Short answer. PerkClub and Loopy Loyalty are different categories of product. Loopy Loyalty is a digital stamp card platform that issues passes to Apple and Google Wallet — customers fill the card and unlock a freebie. PerkClub is a white-label subscription platform that books recurring monthly revenue under your café's own brand. Same wallet pass UX, fundamentally different economics. Pick Loopy Loyalty if you only want to digitise stamp cards. Pick PerkClub if your problem is booked monthly cashflow rather than retroactive freebies.
Different mechanics, different cashflow
Loopy Loyalty is one of the better-known digital stamp card platforms in the global wallet-pass loyalty market. The product does exactly what it says — customers receive a pass in Apple or Google Wallet, staff stamp the card by scanning a QR code or entering a PIN, and after the configured number of stamps the customer unlocks a free reward. The mechanic is the same as a paper coffee card, just cleaner to administer and harder to lose.
PerkClub is not a stamp card. It is a paid recurring-membership platform — the customer pays you a fixed monthly fee through Stripe, in exchange for an ongoing perk, branded as your café's own club. The wallet pass UX is similar; the cashflow underneath is the opposite.
A stamp card rewards a visit that already happened. A subscription pre-pays for a future visit. The customer paying £25/month for a daily coffee has already given you the £25 before walking in. That distinction is the entire reason a UK indie should evaluate both.
Pricing model: tiered SaaS vs flat platform fee
Loopy Loyalty is priced as a tiered SaaS subscription. Entry tiers typically sit in the £15–£25/month range for a single business with a modest stamp card and a few hundred passes; higher tiers add multi-location support, push messaging, and analytics, scaling into £50–£100/month territory depending on scope. Pricing is paid by you, the operator. Customers don't pay anything to participate.
PerkClub charges a flat monthly platform fee plus standard Stripe processing on what you bill your members. Customers pay you. The platform fee is independent of member count — the 200th member costs the same to host as the 20th. See the PerkClub pricing page for the current figure.
The honest comparison isn't price-to-price. It's revenue impact. A successful Loopy Loyalty programme might lift annual revenue by £2,000–£5,000 through marginal repeat visits. A successful PerkClub subscription with 100 members books £30,000/year. Different orders of magnitude.
The customer experience: same wallet, different commitment
Both products use the same plumbing — Apple Wallet on iOS, Google Wallet on Android, no app download required. Both let you brand the pass with your logo and colours. Both are honestly pleasant pieces of software for the customer. That part is parity.
The difference is what the pass means. A Loopy Loyalty pass is a promise — "buy nine, get one free." The customer has committed nothing. They can walk away and never come back, and you've lost nothing because you charged them in full each time.
A PerkClub pass is a contract. The customer has paid you £25 this month for daily access to a perk. If they don't show up, they've still paid you. They have skin in the game, which is precisely why subscription customers visit roughly twice as often as non-members in the first month.
Margin protection: discount vs marginal cost
The economics of stamp cards bite at scale. A buy-nine-get-one-free programme is a 10% discount, full stop. On a £4 flat white that's 40p of margin lost on the tenth visit, every cycle, forever. The card runs perpetually because the customer keeps filling new ones. The discount compounds.
A subscription works the other way around. You book £25 today. The customer visits 12 times this month, each visit costing you maybe 60p of marginal product cost. Total cost-of-goods: ~£7.20. You've kept £17.80 in real margin from a customer who would, on a stamp card, have cost you 40p per cycle. The most loyal customers — the ones who'd visit 20+ times a month — generate the most margin under a subscription and the most cost under a stamp card. The model rewards loyalty correctly only in one of those two scenarios.
When Loopy Loyalty is genuinely the right pick
Be fair about the cases where Loopy Loyalty wins. If you genuinely just want to stop printing paper stamp cards — if "I want a digital stamp card and nothing more" is your actual ask — Loopy Loyalty is a clean, well-designed answer at a sensible price. PerkClub is overkill for that job.
Smaller, less price-confident customer bases also tend to convert more easily to a stamp card than a subscription. A monthly bill on a customer's bank statement is a bigger commitment than collecting stamps on visits they were going to make anyway. For some markets and demographics, a stamp card is genuinely the easier sell.
Why a UK independent should choose PerkClub for recurring revenue
The argument for PerkClub is structural cashflow. If your business needs to book a meaningful share of monthly revenue before customers walk in — to cover rent, smooth out the January trough, or simply give yourself the predictability that lets you negotiate harder with suppliers — a stamp card cannot do that. By design.
PerkClub was built for that specific job. White-label, wallet-first, priced flat, and engineered around the unit economics of a £25/month subscription rather than a 10% discount. Some cafés run both for the first six months: Loopy Loyalty as the entry-level loyalty rail for casual customers, PerkClub as the upgrade path for regulars. After six months most cafés drop the stamp card.
For a fuller treatment of how subscriptions, stamp cards and points compare, see subscription vs stamp card vs points.
Bottom line
If your problem is "I want a digital stamp card", Loopy Loyalty is the right tool. If your problem is "I want £30K of guaranteed annual revenue under my own brand", PerkClub is. If you'd like to talk through which fits your café, the PerkClub team is happy to walk through your numbers.
