As a small business owner, you have a lot of expenses to take care of. From rent to staff salaries to legal bills, the opportunities for money to fly out of your pockets are numerous.
So when you see an advertisement for a free POS system, you can’t help but wonder how much money you could save. After all, a penny saved is a penny earned.
Still, deep down you know there’s no such thing as a free lunch in this world. Regardless of how enticing the free POS offer is, your gut tells you there must be a catch. Something they’re not telling you.
Luckily, you don’t have to guess and worry. All you need is to trust your natural instincts because there isn’t a single free POS system that is actually free.
Let’s explore the 5 hidden costs of a “free” POS system.
Let’s start with the obvious one. Most free POS systems stay free by locking away critical features and limiting others, thus effectively restricting the growth of your business.
For instance, you may not be allowed to sell more than a certain number of items or process more than a certain number of transactions. Both of these limitations render the software useless for established businesses.
However, the worst offenders are companies that keep the cost of upgrade hidden. You should avoid such companies at all costs if you don’t want any harmful surprises later.
Even if you can find a software that’s seemingly free with no paid version, you’ll still have to pay for it.
For instance, open-source projects are usually great because they offer everything for free. At the same time, those projects are usually created by students and junior developers as a hobby project.
Unfortunately, most of those hobby projects don’t have the refinement of a professional solution and hence are hard to setup. The most likely scenario is that you’ll have to hire a professional developer to set it up for you and then keep that professional on the payroll to troubleshoot any problems later.
Clunky Interface
Free software creators simply don’t have the budget to hire a UX and UI designer. That’s because those professional experts charge a considerable sum for their services.
So without an expert designing the interface, what you’ll get with a free POS software is a clunky interface that’s going to take an eternity to figure out. And don’t think figuring it out is the end of your troubles.
Unfortunately, a clunky interface is always going to take more time than an intuitive one. As a result, you and your team will always lose precious time trying to make the POS software work for you. And as you know, time is money.
Scarce Updates
Unlike professional solutions that improve over time, a free POS solution is destined for degradation. That’s because the creators don’t have an incentive to roll out regular updates, and in fact, many simply lose their interest over time.
Just think about that for a second. Your entire business revolves around your POS system. If that system goes down, your business will go down with it. You’ll have to source an emergency alternative and then retrain your team from scratch.
Not exactly the savings you had in mind, right?
Zero Support
Last but certainly not least is the lack of support with free POS systems.
How can a company provide you with professional support, or hire that support staff in the first place, when they don’t have any revenue? That’s one of the biggest downfalls of free POS systems.
Add up the facts that their software is clunky, complex, buggy and comes with zero support — it becomes obvious that a free POS system is a ticking timebomb just waiting to explode and take your business down with it.
How LinkedPOS Can Help You
At LinkedPOS, our goal is to help small businesses like yours experience the benefits of a professional and polished POS system without the shock of hefty hidden costs later.
Our pricing is crystal clear from day one. There are no monthly or yearly subscriptions. No hidden charges for support. And we don’t lock you into a contract with us.
Simply put, we deliver on what we promise and then we deliver a bit more.
Want to see how LinkedPOS can transform your sales and inventory? You should check out the free version today without worrying about hidden costs or forced upgrades.
When we say free, we mean free for life! And no, we don’t limit your growth potential by restricting the number of items or transactions.
You can learn more about the free and paid version using the comparison chart.
