A free loyalty programme for your restaurant
What you actually pay for, and what you should not have to pay for.
What a loyalty programme costs
A restaurant loyalty programme is paid for in three ways, and they behave nothing alike.
A subscription. A fixed amount every month, whether ten people came or a thousand. It is the clearest model to read and the hardest one in a quiet month, because the bill does not fall when your takings do.
A commission. A percentage of every cover the platform sends you. It sounds fair: you only pay when something happens. But the percentage is set by someone other than you, it is usually taken from the whole bill rather than from your margin, and it still applies to a customer who would have walked in anyway.
Hardware. A terminal, a tablet, a till module. The visible cost is the purchase. The real cost is the Friday evening it stops working, and the half hour spent training every new hire on it.
There is a fourth cost that appears on no invoice: the discount itself. It is almost always the largest of the four, and it is the one a sales demonstration is least likely to dwell on.
What can genuinely be free
The software can be free. There is no technical reason that an app which lists your restaurant and checks a code has to cost any particular restaurant money.
The discount cannot be free. Somebody pays for it, and that somebody is you. That is as it should be: it is what you are offering the customer, and it is exactly the part you should control.
That distinction separates two offers that often present themselves the same way. In one, you pay for the tool and the discount. In the other, you pay only the discount, and you decide how large it is.
Six questions to ask before you commit
They take minutes to answer and they head off most of the unpleasant surprises.
- Who sets the discount? If it is not you, you have no lever on the day it costs too much.
- Is there a commission on sales? A percentage of the bill sits on top of the discount. The two add up, and they are rarely presented together.
- Does anything need installing? Anything wired into your till is a thing that can fail mid-service.
- Can I stop whenever I want? Without notice and without having to ring anyone. If the answer needs explaining, it is a no.
- Is there exclusivity? A clause stopping you working with anyone else has a value, and that value should be yours.
- How many customers should I expect? Be wary of a number given without being counted. An honest answer sounds like "we cannot promise you that", not "a steady stream".
Where CalVal sits
CalVal is free for a restaurant: no subscription, no commission on your sales, and no card details asked for at signup or afterwards. The only cost is the discount, and you set the percentage yourself. Most partners use 10%, across the whole menu or part of it, and change it from their partner account whenever they decide to.
The customer arrives with a code they earned by hitting an activity goal, not by hunting for a deal. The code is scanned from a phone or tablet you already have. Nothing is wired into your till.
And the answer to the sixth question, as it stands: we cannot promise you a number of customers. CalVal has 32 partner restaurants in France today, in Amiens, Strasbourg and Lyon, and the app is young. What we can tell you is what you are committing, and the answer is nothing beyond the discount, which you choose, and which you can switch off whenever you like.