Loyalty software with no per-transaction fees: why it matters

When you compare loyalty platforms, the number you see first is the monthly subscription. But for a lot of products, that headline isn't the whole price. Buried in the pricing — or only revealed on a sales call — is a per-transaction fee: a small fixed amount or percentage charged every time a customer uses your programme, whether they're collecting a stamp or redeeming a reward.

It sounds trivial. It isn't. A per-transaction fee has a strange property: it costs you nothing when your programme is failing and the most when it's succeeding. The better your loyalty programme works, the bigger the bill. That's exactly backwards from how a tool you're paying for should behave.

Let's put real numbers on it. Imagine a fee of just R0.25 per loyalty transaction — charged every time a customer scans to collect a stamp, not only when they redeem a reward. A quarter of a rand sounds like nothing. But stamps get collected all day, so the total scales directly with your foot traffic.

Here's what that R0.25 adds up to over a year for three coffee shops running the same programme — a quiet one, a busy one, and a flat-out one:

That's R1 200 to R15 000 a year, on top of your subscription, purely as a tax on customers using your programme. And it scales the wrong way: the busier and more successful your shop gets, the bigger the bill — and a second location stacks on top again. A percentage-based fee behaves exactly the same way, just pegged to your reward value instead of a flat amount.

Transaction fees exist because they're easy to under-notice at sign-up. A R0.25 fee or a "small" percentage feels negligible next to the monthly subscription you're focused on. The cost only becomes visible months later, once the programme is embedded in how you operate and switching feels like a hassle. By then the fee is just a line you've learned to live with.

Platforms built for large retail chains can justify this — a chain has the volume and the finance team to model it. An independent café, salon, or bottle store doesn't, and shouldn't have to. For a small business, predictable cost matters more than almost anything else about the pricing.

A flat monthly fee in rands does something a transaction fee can't: it makes your loyalty cost completely predictable. You know exactly what you'll pay this month and next month, whether you redeem 10 rewards or 300. Your loyalty programme's success flows entirely to you — in repeat visits and word of mouth — instead of being partly clawed back by your software vendor.

It also changes how you run the programme. When every redemption costs you a fee, you're subtly incentivised to make rewards harder to earn and redeem. When there's no per-transaction cost, you're free to be generous — to run a double-stamp weekend, to surprise a regular with a free coffee — because generosity is what actually builds loyalty, and it doesn't cost you anything extra in software.

Lekka has no per-transaction or per-redemption fees, full stop. There's a free tier to start, and paid tiers are a flat monthly fee in rands, billed by EFT invoice. The price is set by the size of your business — your number of regulars — not by how often your programme succeeds. A reward redeemed is a customer who came back; you should never be charged extra for that.

When you compare any two loyalty platforms, don't stop at the subscription. Ask directly: is there a fee per redemption or per transaction? Is it a fixed amount or a percentage? What does it become if my members double? The answers often matter more to your annual cost than the headline monthly price does.