Cost of the stack

What a small store actually pays for software every month

A store that sells, services, delivers and pays staff does not buy one product. It buys a point of sale, then a time clock, then a payroll provider, then accounting, then — if there are trucks — routing. Each line looks small. The bill does not.

Every number on this page was fetched from the vendor’s own published pricing page on 14 September 2026, and the URL is printed next to it. Where a vendor’s page would not give us a figure, the row says so rather than borrowing one from a review site.

This page does not claim a saving.

Not one. What you would save depends entirely on which of these you already run and which you would keep — most stores keep their payroll provider, and should. We show what each thing costs, show the addition, and let you do the subtraction.

Start a free trial See what UpChannels costs

The components, at their published prices

One location, roughly eight staff. These are list prices as the vendors publish them, before card processing, hardware and setup. Nothing here is an estimate; where we could not read a number off a vendor’s own page, the row says so.

Published monthly prices for each component of a small retailer’s software stack, with the source page and the date checked.
Job	Vendor and plan	Published price	Source, checked 14 September 2026
Point of sale	Shopify POSBasic plan + POS Pro	$39 + $89 = $128per month, POS Pro billed per locationTheir page reads “Starting at $39USD/month” for Basic and “$89 USD/month for each POS Pro location”, the POS Pro figure quoted on yearly billing. Higher tiers: Grow $105, Advanced $399, Plus $2,300 on a three-year term. In-person card rate 2.6% + 10¢ on Basic, 2.5% + 10¢ on Grow, 2.4% + 10¢ on Advanced.	shopify.com/pos/pricing
Point of sale	Lightspeed Retail (X-Series)Basic / Core / Plus	$89 / $149 / $289per month, one register included on each tierExtra registers cost more. Lightspeed Payments is shown at a 1.5% card-present rate on all three tiers. Their own page adds: “Prices can vary and additional service fees may apply depending on the nature of the business and the industry.”	lightspeedhq.com/pos/retail/pricing
Point of sale	Square for RetailSquare Free / Plus / Premium	Card rates published; no monthly figure renderedsee noteSquare publishes the card rates plainly: in person 2.6% + 15¢ on Square Free, 2.5% + 15¢ on Square Plus, 2.4% + 15¢ on Square Premium; online and invoices 3.3% + 30¢ on Free and 2.9% + 30¢ on the paid tiers; keyed or card-on-file 3.5% + 15¢ throughout. Their retail pricing page renders its subscription prices in the browser, and fetched on 14 September 2026 it contained no dollar amount at all — so this page states no Square monthly fee. Figures you will see quoted elsewhere come from review sites, not from Square.	squareup.com — Square fees by plan
Payroll + tax filing	Square PayrollFull-service payroll	$35 + $6 per personper month, plus $6 for each person paidTheir page reads “$35/mo” plus a “$6 monthly fee per person paid”. Contractor-only payroll is “$6/mo per person paid”. The same page lists “Automated federal tax payments and filings” and “Automated state tax payments and filings”, and states “No commitment, no long-term contracts required”.	squareup.com/us/en/payroll/pricing
Payroll + tax filing	Homebase PayrollPayroll add-on	$39 + $6 per employeeper month, plus $6 for each employee paidThe add-on sits on top of a Homebase plan; it is not sold on its own.	joinhomebase.com/pricing
Time clock + scheduling	HomebaseBasic / Essentials / Plus / All-in-One	$0 / $24 / $56 / $96 annual — $30 / $70 / $120 monthlyper location per month, unlimited employees on paid tiersBasic is free for one location with up to ten employees, which covers a store with eight staff. Annual prices are the lower figure in each pair.	joinhomebase.com/pricing
Time clock + scheduling	DeputyLite / Core / Pro	$5 / $6.50 / $9 per userper user per month, excluding taxDeputy does not run payroll itself. Its payroll line is “Deputy Payroll enabled by Paycor” at $8 per user per month plus a $49 monthly base fee — it pushes approved timesheets into Paycor.	deputy.com/pricing
Time clock + scheduling	When I WorkEssentials / Pro / Premium	$2.50 / $5 / $8 per userper user per monthNo payroll of its own; the plans list payroll and POS integrations rather than native payroll.	wheniwork.com/pricing
Accounting	QuickBooks OnlineSimple Start / Essentials / Plus / Advanced	$38 / $85 / $140 / $340per month; 1 / 3 / 5 / 25 users, plus accountant accessThese are the list prices showing on Intuit's own pricing page on 14 September 2026, alongside a 50%-off-for-three-months promotion. Lower figures for the same four plans are still widely quoted in guides and listicles written before the current prices took effect — check the date on anything you read.	quickbooks.intuit.com/pricing
Delivery routing	OnfleetLaunch / Scale / Enterprise	$619 / $1,349 / $3,099per month; 2,500 / 5,000 / 10,000+ tasks includedEach tier reads “Starting at”. The Courier Suite add-on starts at $299/mo. The entry tier includes 2,500 tasks — far more than a store doing a dozen stops a day will use, which is what makes the floor hurt.	onfleet.com/pricing

Card processing sits on top of every one of these and is not in any total below, because it depends on your volume: Shopify publishes 2.6% + 10¢ in person on Basic, Square publishes 2.6% + 15¢ in person on its free tier, and Lightspeed shows 1.5% card-present for Lightspeed Payments while noting that additional service fees may apply depending on the business.

Three stacks, added up in public

Same store each time: one location, eight staff. The only thing that changes is how much of the job the store actually does. Every line is a price from the table above, so you can swap a line for the one you actually pay and redo the sum.

A store that does not deliver

One location, eight staff, no delivery fleet — a bike shop, a jewelry store, a gift shop.

Shopify Basic $39 + POS Pro $89: $128
Square Payroll $35 + (8 × $6): $83
Homebase Basic — free at one location, up to 10 employees: $0
QuickBooks Online Essentials (3 users): $85

$296 / month

A store that wants real scheduling and job-level books

One location, eight staff, everyone on the rota, five people in the books — a furniture store, a garden centre, a cleaning company.

Lightspeed Retail Core: $149
Deputy Core (8 × $6.50): $52
Square Payroll $35 + (8 × $6): $83
QuickBooks Online Plus (5 users): $140

$424 / month

A store that runs its own trucks

One location, eight staff, deliveries and installs on a route — a liquidation store, an appliance dealer, an HVAC company carrying equipment.

Lightspeed Retail Core: $149
Homebase Plus, annual billing: $56
Homebase Payroll $39 + (8 × $6): $87
QuickBooks Online Plus (5 users): $140
Onfleet Launch (2,500 tasks): $619

$1,051 / month

The jump from $424 to $1,051 is one line: Onfleet’s entry tier at $619 a month for 2,500 included tasks. A store running six stops a day will not use a tenth of that, and the floor does not come down. It is the single clearest example of why a stack costs what it costs — you buy the tier, not the usage.

What UpChannels costs, add-ons included

Priced per store, not per user, with two users included. Four of our lines are paid add-ons whose price we do not publish — those rows say so, because a page built on other people’s published prices has no business hiding its own.

UpChannels subscription plans, per-user pricing and paid add-ons.
Line	Price	Detail
Basic	$99 / month per store	List price $199. Two users included; additional users $29 per user per month.
Pro	$149 / month per store	List price $299. Adds SMS features and the finance module. Same two-user base and $29 per additional user.
Premium	$199 / month per store	List price $399. Adds grouped and pivot reporting and CSV export. Same two-user base and $29 per additional user.
Additional users	$29 / user / month	Above the two included with every plan.
Bank reconciliation (add-on)	Price not published	A paid add-on. We do not publish its price, which is the same criticism this page makes of vendors who do not publish theirs. Ask on the call.
Customer portal (add-on)	Price not published	A paid add-on: a per-order link where a customer sees status, requests a schedule change, pays, and leaves a review. Price is quoted, not published.
Integrated card payments (add-on)	Price not published + Stripe’s rates	Runs on Stripe, settling to your own connected Stripe account. Stripe’s standard processing rates apply plus a small per-charge UpChannels platform fee, shown in your payment settings. You can instead keep the processor you already use, in which case UpChannels takes no percentage of card volume.
Delivery Routing & Dispatch (add-on)	Price not published	A paid add-on enabled per store, the same as Bank Reconciliation and the Customer Portal — not part of a base plan. The day board, route sequencing, the texted driver link and proof of delivery all sit inside it. Quoted, not published.
Free trial	$0 for 14 days	No credit card. Month-to-month afterwards.

The same eight-staff store, added up the same way

The stacks above assume all eight people need the software. So does this, which is the least flattering way to price us — in practice not everyone needs a login.

Pro plan, one store: $149
Six additional users (8 staff, 2 included) × $29: $174
Add-ons you may or may not take: quoted

$323 / month before add-ons

On Basic the same arithmetic is $99 + $174 = $273. On Premium it is $199 + $174 = $373. Add your payroll provider, because you are keeping it.

What the stack does better

Five specialists beat one generalist at several real things. Here they are, stated by us.

It files your payroll taxes: This is the big one. Square Payroll lists “Automated federal tax payments and filings” and “Automated state tax payments and filings” on its own pricing page. UpChannels is not a payroll provider: it does not withhold, deposit or file payroll taxes, and it does not move money to your employees. If you are on this page to cancel your payroll provider, do not. Keep it.
The time clock and the rota are theirs, not ours: Homebase, Deputy and When I Work exist because staff scheduling is its own problem, and Square Shifts is included in Square Plus and Square Premium. UpChannels has no punch clock, no weekly rota, no shift swaps and no timesheet approval. If that line is the one hurting, none of the arithmetic below helps you — buy the scheduler.
Your accountant already opens QuickBooks: UpChannels keeps a real double-entry ledger — chart of accounts, journal entries, bank transactions — and produces statements from it. It does not replace your accountant and it does not file your taxes. Most stores keep QuickBooks and connect it, and that is a reasonable thing to do.
Shopify and Lightspeed sell online at a depth we do not match: Both publish full e-commerce as part of the same subscription, with an app ecosystem behind it. UpChannels has no built-in sync to Amazon, eBay, Walmart or an existing Shopify storefront; the website our team builds runs off your UpChannels catalog instead.
Onfleet is a courier platform, not a delivery board: At 2,500 tasks a month, barcode scanning and ID verification at the Scale tier, and a public API, Onfleet is built for volume a single store does not have. If you are dispatching for other people, that is the right tool and this page is not arguing otherwise.
Most of them have native phone apps: UpChannels runs in the browser. The driver and proof-of-delivery screens are built for a phone and work offline, but there is no app in the App Store or Play Store today.

What the stack leaves to you

Each of these is phrased as what the vendors do or do not document on their own pages as of 14 September 2026 — not as what they cannot do. If one of them has shipped something since, believe their page over ours.

Lease-to-own is not a payment type in these: If Acima, Snap, Progressive or Katapult are a normal way your customers pay, reconciling the lender's remittance against the tickets it paid for is a monthly afternoon with a spreadsheet. Neither Lightspeed Retail nor Square for Retail documents a lease-to-own or rent-to-own tender on the pricing, payments or financing pages we fetched on 14 September 2026 — Square documents Afterpay, and Jobber documents Wisetack, both of which are instalment lending rather than lease-to-own. This is not exclusive ground: STORIS, a furniture and appliance ERP, treats lender application, settlement and reconciliation as first-class, and has done for years — but STORIS publishes no price and is built for multi-user chains, not for one store with eight staff. The true statement is narrower than the usual one: no platform priced for a single-location independent documents it.
The joins between the products are yours to own: Hours have to reach payroll. The card payout has to reach the books. The delivery has to know the order was paid. Each vendor documents integrations; none of them owns the seam. When a number disagrees across two products at month end, both support teams are correct about their own half.
Sending a technician out is a separate purchase again: If you sell a mower, a furnace or a bike and then service it, the counter is only half of it. Lightspeed does publish a Service Orders module — it frames it as the repair counter, says it "can be added to each of our packages", and does not mention assigning a technician to a route, dispatch or field visits. Technician dispatch is not documented on the Onfleet pricing page either (both checked 14 September 2026). In practice this is where a sixth subscription — a field-service platform such as Jobber — gets added, and it is usually the most expensive line after the POS.
Five vendors, five renewal dates, five people to call: This is not a feature gap and it is not nothing. Every one of these is month-to-month or annual on its own cycle, with its own price changes, its own support queue and its own opinion about whose fault the discrepancy is.

Which lines actually collapse — and which do not

Not price alone — which purchases disappear. Two of these come with the plan. One is an add-on we charge for, and we have put it here rather than in a footnote, because the whole argument of this page is about what a line really costs.

Every tender, including the lenders

In the plan. Cash, check, each card brand, ACH and wire, wallets, Zelle, Cash App, Venmo, PayPal, store credit, gift cards, trade-in credit, loyalty points — and Acima, Snap, Progressive, Katapult, FlexShopper, Okinus and American First as their own named payment types, not as “other”.

How payments are recorded

A ledger that closes the month

In the Pro plan. Ledger accounts and journal entries behind a profit-and-loss statement and an assets-and-liabilities statement, with a balance check, in the same system that took the money. It does not replace your accountant, and bank reconciliation is a separate add-on.

How reconciliation works

Delivery routing — an add-on, not a plan feature

A day board by driver, one-click stop ordering, a texted route link with no driver app to install, and signature-and-photo proof of delivery that works with no signal and syncs when the phone finds one. It is the $619 line in the third stack — but it is a paid add-on here too, priced on the call.

How delivery routing works

If you have already shortlisted one product rather than a stack, the head-to-head comparisons go product by product against Square for Retail, Lightspeed Retail and Jobber — each one naming the case where they are the better buy.

What we could not verify for this page

Gusto’s plan prices. gusto.com returned HTTP 403 to us on 14 September 2026, on three different pricing URLs. We will not print a payroll price we could not read on Gusto’s own page, so Gusto is absent from the stacks above. Check it yourself before you compare.
Square for Retail’s monthly subscription fee. Square publishes the card rates for Square Free, Plus and Premium in its own help centre, and its retail pricing page renders the per-tier feature grid. The subscription prices themselves are loaded in the browser: fetched on 14 September 2026 the page contained no dollar amount anywhere. The monthly figures quoted in review articles are theirs, not Square’s, and we will not repeat them.
The history of QuickBooks Online’s list prices. We fetched today’s prices from Intuit’s pricing page. We could not fetch a dated price-change notice from Intuit, so this page states the current figures only — and warns that older, lower figures for the same four plans are still circulating in guides.
Onfleet overage rates. The pricing page publishes included task counts per tier but no per-task overage price.

Common questions

Questions about the arithmetic

Is this page saying I should cancel all five and buy UpChannels?

No. Keep your payroll provider — UpChannels is not one, does not file 940s, 941s or W-2s, and does not move money to your employees. Keep the time clock and the rota too: we do not have those either. Most stores also keep QuickBooks and their accountant. The lines that genuinely collapse are point of sale, inventory, orders, service jobs, where you record each kind of payment, and the ledger that closes the month — plus delivery, if you take the add-on.

Why are the prices here different from the ones I read last month?

Because they change, and most comparison articles do not. Every figure on this page was fetched from the vendor's own published page on 14 September 2026, and the URL is beside it. QuickBooks Online in particular is quoted at older, lower list prices all over the web. Open the source links and check the numbers against what the vendor says today.

How much will I save by switching?

We are not going to tell you, because we do not know your stack and a wrong number here would make every other number on the page worth doubting. Take the three worked stacks, swap in the lines you actually pay, and do the subtraction yourself. If the answer is small, we would rather you find that out on this page than three weeks into a trial.

Does the delivery routing really replace a tool like Onfleet?

For a store running its own trucks on its own orders, it covers the same ground: a day board by driver, optimized stop order, a texted route link with no app to install, offline proof of delivery, delivery zones and haul-away, and a tracking link for the customer. Two honest caveats. It is a paid add-on rather than part of a plan, so it is a smaller line than Onfleet Launch, not a free one — ask us what it costs for your store. And for a courier business dispatching for other companies at thousands of tasks a month, no: Onfleet is built for that and this is not.

Why does UpChannels not publish prices for its add-ons?

It should, and that is a fair thing to hold against us — this whole page is an argument for publishing prices. Bank reconciliation, the customer portal and integrated card payments are quoted rather than listed today. The plan prices, the per-user price and the trial are published in full, and the add-ons are priced on the call before you commit to anything.

What about card processing fees in these totals?

They are deliberately not in any total, because they scale with your volume and would let us tilt the arithmetic. The published rates are in the note under the components table. With UpChannels you can keep the processor you already have, in which case we take no percentage of your card volume; integrated payments through Stripe are an add-on that carries Stripe’s rates plus a small per-charge platform fee.

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