Two buyers, two clocks
A roastery serves two customers who look nothing alike. One buys a 250g bag every week or two for the kitchen at home. The other is a café that burns through 3kg before lunch. Put both on the same loyalty card and you will overpay one and insult the other.
The retail buyer runs on a consumption clock. The bag empties, and in that week they either reorder from you or pick up something from the supermarket shelf. Your card has one job: be visible at the empty-bag moment, not a month later.
The café account is a contract, not a stamp card. What holds it is price per kilo, a delivery schedule you actually keep, consistent roast dates, and a named person who answers the phone. A free bag after ten purchases is noise next to a 2 SAR per kilo difference on a 25kg weekly order.
So split them. Build one card for retail bags and keep wholesale inside your account terms. On Waya's Growth plan you get up to 10 cards, which leaves room for a second card aimed at something else entirely, like the baristas at your accounts buying beans for themselves.
Work out your 250g clock before you set a single reminder
Start with the arithmetic instead of a guess. A 250g bag holds about 12 to 16 brews at a dose of 15 to 20 grams. One brew a day empties it in 12 to 16 days. Two coffee drinkers in the same house cut that to 6 to 8 days, and a 1kg bag at the same single-drinker rate runs closer to 50 days.
Home espresso lands in the same range. An 18 gram double shot gets you roughly 14 shots out of a 250g bag, so a two-shot-a-day habit is a one-week bag. This is why a single reminder cadence for your whole retail list will be wrong for most of it.
Treat 12 days as a starting assumption, then replace it with your own data. Pull the last 60 days of retail orders and find the median gap between each customer's first and second purchase. If that median is 19 days, your clock is 19 days. Your grinder-owning regulars and your drip-at-the-office regulars will sit on either side of it.
Then place the nudge two or three days before the median empty date. A message on day 30 arrives after they have already bought beans somewhere else. A message on day 3 is an interruption. The window is narrow, and finding it is the whole point of the exercise.
Points on spend beat stamps per bag for retail beans
Bag prices at a roastery are not uniform, and stamp cards assume they are. A 250g washed Ethiopian at 75 SAR and a 1kg house blend at 130 SAR are not the same purchase. Give one stamp per bag and your sharpest customers will collect on the cheapest bag you sell; ignore size and you quietly penalize the 1kg buyers who are worth the most.
Points on spend avoid that. Say one point per SAR, and work the reward out on paper before you announce it. If your average retail basket is 80 SAR and the reward is a 250g bag that costs you 28 SAR in green coffee, packaging, and labor, then setting the reward at 800 points means the customer spends 800 SAR to earn 28 SAR of cost. That is 3.5% of revenue handed back, across ten purchases, or about four months at a 12-day clock. Decide whether you can carry 3.5% before the card goes live, not after.
One honest limit: Waya's free plan includes one stamp card. Points, balance, and discount cards start on Growth at 85 SAR a month. If you want the points model from day one, budget for that.
If you would rather stay on 0 SAR while you learn the clock, run a stamp card and write the reward wording tightly. "Buy 6 bags, get a 250g house blend" is defensible. "Buy 6 bags, get a free bag" is an open invitation to redeem against your most expensive lot. You can switch models later; you cannot un-promise a reward.
Where the bean subscription actually lives
Be clear about the division of labor. Waya does not process your customers' payments, does not run recurring billing, and does not integrate with a POS or till. Your subscription keeps running wherever it runs today, whether that is your online store, a monthly bank transfer, or a standing order over WhatsApp. The card sits beside it.
What the card adds for a subscriber is presence and a channel. The pass lives in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet with the roast date, the points balance, and whatever else you choose to show on it. When something changes, the pass updates itself and a message can land on the lock screen without you opening a messaging app.
Keep subscribers on the same retail points card and treat each fulfilled delivery or pickup as a scan. Award on completion, never on a renewal that has not shipped yet. Staff scan the customer's card on an ordinary phone, either the web dashboard or the Waya merchant iOS app, so there is no hardware to add at the counter.
The card also tells you when a subscription is quietly dying. The dashboard shows new versus returning customers and flags regulars who have gone quiet, and you can send win-back messaging from the same screen. If you already keep a subscriber spreadsheet, Excel and CSV import are available on the paid plans.
The reorder nudge, and the message budget behind it
The mechanics are simple on the customer's side. They scan your QR code, type a first name and a mobile number, and tap once to add the pass. Nothing gets installed, there is no account and no password, and any device that supports neither wallet gets a web card instead. No SMS is involved and no phone number is handed to a third-party messaging app.
There is also a passive branch-proximity reminder, which is useful if you have a retail counter inside the roastery. It is configured on the Branches screen. Worth knowing: the Address and Maps fields on the card itself are not the geofence, so filling those in does nothing for proximity.
Now budget the messages, because that is what the paid tiers actually meter. Suppose 150 people hold your retail card and reorder on a 21-day cycle, and you send one nudge per cycle. That is about 1.4 messages per person per month, or roughly 210 messages. The free plan caps at 100 messages a month, so you would be over it. Growth includes 5,000 a month, which covers about 3,500 card holders at the same cadence.
The free plan also stops at 100 customers. That is a hard stop on new enrollments, not a deletion: everyone already enrolled keeps their card and keeps collecting. For a roastery with a few hundred retail regulars, 100 is enough to find out whether the 12-day nudge changes anything before you pay for anything.
What it costs, and what else is on the market
Waya's prices are public. Free is 0 SAR forever, with up to 100 customers, 100 wallet messages a month, one stamp card, one branch, your own card design, and the full dashboard, with no credit card required. Growth is 85 SAR a month or 867 SAR a year. Premium is 149 SAR a month or 1,520 SAR a year, with unlimited cards, branches, staff, and messages. There is no commission on sales, no per-card fee, and no setup fee, and paying annually is 15% off.
For comparison, here is what other vendors in the Saudi market published as of August 2026. Check each one yourself before deciding, since pricing moves. Niqati is the best-known name here and the leader by search share, with quote-based subscription pricing. Btaqa lists tiers at 108, 250, and 380 SAR a month. OneCup is around 150 SAR a month. Watily is 149 SAR a month with loyalty bundled into a wider plan. All of them ship wallet passes, and several will do more than Waya does in areas we do not touch.
The one structural difference is where you start. Every option above begins with a paid subscription; Waya begins at 0 SAR and stays there up to 100 customers with no card on file. For a roastery testing an unproven assumption about reorder timing, that gap matters more than a feature list. For context on scale: 100+ shops across Saudi Arabia run on Waya, 5,000+ customer cards live in wallets, and merchants rate it 4.9 out of 5 across 90 ratings.
Two more things to know before you commit. There is no Android merchant app in general release yet; it is in closed testing, and the web dashboard works in any phone browser in the meantime. And there is no POS integration at all, so if your requirement is that beans scanned at the till stamp the card automatically, Waya is not the tool for that job.
Frequently asked questions
How long does a 250g bag of coffee last?
A 250g bag holds about 12 to 16 brews at a 15 to 20 gram dose, so one daily drinker empties it in roughly two weeks. Two coffee drinkers in the same house cut that to 6 to 8 days, and home espresso at an 18 gram double gets about 14 shots per bag. Use 12 days as a starting assumption, then replace it with the median gap between your own customers' first and second orders.
Should a roastery use stamps or points for bags of beans?
Points on spend fit retail beans better than stamps per bag, because a 250g single origin and a 1kg house blend are not worth the same stamp. With points you set one point per SAR and pick a threshold you have costed out, so an expensive lot cannot be redeemed against a cheap-bag stamp count. Note that Waya's free plan includes one stamp card only; points, balance, and discount cards start on Growth at 85 SAR a month.
Can I put my wholesale café accounts on the same loyalty card?
You can, but it will cost you money. A café pulling 200 espressos a day at 18 grams uses about 3.6kg daily, so it would clear a ten-bag stamp card in under a week and redeem rewards you priced for a home buyer. Keep wholesale in your account terms, where price per kilo, delivery schedule, and roast-date consistency are the real levers, and point the loyalty card at retail.
Does Waya charge my customers for their bean subscription?
No. Waya does not process customer payments, run recurring billing, or connect to a POS or till. Your subscription keeps running wherever it runs now, and the wallet card sits beside it as the record of the relationship and the channel for reorder reminders.
What happens after 100 customers on the free plan?
New enrollments stop at 100 customers, and wallet messages stop at 100 per month, but nothing is deleted. Everyone already enrolled keeps their pass in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet and keeps collecting. Growth at 85 SAR a month lifts both caps to unlimited customers and 5,000 messages a month, which covers roughly 3,500 card holders on a one-nudge-per-reorder-cycle cadence.