Point of sale
Kessel runs your counter, your floor and your kitchen on one register. Card payments on Stripe Terminal, inventory that actually reconciles, and hardware that pays for itself out of the volume it takes.
30 days free. The demo needs no account at all.
What it does
A counter, a food truck and a dining room are not three products. They are an order type, a ticket number and a table.
Start with Tap to Pay and no hardware at all. Add readers when you want them — and never pay for them up front.
Most point-of-sale systems give you a sales report. Kessel gives you a double-entry ledger, because a sales report cannot tell you where the money went.
Describe a lunch menu and get one. Review exactly what changes before anything is written.
Switching
Connect Square, review what we found, apply it. Your catalog, categories, modifiers, taxes, stock counts and customers come across. Nothing is written until you have seen it, and you can undo the whole import for seven days.
Read-only access. We never write to your Square account.
What came over, what we changed, and what needs a decision from you.
One transaction. Undo available for seven days.
Tap to Pay works immediately. Readers ship after.
The card rate
You pay what the card networks actually charge, plus six tenths of one percent and thirty cents. That is the whole card rate — no separate pricing for chip, tap, keyed or online, and no surprise line items.
Most processors quote one blended percentage and keep the difference between that and the real cost of your card mix. A regulated debit card costs a fraction of a rewards credit card — on a blended rate you pay the same for both, and the gap is their margin.
Interchange is set by Visa and Mastercard and passes through to you untouched. Our 0.60% sits on top, visible, on every statement. When interchange falls, your rate falls.
Every processor charges a per-transaction amount; ours is 30¢. That means the rate works hardest above roughly a $25 sale, and a very low average ticket is better served by a blended rate. We will tell you honestly which one you are before you switch.
| Card type | Interchange (theirs) | Ours | You pay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Regulated debit | 0.05% + $0.22 | $0.54 | $0.78 |
| Consumer credit | 1.65% + $0.10 | $0.54 | $1.30 |
| Rewards credit | 2.10% + $0.10 | $0.54 | $1.48 |
Illustrative, not a quote. Interchange is set by the card networks and varies by card and how it is presented; these are typical US card-present figures. Our part — 0.60% + 30¢ — is the only number that is ours.
If your average sale is under about $15 — a coffee counter, a snack bar — a blended rate with a smaller per-transaction fee can beat this one. So we will match it. Send us a current statement and we will meet any comparable processor’s effective rate on your own volume, or tell you plainly that you are better off where you are.
Readers
Kessel runs on Stripe Terminal. These are the readers available in United States — and the cheapest one is the phone you already own.
The S710 has a SIM in it. When the wifi drops — the router reboots, the café upstairs saturates the line, the storm takes the street out — the reader falls back to cellular and the queue never notices. No hotspot, no tethering to somebody’s phone, no lost afternoon.
Built-in SIM — takes cards with no wifi at all
A full countertop terminal with its own screen, so the customer taps, tips and signs without touching your till. The register can run on the reader itself, which means it is the only thing on the counter.
A counter, a bar, a fixed lane — or anywhere with no wired internet
A pocket Bluetooth reader that pairs with a phone or tablet. Chip, tap and swipe, with a battery that lasts a shift.
Table service, a market stall, a mobile trade
Take contactless cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay on the phone already in your pocket. Nothing to buy, nothing to charge, nothing to lose.
Starting today, a second lane at a rush, a pop-up
Readers are Stripe Terminal hardware at Stripe’s price. Buy one, or lease or finance it and pay nothing on the day.
Hardware
Square makes you buy a terminal before you can take a card. You do not need to. Lease or finance a reader and it is collected out of the card volume it generates — capped, so a slow week never turns into a bill.
One payment, on the card you signed up with.
Nothing today. Collected from volume over the term.
Nothing today. Your term, your monthly.
Until a reader arrives, sell on Tap to Pay with the phone you already own.
Software
One plan. Every feature, every location, every staff member, no seat pricing and no upsell tier. Thirty days free, then $29 a month — and you can leave whenever you like.
30 days free — no card charged until the trial ends
Start 30 days freePayments are processed by Stripe and settle to your bank on Stripe’s schedule. Interchange is set by the card networks and passes through to you at cost; the 0.60% + 30¢ is ours. Send us a recent statement and we will show you the difference on your own volume.
Questions
$29 a month per location for the software, free for the first 30 days. Card processing is interchange + 0.60% + 30¢, where interchange is set by the card networks and passes through to you at cost. Hardware is Stripe’s price and can be leased or financed. There is no setup fee, no PCI fee, no statement fee and no termination fee.
Yes. The register keeps selling — cash, house accounts and gift cards work fully offline, and every sale queues and reconciles when you reconnect. Card payments offline are limited by what Stripe Terminal supports, and the register tells you plainly when a sale is queued rather than captured.
Yes. Connect Square and Kessel imports items, variations, categories, modifiers, taxes, discounts, stock counts and customers. You review a diff before anything is written, and the whole import can be undone for seven days.
None to start — Tap to Pay on a recent iPhone or Android takes contactless cards with no reader at all. Add a Stripe Terminal reader when you want a counter setup, and buy, lease or finance it.
Stripe. Kessel is not a payments processor — your money moves on Stripe’s rails and pays out to your bank on Stripe’s schedule.
Yes. Export your catalog, orders, customers and ledger as CSV at any time, and there is no software contract — $29 a month, cancel whenever you like. A hardware lease has a term; the software does not.
No. Every AI feature in Kessel proposes and a person applies. You see the exact before-and-after of every change, a proposal with a blocking problem cannot be applied at all, and Undo is a single click.
It is the real thing, seeded with a real shop. Ring a sale, split a bill, take a card. No account, no card, nothing charged.
No sales call. No contract. Cancel whenever you like.