I pay for a lot of software to run my clinic. Accounting. Scheduling. Email and texts. Payroll. The website. Card processing. Every one of them charges me a flat, predictable fee — a number I can put in a budget and forget about. Every one except the category this company is in.
Loyalty platforms, almost alone among the tools an operator buys, charge a percentage of the revenue they touch. Five to fifteen percent of gross, depending on who's selling. I want to make the case that this is strange — not just expensive, but structurally strange — and that operators have been trained not to notice.
A thought experiment
Imagine your accountant called and said the bookkeeping software was switching models: instead of a monthly fee, it would now take 10% of your clinic's revenue — because, after all, it helps you manage the money that drives the business. You'd laugh. You'd switch that afternoon. The software didn't earn the revenue. You did. It's a tool, and tools charge for the tool.
Now swap "accounting" for "loyalty." The logic is identical. A loyalty platform sends a push notification, stores a points balance, and renders a membership card. That is useful work — work worth paying for. It is not work that earned a percentage of the treatment your injector performed and your front desk booked.
A rail doesn't take a percentage of the cargo. It charges to move it.
Why loyalty got away with it
Two reasons. The first is the "skin in the game" pitch: we only win when you win, so a percentage keeps us aligned. It sounds good. But alignment doesn't require a percentage — a flat fee and a contract you can leave any month is also alignment, and it's the kind that doesn't scale a tax against your best years.
The second reason is that the percentage is often hidden. It gets bundled into payment processing with a markup, so you never see a line item that reads "loyalty: 10%." You see a slightly worse processing rate and a vague sense that the software is "free." It isn't free. You're paying a software margin stacked on top of a payments margin — two cuts of the same dollar.
The tax compounds exactly when you don't want it to
Here's the part that should bother any operator who wants to grow. A percentage of gross is a tax on the very things you'd do to grow that gross. The better your year, the bigger the check — for the identical software. The model is fine for the platform; it gets bigger as you do. It's fine for a clinic that never reinvests. It's bad for everyone in between, which is most of us.
The one question
Before you sign with any platform — loyalty or otherwise — ask the literal question: are you a flat fee, or a percentage? Then watch which vendors get uncomfortable. The flat-fee answer is a number. The percentage answer is a speech.
That's the whole reason Loyalty Flow is built the way it is. Flat fee. Whatever you do in loyalty-attributable revenue, we keep zero percent of it — not because we're generous, but because it's the only model I'd accept from any other tool in my building. I never understood why this one should be the exception.
— Robbie