How we compare loyalty apps

We make NextStamp, a digital stamp card for independent businesses, and we also write comparisons of loyalty apps, including our own. That is a conflict of interest, and we would rather say so plainly than hope nobody notices. This page explains the rules every comparison on this blog follows, so you can judge them for yourself.

Where the facts come from

Every fact about another company comes from that company’s own public pages: its pricing page, its help centre, its feature pages and its own blog. We write down the day we read them, and each comparison shows that date beside its table, with the pages listed at the end of the post.

We don’t sign up to other companies’ trials for these posts, and we don’t present scores from review sites or anonymous forum posts as facts. If a company’s pages don’t say something, we don’t guess. A gap stays a gap, and the comparison says less rather than more.

Facts about NextStamp come from how the product behaves today. If a feature isn’t live for every business, it isn’t in a comparison.

How the apps are ordered

Apps appear in alphabetical order, with NextStamp in its place under N. There are no rank numbers, no stars and no “best overall” badge. Instead, each app gets a line saying who it is a good fit for, followed by what to know before signing up, so the decision stays with you.

We do this because a list written by one of the companies in it can’t be neutral about who comes first. Alphabetical order is the most honest answer we have found to that problem.

How we treat NextStamp

NextStamp answers the same questions as everyone else, in the same table, and it is labelled as ours wherever it appears. Its limits are written down like anyone else’s: it doesn’t connect to your till or card machine, customers sign up with a name and email before their first stamp, and its Free plan has room for 50 customers.

When another app does something NextStamp doesn’t, the comparison says so. If Square’s checkout or a bigger free plan suits you better, that is a perfectly good reason to choose something else, and we would rather you found the right app than the wrong one with our name on it.

What we leave out

There are no affiliate links in these posts, and nobody pays to appear in a comparison or to be left out of one. We don’t use other companies’ logos or screenshots of their products. Prices appear exactly as each pricing page showed them, in the currency it used, because converting them would add errors of our own.

How often we check

We read every company’s pages again at least every 90 days, and sooner when we hear that something has changed. The date in each comparison moves only when we have checked again. A year in a post’s title, such as 2026, changes only after a fresh check, never as a way to make an old post look new.

When we get something wrong

Prices change and features ship, so a comparison can go out of date between checks. If you spot a mistake, including in what we say about NextStamp, email our support address with a link to the page that shows the right answer. We correct the post, and its “Updated” date moves to the day we did.

Companies we write about can use the same address. We will fix anything their own pages show we got wrong, though we won’t remove a fair comparison because it isn’t flattering.