Cannabis POS pricing 2026: what dispensary POS systems cost, and the questions that get you a real number

Who wrote this. A company that connects to the major cannabis POS systems and sells none of them. We earn nothing if you pick one vendor over another, which is the one thing most "POS pricing" pages cannot say. Every vendor statement below is dated and sourced; where a vendor says nothing public, we write "Not documented", which means we could not find it, not that it does not exist.

The short answer

As of October 2026, none of the five major cannabis POS vendors (Dutchie, Treez, Flowhub, Cova, BLAZE) publishes a dollar figure for its software. Treez has a pricing page, but it describes a single all-inclusive plan and routes you to a demo for a quote. Meadow's pricing page does the same. The comparison hub says the same about the five major vendors.

So when you search "how much does a dispensary POS cost", every page that gives you a confident number is either a vendor's marketing, an aggregator's estimate, or a guess. This page does something different. It explains how the price is built, shows you what each vendor has said in public, and gives you a worksheet to turn five vague quotes into five comparable ones.

We only print a dollar figure when the company that wrote it is named, the date is shown, and a link is in the sources. We never estimate one ourselves.

Why vendors don't publish prices

Here is the reasoning, as an operator would see it. None of these are accusations, but they do explain why the quote call is where the real work happens.

• The price really does vary. Store count, state, number of registers, which modules you take, and which payment setup you choose all change the total. A single list price would be wrong for most buyers.
• Contracts are negotiated. Multi-store groups get terms a single store does not. A published price becomes the floor every negotiation starts from.
• Competitors read the page. A published number is a free target for a rival's sales team.
• The product is a bundle. When software, payments, hardware and e-commerce are sold together, one headline price hides which part is expensive.

The cost to you is that you cannot compare vendors until you have collected the same information from each of them. The rest of this guide is built around that.

The pricing models in use

Almost every cannabis POS quote is built from a mix of the pieces below. The vendors differ in which pieces they lead with, so two quotes that both say "per month" can be measuring different things.

1. Per store or per licence

A monthly fee for each licensed location. This is the most common base. Treez's pricing page says its plan is priced to work for "one store or a multi-state enterprise" and does not give a figure. Ask whether a second location gets a lower rate, and whether a delivery licence or a separate storefront counts as another store.

2. Per register, terminal or user

Cova's budgeting guide (a vendor source) lists per-user, per-register and licensing fees as ones that "grow with the business". Treez's page lists "unlimited registers, unlimited employees", and Meadow lists "Unlimited Seats". Flat seat counts matter if you add a register for 4/20 or a seasonal event. Ask what a temporary register costs.

3. Payment-processing tie-ins

Some plans include a payments product, or price the software differently if you use it. See the payments section below. This is the model most likely to be invisible on the quote and most expensive over time.

4. Tiered modules

Cova's guide describes tiered monthly subscriptions based on capability, and contrasts bundled flat-rate pricing with à la carte add-ons. Meadow's pricing page shows "Essentials" and "Growth" tiers with some features listed separately.

5. Onboarding and migration fees

Setup, data import, training and go-live support may be a one-time charge or may be folded into the monthly rate. Cova's guide names training and onboarding as a cost to budget for but gives no dollar figure for it. Ask for a fixed price, a scope, and what happens if go-live slips.

6. Hardware: buy or lease

Registers, scanners, printers, drawers and scales. Cova's guide says to "expect to budget $1,000 to $3,000 per station" (Cova, vendor, updated July 15, 2026). That is Cova's figure for its own estimate of one-time hardware per station, not a quote for any product. Leasing turns a one-time cost into a monthly one, usually with a refresh clause. Ask who owns the hardware at the end of the term.

7. Contract length and auto-renewal

Meadow's page says "Flexible Contracts" without terms. Other vendors do not publish theirs. Ask for the initial term, the renewal term, the notice window, and what a price increase at renewal is capped at.

8. Integration and API fees

BLAZE API access uses a Partner Key and a Developer Key (BLAZE API docs); how to obtain them and any fee are not documented publicly. Dutchie, Treez and Cova have partner programmes with their own approval steps. Meadow says integrations including Leafly and Weedmaps are "included at no extra cost". If you plan to connect accounting, loyalty, delivery or reconciliation tools, ask what each connection costs, who pays (you or the tool vendor), and whether the fee changes if the tool is replaced.

9. Add-ons: e-commerce, delivery, loyalty, marketing

These are where the monthly number grows. Cova's guide lists integration fees for e-commerce, loyalty, delivery, marketplace and menu tools, and warns that some providers raise cost through add-ons for analytics and reporting. Ask which of these are in the base plan, which are extra, and the price of each at your store count.

What each vendor says publicly

All entries are as of October 2026 unless dated otherwise. "Quote only" means the vendor's own site directs you to a conversation instead of a price.

Three notes on that table.

Cova's tier ranges are a vendor's view of the market. The guide (written by Cova's marketing team) describes four tiers by monthly price: a "starter" tier of $99 to $150, a "lower-tier cannabis POS" of $150 to $250, a "mid-tier" of $350 to $600 where it says most reputable cannabis POS platforms sit, and an "enterprise" tier of $700 and up. It gives no method or source for them, and it says nothing about what Cova itself charges. Treat them as one competitor's rough map, not as a price list. The same guide estimates that a new shop typically invests $3,000 to $10,000 in software, hardware and launch services in the first year. That is Cova's estimate too.

Aggregator listings disagree. Software directories show starting prices for several of these products. For the same vendor they often conflict with each other by a wide margin, and several are marked as unverified by the directory itself. We left those numbers out. If a directory shows a figure, ask the vendor whether it is current.

Ask about per-transaction charges. Some cannabis POS quotes include a per-transaction component alongside or instead of a monthly fee. Ask every vendor, in writing, whether any part of your cost is charged per transaction and on which transactions.

A total-cost-of-ownership worksheet

Copy this table into a spreadsheet and fill it in for every vendor you are quoted, over the same term. We have left the amounts blank on purpose: the only numbers worth putting in are the ones the vendor writes in your quote.

Fill in "Not stated" where the vendor has not written an answer. A column with five "Not stated" cells is itself information.

Hidden costs worth a second look

Payment processing

Over a year, the share of each sale that goes to payments is usually the largest line you can negotiate. Cova's payments article (vendor, May 2023) says card interchange fees range from "under 1% to slightly over 3%" depending on the card type, and lists the other charges a processor may add: a markup on top of interchange, setup or monthly fees, hardware and installation fees, and extra charges for merchants who are not PCI compliant. It gives no figure for those. Ask for the full schedule, not the headline rate.

Data export on exit

This is the cost nobody quotes. Your customers, loyalty balances, consent records and product history live in the POS. Ask now what you can export, in what format, how fast, and for how much. Dutchie's own partner programme documentation (vendor) shows what its API exposes to an approved partner, and the Dutchie alternatives guide explains how to keep your own copy flowing out daily as a hedge. The switch guide covers what survives a migration.

Compliance reporting

State reporting changes. Cova's budgeting guide lists regulatory updates as a cost category and notes that a lagging system carries risk. What we can state is what to ask: are updates to state reporting included in the plan, or priced per state or per change, and how quickly after a state changes its requirements has the vendor shipped an update in the past?

Before you spend weeks on quote calls, the free read-only audit looks at your sales, invoices and fees and shows you where money is leaking, which is useful whether you stay or switch.

How POS pricing interacts with payments

This is the part that makes cannabis POS quotes hard to compare with other retail software. Stated factually:

• Cashless payment is usually a separate product from the register. Dutchie Pay was introduced in 2022 as a payment option for cannabis (TechCrunch, July 20, 2022). Treez's page lists "cashless payments" as part of its plan. Meadow lists "Integrated Debit & ACH Payments". Each is a way for the vendor, or a partner, to earn from your sales alongside the software fee.
• The software price and the payment price can be linked. Whether a lower software rate requires you to process through the vendor's own payments, or a restriction on which payment partners you may use, is a contract term. Ask it directly.
• Rates are rarely public. In our searches we found no published rate card for Dutchie Pay, and Cova's article gives no figure for its own PIN debit fee. Payment pricing is, like the software price, a quote.
• The method of payment changes the cost. Cova's article presents PIN debit as an alternative to cashless ATMs and mentions a "crackdown on cashless ATMs". Treez and others describe PIN debit and ACH as options with different fee structures. We do not give advice on which method to use; we recommend you ask each vendor which methods its POS supports and the fee for each.

The practical rule: compare the total cost of the register and the payments together, over the same term, using the worksheet above. A cheap software line with expensive payments can cost more than the reverse.

How to negotiate

1. Get at least three quotes on the same day, on the same inputs. Give each vendor the same store count, registers, modules and expected monthly sales, so the quotes are comparable.
2. Ask for the itemised quote. If a vendor will only give one bundled number, ask for the line items. A refusal tells you something.
3. Negotiate the contract, not just the price. Initial term, renewal cap, notice window and exit terms are worth more than a small discount on the monthly rate.
4. Name a competitor. Quotes move when a vendor knows who else you are talking to.
5. Trade volume for terms. If you have several stores, ask for a rate that applies to the whole group and to stores you add later.
6. Keep payments separable. Ask for a quote that shows the software price with and without the vendor's payments.
7. Ask for the exit clause first. If the data-export terms are vague, that is where cost shows up later.

Questions to ask on the quote call

Print this list and keep it next to the worksheet.

1. What is the total monthly cost for my store count, my registers and the modules I named? Please send it itemised.
2. Which items are one-time and which recur?
3. Is any part of the price charged per transaction? On which transactions?
4. What is the payment-processing rate for each payment type, and what other fees does the processor add?
5. Does the software price change if I use a different payment provider, or none?
6. Do I buy or lease the hardware, who owns it at the end, and when is it refreshed?
7. What does onboarding cost, what is in scope, and what happens if go-live is late?
8. Which add-ons am I likely to need within a year (e-commerce, delivery, loyalty, marketing), and what do they cost?
9. Do you charge for API access or for connecting other tools? Who pays?
10. What is the contract term, does it auto-renew, what is the notice window, and what caps a renewal increase?
11. If I leave, what data can I export, in what format, how fast, and at what cost?
12. Are state reporting updates included, or priced per state or per update?
13. What was your uptime on the last 4/20, and can I see the incident record?
14. What is support's response time, and what does a higher tier cost?

Keeping the POS decision small

If the real problem is not the register but the cost around it (invoices that do not match, discounts that leak margin, loyalty that no one uses), changing POS will not fix that. Reconciliation, invoice capture, price intelligence and month-end close can sit beside the POS and read from it, and that can make the POS decision a smaller, lower-stakes one. The comparison hub lays out the differences between the majors, the best cannabis POS page covers choosing by situation, and the BLAZE alternatives guide takes a vendor-specific view.

For head-to-head detail, see the pair pages: Dutchie vs Flowhub, Dutchie vs Treez and Cova vs Dutchie. BudAlly's own plans are on the pricing page; BudAlly does not replace the register.

If you would rather see the numbers than argue about them, the free read-only audit finds cost leaks across your POS, invoices and processor statements without changing anything.

Corrections and vendor updates: hello@budally.com. We will update the row and the review date.