How we price VIND — and why we publish the numbers

Open any other POS website serving the Maltese market and try to find a price. You will not. You will find a “Request a quote” button, a phone number, and a friendly note about how every business is different. Sometimes there is a contact form.

We took the other path. The VIND pricing page shows you three tiers, in EUR, with the included features per tier and the things we deliberately don’t include. There is no asterisk after the price. This post explains why.

What hidden pricing is really for

Hidden pricing exists for one reason: the vendor wants to know who you are before they quote you. They want to know how many sites you run, whether your previous POS was Lightspeed or a stack of paper, how desperate you are to switch, and whether there’s a deal at the end of the quarter that motivates them to discount. The price you eventually get is the highest one the salesperson thinks you’ll pay.

This is rational for the vendor. It is hostile to a small business owner whose time is the constraint, not the budget.

The clearest sign that hidden pricing is a tactic, not a necessity, is what happens when a vendor finally tells you the number: it’s the same as the next vendor’s, and the one after that, plus or minus 5 %. The market knows what hospitality POS costs. The “every business is different” line is theatre.

The three tiers

We ship three tiers. They map to real product surface, not synthetic feature gates:

• Starter (€39/month, single venue, up to 2 terminals). Full MTCA-compliant POS, offline mode, X/Z, multi-user, RBAC, audit log, EU residency, automatic updates. This is enough for a one-shop café or a small restaurant. It is not crippled.
• Professional (€89/month, single venue, unlimited terminals + KDS). Everything in Starter, plus the kitchen display system, inventory & BOM, ingredient-level COGS, aggregator integrations (Wolt, Bolt), and the backoffice analytics dashboard. This is the tier for a real working kitchen.
• Enterprise (custom — and yes, we’ll quote in advance). Multi-venue, central management, dedicated phone support, custom integrations, SSO, advanced audit retention. Enterprise is the only tier with a quote because the variables (number of sites, depth of integration) genuinely change the implementation cost.

We publish the Starter and Professional prices because they are the prices for everyone, with no quarterly haggle, no “if you sign by Friday” discount, no introductory rate that doubles in year two.

What’s included on every tier — the floor

On every tier, including Starter:

• MTCA-compliant receipt numbering, signing, and archiving.
• Offline mode (cash, card, receipt printing, KDS — all work without internet).
• Daily X/Z readings, auto-closed at the configured cutover time.
• Multi-user with role-based access control. A cashier cannot reach backoffice reports or void workflows.
• An immutable audit log for every fiscal write and every void.
• EU data residency. The fiscal store lives in eu-central-1.
• Automatic updates. We push fixes weekly; you don’t pay for upgrades.

That list is the floor because compliance is not a feature you should pay extra for. A POS that holds back MTCA-correct numbering for the higher tier is a POS that’s structurally selling you a compliance liability at the lower price point.

What’s not included — the honest list

There are four things VIND does not include, and we say so on the pricing page:

1. Hardware. We don’t sell the receipt printer or the iPad. We recommend specific models (Epson TM-m30iii printer, Viva Wallet terminal) and point you at the supplier. Bundle pricing is a margin trick; we’re not a hardware reseller.
2. Payment-processing fees. Your acquirer charges those. We don’t add a markup. The card-terminal integration is included; the per-transaction fee is whatever Viva (or your chosen acquirer) charges directly.
3. Custom integrations on Starter. If you need us to connect to your accountant’s bespoke booking system, that’s a Professional-or-up scope. We’re not gating Stripe or Xero connectors behind it; those are coming, in the integrations page.
4. Dedicated 24/7 phone support on Starter. Starter ships with email and chat during EU business hours. Professional adds phone during business hours. Enterprise adds 24/7.

That list exists because every restaurant owner who reads a pricing page is mentally subtracting the things that aren’t on it. We’d rather you do that subtraction with the right numbers.

What this costs us

It costs us short-term margin. There are absolutely Maltese restaurant chains that would have paid €120/month if our salesperson got them on the phone first. We’re choosing the long game: a market that learns VIND is the honest one is a market we win over five years, not over one quarter.

It also makes our sales conversations shorter and more honest. By the time someone is on a demo with us, they’ve seen the price. The demo is about whether the product fits — not about extracting a number.

What this asks of you

Read the pricing page. Compare with the vendors who hide. Notice that the “what’s included on every tier” table is longer than most competitors’ top-tier feature list. Pick the tier that matches your real shop. Book a demo when you’re ready.

We don’t make you guess what we charge. That’s the whole pitch.