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Point of sale
Every major POS vendor now bills by the month. JETpos sells the station once and charges nothing after that — and it is betting the whole company on that being enough.
Ask a restaurant owner what their point-of-sale system costs and you will usually get the wrong number. They will tell you what the terminal cost. The terminal is not the cost.
Toast lists its restaurant point-of-sale plan at $69 a month, and its retail plan at $90. Square’s mid-tier Plus plan runs $49 a month per location, with Premium at $149. Clover, Lightspeed and the rest sit somewhere in the same band. Add a second station, add inventory, add loyalty, add a reporting module, and the monthly line item quietly outgrows the hardware it runs on inside the first year.
That is not an accident. It is the model. Hardware became the loss leader roughly a decade ago, and the operator became the annuity.
JETpos, a North American POS company operating at jetpos.ai, is built on the opposite arrangement. You buy the station. The software that runs on it costs nothing per month, permanently, and every feature is switched on from the first day.
It is worth being precise about why POS pricing drifted this way, because it explains what JETpos is reacting to.
Cloud POS vendors sell software, and software wants recurring revenue. So the terminal price came down, sometimes to zero, and the value moved into the plan. Then the plan got tiered. Then the good features moved up a tier. Most operators now run a system where the thing they actually needed — inventory that counts properly, a loyalty programme, reporting that survives an audit — sits one or two tiers above the one they signed up for.
Many of those contracts also attach the payment processing. Leave the processor and the hardware stops being useful to you.
JETpos moved the revenue back into the hardware and left everything else alone. The station is the product. The software rides along with a lifetime activation licence tied to the device.
There is no monthly fee, no annual fee, and no plan tier, regardless of which payment processor the merchant uses. The JET POS software arrives with the full feature set unlocked.
The company frames artificial intelligence as the reason the economics hold up at all — that AI is what makes it viable to ship 100-plus premium features without a subscription attached, and it markets itself as the first AI-powered POS on that basis. Take the framing or leave it. The verifiable part is simpler: nothing on a JETpos station sits behind a paywall.
Here is the thing that separates a POS you tolerate from a POS you trust, and almost no vendor puts it on the front page.
Most modern systems are cloud-native. Read that as internet-dependent. When the connection drops on a Friday night — and in a busy room it eventually does — a cloud-only terminal degrades into an expensive drawer with a screen on top.
JETpos runs a hybrid architecture. Online, it behaves like any cloud system: data syncs, reports are live, multi-location visibility works. Offline, the station keeps ringing sales locally with the full catalogue, correct pricing and correct tax rules intact. When the line comes back, everything recorded in the meantime syncs upward on its own. Nobody presses anything.
Old buildings. Basement rooms. Food trucks. Market stalls. Rural main streets. A neighbourhood where the cable goes down every second storm. For those operators this is not a feature, it is the difference between a bad hour and a closed day.
The hardware line runs to three tiers, plus a two-station bundle. The software is identical across all of them. There is no cheaper edition on the cheaper station.
| Station | Price | Where it fits |
|---|---|---|
| Onyx | $1,250 $1,800 | Dual-screen flagship. The second screen faces the customer, so order lines, loyalty points and promotions display during checkout instead of a blank plastic back. |
| Diamond | $1,299 | The mid-tier all-in-one. The default choice for a single busy counter. |
| Topaz | $899 | Compact station with an 80mm receipt printer built into the body. Small footprint, nothing bolted on. |
| Onyx Duo | $2,200 $3,900 | Two Onyx stations with two upgraded 80mm printers, for a two-till floor. |
Peripherals are sold separately on the hardware page: receipt and kitchen printers, label printers, barcode scanners, cash drawers, weighing scales and consumables. Onyx pricing runs on a promotional cycle, so the $1,250 and $2,200 figures are the prices most of the month.
The restaurant build is organised around a table floor plan rather than a ticket queue, which is a meaningful distinction once a room is full.
A server opens the floor plan on a tablet. First floor, second floor, terrace, bar. Live tables are marked with covers and a running timer, tables in the middle of a split are flagged as splitting. The server taps the table, takes the order standing at it, and sends it. It prints in the kitchen the same second, on the 80mm Bluetooth kitchen printer.
No walking back to a station. No transcription. No ticket written twice.
Every item carries a second name field, and the kitchen ticket can be set to print both. English in the first field, Spanish in the second, and the line cook reads Spanish while the owner reads English off the same piece of paper — with reporting still keyed to the first name. Bilingual kitchens spend years working around this. Here it is a setting.
The retail build covers the expected ground: barcode checkout, inventory, stock alerts, unit conversion, promotions, members and loyalty, cashflow tracking, label printing.
The part that saves real time is the catalogue, which is normally the miserable part of switching systems and the reason a lot of shops never switch at all.
Two shortcuts do the work. In the Add Item screen you tap the barcode field and scan the product; roughly 99% of the time the system recognises it and fills in the product name itself, leaving the merchant to type a selling price and move on. And if the products can be exported from the current system to a spreadsheet, JETpos imports the entire catalogue on the merchant’s behalf.
Taxes are attached per item and can be applied in bulk once the catalogue exists, which is why the order matters: build products first, create taxes after. Both percentage rates and fixed per-item amounts are supported, so a bottle deposit or an eco fee sits on the same line as GST or state sales tax.
For a certain kind of buyer this matters more than the subscription does.
Clover, Toast and systems of that class tie the terminal to their own payment processing. That is where a large share of the vendor’s revenue lives, and it is why leaving is expensive. JETpos does not do it. The merchant keeps their existing processor, their existing terminal and their existing rates.
In practice an Ingenico Desk/5000 connects semi-integrated over USB, which means the sale total is pushed from the POS to the terminal automatically and the cashier never keys the amount in a second time. Wrong-amount charges disappear and end-of-day reconciliation stops being an argument. Any other terminal can run alongside the POS in standalone mode.
Processor lock-in is the single most expensive clause in most POS agreements and the one operators discover last. Whatever system you buy, find out before you sign whether the hardware still works if you change who processes your cards.
Sticker price is the wrong comparison. Total cost of ownership is the right one. Take a single-station retail shop over 36 months:
The gap is roughly $2,265 on one till, and it widens with every station added and every year that passes. On a three-terminal restaurant the difference over the same period runs well into five figures.
A practical note for anyone searching, because this causes genuine confusion.
Several unrelated businesses around the world trade under the JetPOS name. They are not connected to one another and they do not sell the same thing. To be clear about which is which:
The official site is jetpos.ai. The product pages are software, hardware, restaurant and retail.
Yes. The software carries a lifetime activation licence tied to the station. No monthly fee, no annual fee, no plan tiers, and no dependency on which payment processor the merchant uses. Every feature is included.
Yes. The system is hybrid. Online it syncs to the cloud; offline it keeps ringing sales locally with the full catalogue and tax rules, then syncs automatically once the connection returns.
The server selects the table on the floor plan, takes the order at the table on a tablet and sends it. It prints immediately in the kitchen on the 80mm Bluetooth kitchen printer, which connects over Bluetooth, USB or LAN.
Yes. JETpos does not tie hardware to a processor. An Ingenico Desk/5000 connects semi-integrated over USB so the total is pushed automatically; any other terminal works alongside the POS in standalone mode.
Three stations: Topaz at $899, Diamond at $1,299 and Onyx at $1,800, with promotional pricing on Onyx at $1,250 for most of the month. A two-station Onyx Duo bundle is also available. Printers, scanners, label printers, cash drawers and scales are sold separately.
Two routes. Scan each product’s barcode and the system fills in the name about 99% of the time, so only a price needs typing. Or export the product list from the current POS to a spreadsheet and JETpos imports the whole catalogue.
English, French and Spanish.
The buyer this suits is the one who has done the arithmetic. Independent restaurants and cafés running paper tickets to the kitchen. Retail shops and convenience stores carrying thousands of SKUs. Anyone who has watched a cloud terminal go dark mid-service, or discovered halfway through a processing contract that the hardware they paid for was never really theirs.
For that operator, buying the register outright and never seeing a software invoice again is not a novelty. It is how it used to work.
Full specifications, pricing and product detail are at jetpos.ai.
Competitor pricing cited from Toast and Square published rates, August 2026. Figures are list prices and exclude payment processing.
