Square was built for everyone, everywhere. Fern was built in Swansea for the independent café, restaurant and bar owner who is tired of running five systems that don't speak to each other, and who wants someone local to call when one of them stops.
Split bills, allergens, table service, multi-site, offline resilience and a full audit trail. All built in, never a paid add-on.
Evenly, by item, or by free-form amount. The next card collects automatically once one is paid.
Tag once in the menu. Staff see them on every order, customers see them on every receipt.
Draw your floor plan once. The POS picks up where the previous shift left off, open tabs survive a tablet swap.
Open the admin panel from anywhere. Every metric updates as your POS rings transactions through.
EOD reconciliation built in. Variances are highlighted; history is searchable. No spreadsheet maths at midnight.
Every refund, role change, menu edit, and stock adjustment is logged with who and when. Filterable in the admin panel.
Compared with the typical entry-tier hospitality POS, the kind most independents shortlist when they're starting out.
"Entry tier" reflects the standard plans on the most common UK hospitality POS products in early 2026. Higher-tier plans may add some of these features at additional cost. We'll update this comparison as competitors evolve.
Here's a typical bistro's software stack, and the same venue on Fern. The card rates work out about the same either way — the difference is the five subscriptions.
Stripe's standardised rates. Stripe bills you directly and itemises every one of these on your own Stripe statement, so you can check our sums against theirs. We don't mark them up and we don't see a penny of them.
Per site, per month. No setup fees, no contract, no minimum term — monthly, cancel when you like. Your first six months are free, so the monthly fee below starts in month seven; Stripe's fees and our 0.1% apply from day one.
Deposits, not purchases. You get the money back when the kit comes back.
Put your own trade in and compare us against a card provider plus the tools you'd need alongside it. Every assumption below is editable, because your quote will not look exactly like anyone else's.
The competitor figures are starting points, not quotes, and we can't see the deal you've been offered. Every one of them is editable above — put your real numbers in and the comparison becomes worth something. Stripe processing is modelled at the in-person UK and EU rate of 1.4% + 10p; a card mix heavy in international or premium cards will cost more on either side of this table.
Three situations where something else will serve you better. We'd rather tell you now than take your money and let you find out.
Not a ticket queue, not a hold time, not a chatbot that asks you to rephrase. 8am to midnight, seven days a week, and always a reply within the hour.
Independent hospitality in Swansea and the valleys deserves a POS built here, not in San Francisco.
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