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vs Fivestars (SumUp Connect)
Fivestars built the best-known local-business loyalty network in America, and SumUp bought it in 2021. If you're reading this page, odds are you're here because of what happened next: contract changes, processing bundles, and a countertop screen that advertises other businesses to your customers. Here's the honest comparison.
01 — Side by side
The honest table.
| Category | Eco Systems CRM | Fivestars / SumUp Connect |
|---|---|---|
| Contracts | Month to month. Cancel any time, export everything. | BBB complaints describe month-to-month accounts being moved onto annual auto-renewing contracts, with continued billing after cancellation attempts |
| Whose brand | Fully white-label: your name on the kiosk, the texts, the member site, the events | Fivestars network branding; the countertop screen can cross-promote other nearby businesses in the network to your customers |
| Pricing | $200/mo flat + one-time $500 setup & migration · extra texts 2¢ · published right here | Quote-only; commonly reported around $299/mo, typically bundled with SumUp payment processing (2.6% + 10¢ in-person) |
| Payments lock-in | None. Keep Shopify, Lightspeed, or whatever processes your cards today. | Loyalty is sold alongside SumUp processing; leaving the processor means unwinding the loyalty program too |
| In-store | Branded kiosk PWA on any iPad or Android tablet you own | Their proprietary countertop tablet, in their branding |
| Beyond points | Community events with RSVP pages and door check-in, a themed public website, vendor directories, storefront rewards widget | Points, autopilot offers, and network promotions |
Comparison based on public materials, Better Business Bureau complaint records, and third-party reporting as of August 2026. Fivestars/SumUp pricing is not published; figures are as reported by merchants and industry sources. Spot something out of date? Email [email protected] and we'll fix it.
02 — Fair is fair
Where Fivestars earned its reputation
Fivestars solved a real problem at real scale: millions of consumers carry its shared rewards identity, sign-up at the counter is fast, and the autopilot offers genuinely bring some lapsed customers back. If you want a done-for-you network where being part of a bigger ecosystem matters more than owning your brand — and you're comfortable inside SumUp's processing stack — it still does that job.
03 — Where we win
Your customers should be yours.
The network is the product at Fivestars — and that cuts both ways. The customer who signs up at your counter joins their network, and the screen on your counter can promote other businesses. With Eco Systems, every surface is yours: the kiosk wears your logo (or even a second in-store brand, if your storefront and community run under different names), the texts come from your number, the member site lives on your subdomain, and your list exports whenever you want it.
Then there's everything a points network was never going to build for you: community events with RSVP pages and door check-in, a branded public website with a vendor directory, and a storefront widget that turns points into Shopify discount codes. Loyalty is the floor here, not the ceiling.
And the boring, important stuff: no annual contract, no processing bundle, published pricing, and A2P carrier registration filed for you by name, not by a form. If you're mid-contract with SumUp right now, book the demo anyway — we'll tell you honestly whether it's worth waiting out or worth switching, and the migration (balances, consent, rewards) is our labor either way.
Weighing more than one option? The full lineup is on the compare index, and the deepest write-up is vs TapMango — the platform we actually ran our own store on.
04 — Next step
Judge it on a demo, not a table.
Twenty minutes: the portal, a live kiosk, a real event page, and an honest answer on whether we fit your store.
$200/mo platform · 5,000 texts included · no contracts