Small business owners need to take care when considering accepting free POS software. While there may not be a cost fo the software itself, there is usually an annual fee which is considerably higher than the systems which have a purchase price.  I have seen many situatios where such an annual fee is mandatory.

In one situation recently we compared the cost of ownership over three years between a company offering ‘free’ software and ourselves. The customer chose us because we cost 25% less over three years and because software supportwas ptional with us.

We were first alerted to the high annual costs when we saw several annual support invoices from a competitor. $3,500 is too much to pay for annual software support in our view.