Free. No card, no plan.
A café POS system that keeps up with the morning rush
Platevio is a point of sale for a coffee shop that keeps the drink, its extras, the note, what is still being made and what has been paid for in one browser tab. Take the next order on a phone or tablet already behind your counter — no terminal to buy, and no card processor to sign with.
No card needed. Nothing to install.
What a café POS has to do that a restaurant POS does not
A cafe is not a restaurant that sells coffee. The work arrives in bursts, the average order is three items, and the queue can see you the whole time you are taking it. Nobody waits twenty minutes for a table to turn; they wait ninety seconds and watch. That changes what the software has to be good at. A full-service system is built around the check — one long-lived thing that grows through a service and gets split at the end. A cafe needs the opposite: the order finished in a handful of taps, sent whole, and read correctly by whoever is on the bar, forty times in the same half hour. It also has to survive a room that changes character at eleven, when the same counter starts serving people who sit down.
A latte is one tap. Everything said after it is the problem.
Adding "latte" to an order is not what goes wrong. What goes wrong is oat, half-sweet, an extra shot, and a croissant warm but not toasted — four pieces of detail attached to two different items, spoken once, at the counter, to somebody who then has to carry them to the bar. Written on a cup, they survive. Held in a head, they survive until the third order behind them. Platevio takes them as data on the individual unit: the milk and the shot are extras on that drink, and the "warm, do not toast" is a note on that croissant. Both travel with it, both are still there when the bar reads it, and neither depends on anyone remembering.
What Platevio gives a coffee shop
Six things, all of them about the same ninety seconds.
-
A menu laid out the way you sell it
Espresso, batch brew, tea, cold drinks, pastry — your categories, in your order, each item with a price and a line of description for whoever started on Monday. Change a price from the same tablet you take orders on, and every other device has it moments later, without anybody reloading.
-
Oat, decaf and the syrups, priced on the drink
Set up the extras a drink can take — the milks, the extra shot, each syrup — and choose them on the individual cup as you take the order. A priced one adds itself to that cup, so the bill is right without anyone doing arithmetic at the counter.
-
The price the guest actually agreed to
The name and the price of an item and of every extra are copied onto the order at the moment it is taken. Repricing the menu tomorrow morning does not reach back into a bill that is still open on the counter.
-
Notes that survive the handoff
"Warm, do not toast." "Nut allergy." "Ice on the side." A note sits on the one unit it is about, not on the order and not in the cashier’s memory, so it is still attached when that unit reaches the person making it.
-
The order knows which table it is on
Put the order on the table it is sitting at, and the check follows the room rather than the person who took it. A table is a reference, not a copy, so renaming table 4 renames it on the check already open there.
-
Every cup on its own clock
Each unit moves through ordered, preparing, ready and served by itself, so the muffin can be ready while two flat whites are still being made. Mark the wrong one ready and you can walk it back down again, and a unit cancelled by mistake can be put back on the ladder.
One café order, end to end
A Tuesday at twenty to eight, with four people behind the one in front of you.
-
07:41
The order goes in at the counter
Two flat whites, one on oat with an extra shot, and a croissant with a note on it, on the table by the window. Four taps and it is sent.
-
07:41
The bar reads it, extras and all
Every unit arrives with the milk, the shot and the note still attached to the right item. Nobody translates handwriting and nobody shouts a question back over the grinder.
-
07:42
The croissant is ready before the coffee
The pastry goes to ready on its own while the drinks are still preparing, so the counter can answer "is the food up?" by looking rather than by asking.
-
07:43
It is paid for, cup by cup if that is how they are paying
Mark the whole order settled, or just the two coffees one of them is covering, and say how — cash, card, cheque, meal voucher. The card itself goes through your own reader, so no percentage of it comes to us.
Loyalty: the honest answer
Platevio has no loyalty program. No points, no digital punch card, no automatic reward on the tenth cup — and for a coffee business, where the same forty people come back every week, that is the feature most worth being straight about. Every café POS on page one of your search has one, and several are mostly sold on it. Platevio does not compete there yet. You can keep whatever loyalty tool you already run, but it will not know what Platevio recorded, and Platevio will not know who is on their ninth cup. Gift cards and store credit are the same answer. If rewards are the reason you are replacing your till, buy the system that has them today rather than the one that might.
Where Platevio fits, and where it runs out
It fits an independent cafe or coffee shop that wants orders in fast, drink detail that survives the bar, a live view of what is still being made, and the freedom to keep the card reader it already has. It is not coffee shop management software and it is not an all-in-one cafe suite, and these are the things it does not do today. None of them are on a promised date, so weigh them as they are.
-
Ingredient inventory
Platevio counts nothing. It will not tell you the oat milk is running out, and it does not deduct a shot of syrup from a bottle.
-
Online ordering and delivery apps
Orders are taken by your staff, on your devices. There is no ordering page for guests and no connection to the delivery platforms.
-
Payroll and scheduling
Staff have their own logins and their own roles, which is where it stops. Hours, wages and who is on Saturday live somewhere else.
-
Takeaway as its own kind of order
Every order Platevio opens today is a dine-in order. A counter can run on one that is on no table, but the board cannot yet tell a takeaway from a table that has not been chosen.
-
Printed receipts and tickets
Thermal printing is being built and is not usable yet. Today the order lives on screens, and a guest who wants a receipt is asking for something Platevio cannot hand them.
-
A connection is required
Orders move through a server, so the service needs the internet. There is no offline mode, and a cafe whose signal drops in the middle of a rush should weigh that first.
How to choose a POS for a coffee shop
Do not judge one of these on a demo order. Ask each vendor to build yours: a large half-sweet oat latte with an extra shot, a pastry with a preparation note, one item changed after it was sent, and a seated table splitting the bill two ways. Count the taps, and watch where the detail goes. The best POS for a cafe, or the best point of sale system for a coffee shop, is the same thing judged on the same ninety seconds: the third order of the morning going out without anyone having to ask a question. Then ask the questions that decide what it really costs.
- Is the free plan free because you have to take their card processing?
- Which of drink modifiers, loyalty, kitchen screens and extra devices cost more than the headline?
- What happens to a service when the internet drops?
- Can it run on hardware you already own, or is a terminal part of the deal?
- Can you export your menu and your sales history on the day you leave?
- Can somebody who started this morning take the usual order without help?
Café POS questions
- What is a café POS system?
- A café POS system is the software your counter takes orders on, plus whatever you run it on. It holds the drinks and food a guest asked for, the modifications they asked for on top, the handoff to whoever makes them, and the record of how the order was paid for. What separates it from a retail till is the modifications: a cafe sells the same six drinks all day and almost never sells them the same way twice.
- Is a café POS the same as a coffee shop POS?
- For almost every buyer, yes — café POS, coffee shop POS, coffee house POS and coffee shop point of sale describe one category, and this page is written for all of them. Cafeteria is the one worth pausing on: where it means a counter selling coffee and food to whoever walks in, this is the page for it; where it means a staff canteen running on badges, accounts and payroll deduction, Platevio has none of that machinery. The other genuine forks are elsewhere: a cafe with real table service also wants a floor plan and split bills, and a roastery selling beans and equipment wants retail inventory and barcodes, which is a different product.
- Is coffee shop management software the same as a coffee shop POS?
- Not quite, and the gap is where the disappointment usually lives. Coffee shop software sold as a management system is mostly the back office — ingredient stock, staff hours and scheduling, purchasing, loyalty and the reports that plan next week. Platevio is the point of sale end of it: the order, the drink detail, what is still being made, what has been paid for, and staff who sign in as themselves under a role that matches the job. It counts no stock, schedules nobody and runs no loyalty. If management is the word you are shopping under, read the list above before deciding this is it.
- Can Platevio handle milk choices, syrups and extra shots?
- Yes. Set them up as extras on the drink, then choose the guest’s on the individual cup as you take the order, and a priced one adds itself to that cup. Anything too unusual to deserve a permanent option goes in the note instead, which travels with the same unit.
- Does Platevio include café loyalty software?
- No. There is no loyalty program, no points and no digital punch card, and there is no date on which there will be. Keep the loyalty tool you already use — it will run alongside Platevio without knowing about it — or choose a POS that has rewards built in if that is the feature you are buying.
- What hardware does a small coffee shop need for Platevio?
- A phone, a tablet or a laptop with a current browser, and a connection. That is the whole list for the POS itself. Card payments keep going through the reader or terminal you already have, because Platevio records how an order was paid and never processes the card. Receipt and kitchen-ticket printing is still being built.
- Can Platevio replace a coffee shop till system?
- It replaces what a till is for, not what a till is. The order, the price it was sold at, the extras, the note and how each item was settled all live in Platevio, on a device already behind your counter. What it is not is a cash register: there is no drawer for it to open, no printed receipt to hand across — thermal printing is being built and is not usable yet — and no end-of-day cash-up, because Platevio holds none of the money. A counter that needs a drawer keeps the one it has and takes the order here.
- Does this coffee shop POS work offline?
- No. Platevio needs a connection to move an order from the counter to the bar. The pages are built small so they still load on the signal at the back of a stone-walled room, but that is not the same as working without one. If your connection genuinely drops during service, choose a system with a true offline mode.
- How much does a café POS system cost?
- Add up four numbers, not one: the software, the hardware, the card processing and whatever is charged as an add-on. A zero-dollar plan that requires the vendor’s processing is not the cheapest of the four. Platevio is free to use, runs on devices you already own, and takes no percentage of your sales, because it is not your processor.
Open your restaurant tonight
It takes a minute: your restaurant, your first menu, and you are taking orders.