Waya vs OneCup: the first-year cost for one café

The first-year numbers, up front

OneCup publishes three USD tiers, priced in USD even on its Saudi-Arabic page: Basic $40 a month, Growth $80, and Business $220 — approximately 150, 300, and 825 SAR a month at a ≈3.75 SAR/USD conversion (this is our conversion for comparison, not a figure OneCup itself publishes in SAR). The entry tier is 1,800 SAR over twelve months. Waya's path for the same café is 0 SAR while you're under 100 customers, then 85 SAR a month on the Growth plan. That lands at about 935 SAR in year one paying monthly, or 867 SAR if you prepay the year at 15% off. Against OneCup's entry tier the gap is roughly 865 SAR, which is about one more full year of Waya Growth.

The honest caveat is how many of those months are actually free. A café at 300 covers a week fills the 100-customer free tier in roughly four weeks. So treat free as a real trial with no card on file, not a permanent home for a busy coffee shop.

Both prices here are what the vendor published as of September 2026. Vendors change pricing, so confirm each one directly before you decide anything. And the biggest number in this article is neither subscription — it's the free coffee you give away, which is further down.

What Waya doesn't do

There's no POS-terminal or card-reader link and no hardware to buy — Premium separately adds integrations with seven accounting platforms. Waya doesn't read your till or your payment terminal, so stamps don't fire off a receipt total. Your cashier opens the Waya dashboard on an ordinary phone, or the Waya iOS app, and scans the customer's card after payment. It takes a few seconds and it sits beside your existing setup rather than replacing anything. OneCup explicitly markets "no POS required" too, so neither product touches your till.

There's no SMS. Messages go out as wallet notifications on the phone's lock screen, which means they reach the people who actually added the pass and nobody else. No customer phone number is handed to a third-party messaging app. If your plan is to blast a phone list, Waya is the wrong tool for you.

The free tier is a hard stop, not a soft nudge: 100 customers and 100 wallet messages a month. Customer 101 can't enroll until you upgrade, though everyone already enrolled keeps their card and keeps collecting stamps. The Waya merchant Android app is in early access today, so staff mostly use the web dashboard or iOS — OneCup has no dedicated merchant app on either platform, web-scanner only.

Notifications, side by side

OneCup's geofence is real but narrower than it sounds at first read: its own site states the feature works on iOS/Apple Wallet only, explicitly excluding Android/Google Wallet customers. Here's the fuller comparison, checked in September 2026.

The café we're pricing

300 covers a week is about 1,300 covers a month. Those aren't 1,300 different people. If your average regular comes two or three times a month, roughly 500 distinct people walk through the door in a month.

Now the enrollment assumption, written out so you can swap in your own. Say your cashier asks everyone who pays, and 1 in 5 of them scans the QR code and finishes the one-screen form. That's about 100 cards in month one, which is exactly where the free plan stops. If your staff only ask half the time, free lasts about two months instead.

Your enrollment rate is the single number that decides how long free lasts, and it's cheap to measure. Put a QR card by the register, count enrollments after seven days, and multiply. Guessing this number is how owners end up paying for a plan they haven't tested.

Month two adds fewer cards than month one. The pool of un-enrolled regulars shrinks fast, so after the initial rush you're mostly enrolling genuine newcomers — maybe 40 to 60 a month at this volume.

Published subscription prices, September 2026

OneCup's entry tier is $40 a month, about 150 SAR at a ≈3.75 SAR/USD conversion — but that's not the whole ladder. Growth is $80 (≈300 SAR) and Business is $220 (≈825 SAR), and every tier is billed in USD, even on OneCup's Saudi-Arabic page. Over twelve months the entry tier is 1,800 SAR; annual billing on OneCup is $192/$432/$1,440 a year across the three tiers.

For context, other Saudi options published these numbers on the same date. Watily publishes three SAR tiers — Basic 49, Growth 249, Pro 549 a month, VAT excluded — with loyalty bundled into a wider WhatsApp-commerce plan. Btaqa publishes tiers at 108, 250, and 380 SAR a month, so 1,296 SAR a year at the entry tier.

Waya is 0 SAR up to 100 customers, then Growth at 85 SAR a month (867 SAR a year), then Premium at 149 SAR a month (1,520 SAR a year). No commission on sales, no per-card fee, no setup fee. The structural difference isn't the feature list — most of these ship Apple Wallet and Google Wallet passes. It's that OneCup, Btaqa, and Watily all start with a paid subscription, and Waya's free tier goes to 100 with no credit card.

If you run two or three locations, Growth covers it at the same 85 SAR: 3 branches, 5 staff accounts, one card that works across every branch, and all scans rolling into one dashboard. At four or more branches you're on Premium at 149 SAR a month — cheaper than OneCup's $80/mo Growth tier (≈300 SAR) at that point, and well under its $220/mo Business tier. At that point price stops being the reason to choose, and you should compare on how the product actually behaves.

The line item that dwarfs the subscription

A buy-6-get-the-7th-free card is a 14% discount to your regulars, applied only after they've paid six times. That discount is a cost line, and for most cafés it's larger than the software.

Here's the worked version, with the assumptions on the table. Of your 100 enrolled customers, say 30 come weekly and buy about four drinks a month each. Each of those completes a 6-stamp card roughly every six weeks, so you're handing out about 20 free drinks a month. At an 18 SAR menu price that's 360 SAR of forgone revenue; counted in beans, milk, and a cup it's closer to 100 SAR of actual cash, assuming the free drink wouldn't have been sold otherwise.

Line those numbers up. Reward cost: 100 to 360 SAR a month depending on how you count it. Software on Waya Growth: 85 SAR. The difference between Waya and a 150 SAR plan: 65 SAR. The subscription gap is real money, and it's the third-biggest number on the page. Set your stamp threshold carefully before you agonize over vendor pricing.

Break-even is the useful check. At 85 SAR of software plus 100 SAR of reward cost, you need about 185 SAR of extra gross profit a month. Assuming an 18 SAR ticket at roughly 65% gross margin, that's about 16 extra drinks a month across your whole customer base, or four a week. On a 150 SAR plan the same math needs about 21 drinks a month, or five a week. Substitute your own ticket and margin — the point is that the target is small either way, and one extra drink a week is what the price difference buys you.

How to decide in one afternoon

Run a free plan for 30 days before you pay anyone. The cost of that experiment is zero and there's no card on file, and it tells you three things you can't guess: your real enrollment rate, whether your staff actually ask, and whether your reward threshold is too generous. Then pick a vendor with numbers in hand.

Ask every vendor the same five questions, including us. Is there a setup fee? Is it monthly cancel or a contract? Does the plan assume a tablet at the till, and who buys it? What happens when you pass the customer or message allowance — blocked, or billed? Can you export your customer list if you leave? Get the answers in writing, because these are the items that turn a 150 SAR subscription into a 400 SAR month.

One local timing note if you're new to the Saudi market: most salaries land at the end of the month, so both covers and redemptions cluster in the first ten days. Schedule your wallet messages around that rather than spreading them evenly. Growth includes 5,000 messages a month, so cadence isn't the constraint — restraint is.

For what it's worth, the numbers on our own homepage: more than 200 merchants across Saudi Arabia, 5,000+ customer cards living in wallets, and a 4.9/5 average rated by 90 merchants. Waya is backed by the AWS Startups program. Those are our figures, not an independent audit, and you should weigh them accordingly.