Leal vs SQUID
Your regulars should be an asset, not a line item on your invoice.
We will match a full year of your SQUID invoices.
Switch to Leal, start free, and put the credit toward Pro whenever you want.
SQUID is a well built product with real reach. Around 750,000 active users, more than 4,000 partner businesses, and a customer success team that many partners speak well of. If you want to be listed in a national rewards network, that is a real thing to want and Leal does not offer it.
But there are four things about the SQUID model that a lot of owners only notice in month nine. Your bill is indexed to how well your loyalty program works. Your loyalty card lives inside somebody else's app, on a screen that also shows the café, gym or salon down the road. The whole thing hangs on customers tapping an NFC tag, which is a worse way to sign someone up than the QR code they already know how to use. And because the customer does the tapping, you have no way of knowing whether a stamp was attached to a sale.
They are trade-offs that suit SQUID's business more than yours. And before any of them even kick in, there is the matter of getting started.
You pay, and then you wait for the post.
SQUID's own checkout tells the story. To finish signing up you pay €24.14 up front for a SQUID Tag and Marketing Pack (€19.95 plus €4.19 VAT), then you wait for the wooden tag to be delivered. Your loyalty program does not exist until that puck lands on your doormat and you activate it. Only then does the meter start.
- Pay €24.14 for a tag and marketing pack before anything is live.
- Wait for the physical tag to be posted to you.
- No stamps collected, no program running, until it arrives and you activate it.
- Sign up free, design a card, generate a QR code.
- Live in minutes. Nothing is shipped and nothing is paid to start.
- Print the QR, stick it on the counter, take your first sign-up on the same shift.
A loyalty idea you have on Monday is running on Leal by Monday afternoon. On SQUID it is running whenever the courier gets to you.
The better it works, the more it costs.
SQUID's published pricing is banded by the number of customers actively using your loyalty program each month. Not by features. Not by locations. By how many of your regulars are actually engaged. Every person you successfully sign up is moving you toward the next band.
| Active loyalty customers | SQUID, per month | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| 0 to 50 active customers | €15 | €180 |
| 51 to 100 | €35 | €420 |
| 101 to 500 | €55 | €660 |
| 501 to 1,000 | €75 | €900 |
| 1,001 and up | €95 | €1,140 |
The gap between SQUID's cheapest and dearest Digital Loyalty band, for an identical feature set.
What Leal charges when your customer count goes up. The price is the plan, not the headcount.
Leal is free for unlimited customers, or $99/month on Pro whether you have 50 regulars or 50,000.
You put the tag on the counter, you train the team, you push it for a year, and 600 people join. You did the work. SQUID moves you from €15 to €75 a month. Nothing about the product changed, and the better next year goes, the worse that gets.
The annual plan makes it explicit
SQUID's annual checkout offers a discounted first year: €328 for what it lists as a €950 plan, up to 65% off. Then, in its own words on the checkout screen, renewal "will be based on the average amount of active users you had in the 6 months prior to renewal". So year one is the discount, and the year you renew is priced on how many customers you got using the program. Grow, and the intro price is not the price you keep.
Problem two: you are paying to advertise your competitors
A SQUID stamp card does not live on your card. It lives in the SQUID app, and the SQUID app is a directory. Its whole job is to help a customer find businesses. The App Store listing describes it plainly: you download the app, sign up, and use the in-app Discover feature to find participating cafés, restaurants and salons.
So picture what happens after your customer collects their stamp. They are in an app, holding a screen that shows them every other place nearby offering a free coffee. The café that opened two doors down. The gym across the street. The salon your best client has been meaning to try. SQUID has more than 4,000 partner businesses. Some of them are your competitors, and you are on the same page as them.
SQUID's own pricing page lists this as a benefit: every plan includes "full advertising space on your in-app profile". Which is another way of saying your brand is a profile inside their app, sitting in a feed with everyone else's. Your push notifications go out through that app too, so what lands on the customer's lock screen is a SQUID notification.
A profile in a marketplace
- Your card opens inside an app called SQUID, not yours.
- A Discover feed puts nearby cafés, gyms and salons one tap away from your customer.
- Push notifications arrive branded as SQUID.
- Leaving means your customers keep the app and lose only you.
A card with your name on it
- The card sits in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet, in your colours, under your name.
- No directory, no feed, nobody else's logo on the screen.
- Push notifications come from your card, so your name is on the lock screen.
- The customer list is yours, exportable, not a segment of somebody else's audience.
Problem three: NFC is a fad, and it is slower than a QR code
Tapping a phone on a tag demos beautifully. At a real counter during the morning rush, it is the worst part of the whole system.
NFC only works for a customer who already has the app. That is the entire problem. The tap is the second visit. The first visit is a download, a signup and a search, performed by a stranger holding a coffee, while three people wait behind them. A QR code has no such precondition. Every phone sold in the last eight years scans one from the camera app, and the thing on the other side is a wallet card, not an install.
Signing up a new customer on SQUID
- 1 Your staff member explains the loyalty program while the queue builds.
- 2 The customer opens the App Store or Google Play.
- 3 They download the SQUID app. On iOS that is 111.8 MB over your café wifi.
- 4 They create a SQUID account.
- 5 They find your business in the app's Discover feed, alongside every other café near them.
- 6 They unlock the phone and hold it against the tag on your counter.
- 7 They get one stamp. Nine to go.
Signing up a new customer on Leal
- 1 The customer points their camera at the QR code on the counter, the receipt, the table or the window.
- 2 They tap Add to Apple Wallet or Add to Google Wallet.
- 3 The card is in their wallet with the first stamp already on it. No app, no account, no queue.
A QR code also works on a receipt, a table tent, a window sticker, a poster, an Instagram story and an email. A tag on the counter works in one place, one customer at a time.
And the tag is a small wooden cork puck that sits loose on your counter, fixed to nothing. It gets knocked behind the till, tidied away by a new staff member, or pocketed by someone who thinks it is a nice bit of wood.
Your entire loyalty program is one small wooden object
When the tag goes missing, nobody collects a stamp until a replacement arrives in the post. Not a degraded service, a stopped one, on the busiest counter in your business. That is a strange single point of failure to accept in 2026.
A QR code cannot be pocketed. It costs nothing to reprint, it can exist in ten places at once, and if one gets coffee spilled on it you print another in thirty seconds.
Problem four: when the customer taps, the customer decides
This one follows directly from the tag, and it is the one owners tend to raise last and feel worst about. If the customer taps the tag themselves, then nothing connects a stamp to a transaction. Your staff are not scanning anything. There is no moment where the business says yes, this person bought a coffee, give them credit for it.
So a customer can tap before they pay, or while deciding whether to pay at all. One person can tap several times for a table of four, three of whom have never installed the app and never will. None of it is especially malicious. It is just what happens when you leave the rewards button on the customer's side of the counter and get busy. You find out at the end of the month, when your stamp count does not match your till.
Leal runs the other way around. Your staff scan the customer's wallet card at the point of sale, so the stamp is issued by the business, once, attached to a real transaction. There is nothing on the counter for anyone to help themselves to.
This is why businesses actually leave
An Irish coffee shop told its customers in early 2026 that it was dropping SQUID. Its reasons:
- The monthly cost did not translate into anything tangible.
- The app did not always function properly.
- Customers collected stamps before paying.
- People collected on behalf of groups who did not have the app.
What it wanted instead: better pricing, better analytics, and an easier experience for customers with no stamping required.
Side by side
| Leal | SQUID | |
|---|---|---|
| Price at 50 active customers | $0 (free plan) | €15/month |
| Price at 1,000+ active customers | $0 free, or $99/month Pro | €95/month |
| Does the price rise as customers join? | Never | Yes, that is the pricing model |
| Customer app download required | None | Yes, 111.8 MB plus signup |
| Apple & Google Wallet cards | No, cards live in the SQUID app | |
| Who issues the stamp | Your staff, at the point of sale | The customer, by tapping the tag |
| Stamp tied to an actual transaction | No link between a tap and a payment | |
| Hardware on your counter | None required | A wooden SQUID Tag, loose on the counter |
| Competitors visible to your customer | None. There is no directory | 4,000+ businesses in the Discover feed |
| Whose brand is on the push notification | Yours | SQUID's |
| National rewards network | No | Yes, Wave Points |
| Cost to get started | €0 | €24.14 up front for the tag + marketing pack |
| Time from sign-up to first stamp | Minutes | However long the tag takes to arrive in the post |
| How you get started | Sign up and build a card yourself | Book a demo, pay, wait for delivery, activate |
You do not have to take our word for it
SQUID sits at 3.6 on Trustpilot. It is a small sample, and most reviews are positive, plenty of them from happy customers on their free coffees. But the shape is telling: a big block of five-star reviews, not a single four-star one, and then a third of all reviews sitting at one or two stars. People are either delighted or done. And the unhappy ones keep landing on the same handful of problems.
You cannot get at your own customer data
A retailer reports that SQUID fenced off requests for data on their own customer base, with no export function and no API to pull it out. The people who signed up in your shop, locked in someone else's dashboard.
Straight from a SQUID partner, not from us.
Billing outlives cancellation
One business says it cancelled and was still charged. A user reports vouchers exchanged for points vanishing from their wallet, explained away as a bug with no warning. So much for cancel anytime.
SQUID's checkout promises cancel anytime. These reviewers describe otherwise.
The app is a single point of failure
Reviewers report the app crashing and refusing its one job, and stamps not recording without a live internet connection at the counter. When the app has a bad day, your loyalty program has a bad day.
A wallet card in Apple or Google Wallet has no app to crash.
Support can be thin when it matters
A retailer describes five to seven working day response times and cookie-cutter replies. A user found the support chat was an AI article bot with no way to reach a person.
The proactive success team is real for some, absent for others.
We are paraphrasing public reviews and leaving reviewers unnamed. It is a small sample, so read them yourself and make your own call.
Read them on TrustpilotWhen SQUID is genuinely the better call
SQUID is the better choice in a few real situations.
- You want the network. Around 750,000 active users and a Discover feed is genuine distribution. Leal has no discovery network at all. If your problem is that nobody knows you exist, being listed somewhere people browse is worth paying for.
- You want Wave Points. A shared currency your customers earn on their supermarket shop and spend on your flat white is a clever idea, and there is no Leal equivalent. If that is the pitch you want to make, SQUID is currently the only Irish product making it.
- You want to be looked after. Some SQUID partners describe a success team that calls unprompted with promotional ideas, though its Trustpilot reviews are more mixed on response times. Leal is self-serve by design. If you would rather someone else drove the program, that is a real difference either way.
- You are tiny and staying tiny. Under 50 active loyalty customers, €15 a month is cheap. Compare it to Leal's free plan rather than to Pro, and then ask what happens at 501.
The question worth asking
Not "which product has more features". Ask instead: at the end of three years, who owns the relationship? If your loyalty lives in a network's app, priced on how many of your customers use it, then the network owns a slice of every regular you earned. If it lives in a wallet card with your name on it, you own all of it, and adding your thousandth customer costs exactly the same as adding your first.
Already on SQUID and thinking about moving?
You do not have to make it a project. Set a Leal card up on the free plan, put a QR code beside the tag, and run both for a month. Within two weeks you will see which one people actually join, because one of them asks for a download and the other does not. If you want a hand moving existing stamp balances across so your regulars do not lose progress, tell us what you have and we will sort it.
SQUID pricing breakdown
Every published tier, the Wave Points fees, and the renewal questions to ask before you sign.