surely there’s more to be had…
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