How much does a loyalty app cost in Australia?

Which kind of loyalty program do you actually need?

Choose the cheapest rung on the loyalty ladder that changes customer behaviour, because each step up adds cost faster than it adds repeat visits. The ladder runs from stamp cards to multi brand coalitions:

Rung	What it is	Typical cost (AUD)	When it is enough
Digital stamp card	Buy nine, get one free, tracked in a simple app or the POS	Low monthly fee	A single cafe or salon with one simple reward
POS integrated loyalty	Points or visits earned at the register, such as Square Loyalty	From $49 a month per location (Square, at the time of writing)	Most single brand venues and retailers
Wallet pass program	A branded Apple Wallet and Google Wallet pass linked to your POS and CRM	$9k to $27k build, plus running costs	Groups wanting their own brand, data and offers without an app
Custom points app	Your own app with points, tiers, offers and push notifications	$50k to $120k	Brands with frequent visits and a reason to open the app beyond points
Multi brand platform	Earn and burn across several brands or partners	$150k to $400k	Groups and coalitions with partner settlement

The build ranges are worked at an assumed agency rate of $1,100 to $1,500 a day, reflecting Re:Sourced’s July 2026 figure of $800 to $1,100 a day for senior software contractors in Sydney before agency overheads. Expeed’s 2026 app guide puts mid range business apps at $40k to $150k, which brackets the custom points app band.

What does POS integrated loyalty cost?

POS loyalty is the default for most venues because it needs no build, and its cost scales with locations and visits. Square’s Australian pricing at the time of writing is per calendar month, per location:

Loyalty visits a month	Price per location
0 to 500	$49
501 to 1,500	$99
1,501 or more	$149

A loyalty visit counts when a customer enrols, earns a point or redeems a reward. A group of four cafes, each with 501 to 1,500 loyalty visits a month, pays $396 a month, or $4,752 a year. Lightspeed and other POS systems offer their own loyalty features or partner apps, so check what your current POS includes before buying anything else.

The limits of POS loyalty are control and data. The program looks like your POS vendor’s, rewards follow its rules, and the customer data sits in its system. If you change POS, the program usually has to start again.

Are wallet passes a cheaper alternative to an app?

Yes. A wallet pass gives customers a branded loyalty card on their phone without an app download, and costs a fraction of a custom app to build. Apple says loyalty passes in Apple Wallet can show points and balances, send real time updates with Lock Screen notifications, and be distributed through your app, SMS, email, NFC tags and QR codes. Contactless passes can let customers pay and check in to the loyalty program with a single tap when paying with Apple Pay, using a protocol Apple calls Value Added Services that the payment terminal must support. Google Wallet offers a loyalty card pass type for Android.

What a wallet pass build involves:

1. Developer accounts. An Apple Developer Program membership, which Apple lists at 99 USD per membership year, with local pricing shown at enrolment. Organisations need a D-U-N-S Number to enrol.
2. A pass service that issues passes, signs them and pushes updates when points change.
3. POS integration so purchases add points automatically, through the POS vendor’s API.
4. A small admin area for offers, rewards and customer lookup.
5. Sign up flows from a QR code at the counter, a link in receipts, or a website form.

That is typically 8 to 18 days of work, or about $8.8k to $27k at the assumed rate, depending mostly on the POS integration.

When is a custom loyalty app worth it?

A custom app is worth it when customers have a reason to open it beyond checking points, such as ordering ahead, booking or exclusive content. Without that, installs and retention are hard to win, and most loyalty value can be delivered in a wallet pass.

Worked example: a 12 venue hospitality group

A hypothetical group wants one app across its venues with points, two tiers, birthday rewards, targeted offers and order ahead at three of the venues. Scope: discovery and design (10 days), accounts and profile (5 days), points ledger with tiers and expiry rules (10 days), POS integration across two POS products (14 days), offers engine with targeting and push notifications (10 days), order ahead for three venues (15 days), admin and reporting (8 days), testing, store submission and launch (12 days). Total 84 days, or $92,400 to $126,000 ex GST. Dropping order ahead would bring it to about 69 days. Our restaurant software page covers ordering in more depth.

Points ledgers deserve care. Every earn, redeem, expiry and adjustment must be an entry that cannot be silently edited, so that balances can be explained to a customer, an auditor or the ACCC.

How do points show up in the accounts?

Unredeemed points are an obligation to customers, so the accounting treatment affects your reported revenue and must be planned before launch. IFRS 15, adopted in Australia as AASB 15, replaced the old customer loyalty programmes interpretation. Under it, revenue linked to points customers earn is generally deferred until the points are redeemed or expire, based on an estimate of how many will be redeemed. Your software must therefore report points issued, redeemed, expired and outstanding, by period and by location.

A simple illustration, not accounting advice: a group earns 1 point per dollar, and 100 points buys a $5 reward, so rewards are worth 5% of member spend. On $1 million of member sales, that is $50,000 of reward value issued. If the business expects 60% to be redeemed, about $30,000 relates to rewards not yet delivered. Ask your accountant how to treat it, and make sure the ledger can produce the numbers they need.

Expiry rules also need attention. The ACCC’s 2019 report asks operators to make notice of approaching expiry sufficiently prominent, giving the example of an email subject line saying the points are about to expire.

What do ASIC and the ACCC expect?

ASIC treats typical loyalty schemes as outside financial services regulation, and the ACCC expects clear terms, fair changes and honest data practices. ASIC’s Regulatory Guide 185 says it has declared loyalty schemes not to be financial products where their sole or main purpose is to promote spending on the goods or services of the issuer or participating third parties, members receive credits for buying or using those goods or services, and the credits can be used to pay for goods or services or obtain another benefit. Licensing, conduct and disclosure requirements then do not apply. If your design lets points be cashed out, sold or used like money, get legal advice before you build, because it may fall outside that description.

The ACCC’s customer loyalty schemes final report, published on 3 December 2019, made recommendations that read like a product checklist:

• Present terms so members have a genuine opportunity to understand them.
• Give prominent, timely notice before reducing earn rates or point values, and a genuine chance to redeem first.
• Make expiry warnings prominent and targeted.
• Avoid automatically linking payment cards to profiles to track purchases when members have not scanned their card. The ACCC directed this one at the largest supermarket schemes.
• Explain data practices clearly and give members meaningful control over their data.

Unfair contract terms rules apply to loyalty terms too, including clauses that let you change the program without notice. For the analytics side, see our guide to privacy safe product analytics. This is general information, not legal advice.

What will each option cost over three years?

For a multi venue group, POS loyalty is the cheapest over three years, a wallet pass costs modestly more for your own brand and data, and a custom app costs several times more. Assumptions, not quotes: four locations with 501 to 1,500 loyalty visits each a month; wallet pass build of $8.8k to $27k with $2k to $5k a year for hosting, pass updates and support; custom app build from a scaled down version of the worked example at $55k to $90k with maintenance at 15% to 20% of build a year and hosting of $3k to $6k a year; POS integration fees are left out.

Option	Year 1	Years 2 and 3	3 year total
Square Loyalty, 4 locations at $99 a month	$4.8k	$9.5k	$14.3k
Wallet pass program	$10.8k to $32k	$4k to $10k	$14.8k to $42k
Custom loyalty app	$58k to $96k	$22.5k to $48k	$80.5k to $144k

The wallet pass narrows the gap with POS loyalty quickly and gives you portable customer data. The custom app only pays back if it drives orders or bookings, not just points.

How AWLabs approaches loyalty projects

We start with a Development Consult, then a paid Discovery Audit, credited in full against the build, that checks what your POS already offers and whether a wallet pass would meet the goal. If custom is right, you receive a fixed price Schedule of Work with three options: The Minimum, The Recommended and The Complete. Senior engineers lead every build. See our web and mobile app development service, our retail and ecommerce and hospitality pages, and our app development cost guide.