How we work it out
- Members. Not everyone joins. We take your regulars and the share who sign up (50% in the middle guess).
- Extra visits. Members come back a little more often. We use 10% in the middle guess, so someone who came 10 times a year now comes 11 times.
- Profit on those visits. Extra visits × your average spend, less VAT if your prices include it, × the profit you keep after ingredients or stock. We leave out wages and rent because a few extra visits don't change them.
- Less the rewards. Members earn a reward every few visits, including visits they'd have made anyway. We count one reward for every full card, as if every card gets finished. Lots don't, so your real cost will usually be lower.
- Less the plan. Bronze is free up to 100 members. Silver is £35 a month up to 1,000, Gold £79 up to 10,000, and Platinum £199.
The break-even line tells you how many extra visits a week cover all of that. If that number looks easy for your business, the card is worth trying. If it looks hard, try a cheaper reward first.
What it leaves out
To stay on the safe side, the sum ignores things that are real but hard to put a number on: regulars who stay with you instead of drifting to the chain down the road, people who bring a friend, and the list of customers you build, which you can message about new offers.
Why we don't use bigger numbers
You'll see claims that loyalty members visit 64% more often than everyone else. That figure comes from a survey of restaurants by Square, and it's true in the sense that members are your keenest customers. But most of them were coming in a lot before they joined. The card's real effect is the extra visits on top, which is why our middle guess is 10%. Use the cautious setting if you want to be sure.
Where the card tips come from
- Keep the wait short. A 2026 study of 23,296 stamps across 1,013 small businesses found that about 11% of cards that take 2 to 4 weeks to fill get finished, against 4% of cards that take 8 to 16 weeks and about 1% of cards that take longer. (FaveCard, 2026)
- Give a head start. In a car wash study, 34% of people given a 10-stamp card with 2 stamps already on finished it, against 19% given an 8-stamp card with none. It's the same 8 washes either way. (Nunes and Drèze, Journal of Consumer Research, 2006)
- People speed up near the end. In a café study, customers bought coffee more often as they got closer to the free one, and a pre-stamped card was finished in a median of 10 days instead of 15. (Kivetz, Urminsky and Zheng, Journal of Marketing Research, 2006)
- What a free coffee costs. The coffee and milk in a latte cost a café roughly 30p to 35p, and a takeaway cup and lid about 16p more, according to Carvetii Coffee. The average UK coffee was £3.97 in 2026 (Finder).
It's an estimate, not a promise. If it looks worthwhile, try it on the free Bronze plan with your first 100 members and see what happens. See how Crocadilo loyalty cards work.
