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 Kessel is
Kessel is a point-of-sale system for cafés, shops and restaurants. It runs the counter, the floor and the kitchen on one register, takes cards through Stripe Terminal or Tap to Pay on a phone, and keeps a double-entry ledger rather than only a sales report. It costs $49 per location per month after 30 days free, and cards are priced at interchange + 0.90% + 30¢, with interchange passed through at cost. There is no setup fee, no PCI fee, no statement fee and no termination fee, and you can start taking cards today on a phone you already own.
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.
The difference under the hood
A sales report tells you what you sold.
A ledger tells you where the money went.
Every sale in Kessel posts as one balanced transaction. Tips are a liability rather than revenue, so you are not taxed on staff money. Cost is snapshotted per line, so correcting a supplier price next month does not silently rewrite last month’s margin. It balances, or it does not post.
Switching
Give Kessel read-only access, 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.
A read key from your Square dashboard, or just upload their item export. We never write to Square.
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.
Coming from something else? Read the honest comparison for Square, Toast, Clover, Lightspeed, Shopify POS, including where each of them is the better buy.
The card rate
You pay what the card networks actually charge, plus nine 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.
You are quoted the whole bar. Where the line between the two parts falls is not on your statement, and it moves with your card mix: a debit-heavy week makes that hatched part bigger, not smaller.
Both parts are printed. When interchange falls, your rate falls, because the only piece we control is the green one and it does not move.
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 0.90% 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 on a larger average sale, and a low average ticket is usually better served by our flat rate below. We will tell you honestly which one you are before you switch.
| Card type | Interchange (theirs) | Ours | You pay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Interac debit | $0.05 flat | $0.66 | $0.71 |
| Consumer credit | 1.40% + $0.00 | $0.66 | $1.22 |
| Rewards credit | 1.75% + $0.00 | $0.66 | $1.36 |
Illustrative, not a quote. Interchange is set by the card networks and varies by card and how it is presented; these are typical Canadian card-present figures. Interac debit is charged as a flat fee rather than a percentage, which is why it looks so different from credit. Our part — 0.90% + 30¢ — is the only number that is ours.
Below roughly a $30 average sale, measured against a flat 2.65% + 10¢, interchange-plus usually loses to a flat rate: our 30c per transaction is a bigger share of a small ticket than the percentage we save you. It also depends on your volume, because the $49 has to come from somewhere. The calculator above works out the crossover on your own numbers — and if you are better off where you are, it says so. Send a current statement and we will meet any comparable processor’s effective rate on your real volume, or tell you plainly to stay put.
Do the arithmetic
Move the sliders. It can tell you to stay where you are, and on a small average sale it will.
2.94% effective on your volume.
Cards at about 2.77% effective, plus $49 of software. Nothing else.
a month better on Kessel, about $349 a year.
Break-even is an average sale of about $31.03. Above that Kessel is cheaper; below it, the fixed 30¢ costs you more than the percentage saves, and a flat rate is the better buy. That is on cards alone — you have the software line set to $0. If you pay separately for table service, team accounts, loyalty, invoices or a kitchen display, put the figure in and the break-even drops.
An estimate, not a quote. It assumes your whole volume is card present, and the interchange figure above is an assumption you can change. The two numbers that are not assumptions are ours: interchange + 0.90% + 30¢ and $49 a month.
Readers
Kessel runs on Stripe Terminal. These are the readers available in Canada, 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 handheld Bluetooth reader with a PIN pad, so chip-and-PIN works the way Canadian customers expect. Pairs with a phone or tablet.
Table service and mobile trade where PIN entry is the norm
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 $49 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 0.90% + 30¢ is ours. Send us a recent statement and we will show you the difference on your own volume.
Comparisons
We compare pricing models rather than quoting anybody else’s rates, and every page says where the other product is the better buy.
The switch Kessel was built for.
Read the comparison →Restaurant depth, on a term you cannot leave.
Read the comparison →The same terminal, a different rate every time.
Read the comparison →Retail depth, annual terms, priced by module.
Read the comparison →Excellent, if the store is the business.
Read the comparison →Questions
$49 a month per location for the software, free for the first 30 days. Card processing is interchange + 0.90% + 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. Paste a read-only key from your Square dashboard, or upload a spreadsheet — Square’s own item export works, and so does Clover’s or Lightspeed’s. Kessel brings over 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 — $49 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.
The demo 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.