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Comment by rohern | Hacker News Reader

This is fantastic. The POS space has needed massive disruption for decades. Kill the dinosaurs!

How is this disruptive? It's still a cash register. Most cash registers for decades have been digital/electronic in terms of running/totals and counting cash, and they all have credit card readers too.

For restaurant POS systems the typical cost is typically around $15-20k plus $2k per terminal. For smaller restaurants that don't need more than this package offers it's a bargain.

Which is fine... except this system is pretty unsuitable for even small restaurants (coffee shops, OK maybe :)).

The target market for this is very squarely (heh!) high end indie shops.

It's easy. It doesn't require having a merchant account. It has an simple interface for configuring items and lets transactions be paperless. That sounds disruptive.

Merchant accounts aren't necessarily a bad thing! With a merchant account there's little to no delay on your funds - money goes straight from your customers account into your business account. There's a Canadian company Payfirma that is disrupting payments by giving merchants more payment options like the popular mobile and tablet pos to ecommerce and even traditional chip and pin terminal setups, in one solution. You get to pick and choose the products that help fix your current payment woes but also upgrade those products in the future for when your business grows.

Ha, someone works for Payfirma...

There are plenty of companies doing this already, Square is pretty slow to the table.

Caveat: I work for one such company (GoPago).

The fact that there's so much activity in the space suggests that it's undergoing disruption. For years, POS systems have been... well... POSes. They're unfriendly, overpriced, lacking in features and just all around bad. The tech has been easily 10 years behind the curve.

We've got a new generation of POS systems coming into place using commodity hardware, the internet & business model that doesn't involve paying some shady fucker thousands of dollars for plugging in some hardware & typing in your menu.

Don't forget $300/hour fees for tech support when the system inevitably crashes during dinner hour.

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