Your Own App, Without the $25,000 Quote

What a build like this costs

First, the number everybody asks about.

You already know a custom app is the right thing to own. The question is what it costs, so here it is first, before anything else on this page. Not what another loyalty vendor charges, but what a shop pays a studio to build an app like this from scratch. Every figure below is somebody else’s published price, with a date, and you can check all three while you read this.

What you would be buying	What that means	To build it	To keep it running
Basic ordering app	Menu, ordering, payments, push. One location, both app stores.	$25,000 – 50,000	$3,750 – 10,000 a year
Mid-level restaurant app	The above plus a loyalty programme, a POS integration, more than one kind of user.	$50,000 – 90,000	$7,500 – 18,000 a year
Enterprise restaurant app	Ordering with modifiers, a kitchen display, a staff app, an admin console, wired into the till.	$90,000 – 180,000+	$13,500 – 36,000 a year
Production app with loyalty	Multi-location, loyalty, automated campaigns: what a chain runs. American figures, so US dollars.	US$150,000 – 300,000	15 – 20% of the build, a year
The average app project, any kind	Every category of app, not just restaurants. Here so you can see we did not pick only the dear ones.	US$90,780	not stated
This app	Built, submitted and published under your own name, then run for you.	Under $10,000, once	A few hundred a month, and no fee to your customers

Why ours is not that number. Every price above is a studio working the whole problem out from scratch on your money: the design rounds, the points engine, the staff side, both store submissions, the rejections and the resubmissions. We already went through all of that, for G.O.A.T. Coffee in Camrose, and for every shop since. Your app is still built for your shop: your name, your menu, your rewards, your own listing on both stores. But we are not learning the job on your budget. That is the whole reason our number is four figures and not ninety thousand, and it is the honest answer to “what is missing from yours”: nothing is missing.

Sources, all published and dated: the Canadian rows are App-Scoop’s price list for restaurant apps (offices in Vancouver, Toronto and Calgary, April 2026); the American rows are unPLUG Inc.’s 2026 restaurant app cost guide; the average is Clutch’s pricing guide from their own verified client reviews, updated 2 September 2026. They are ranges and estimates, not quotes, and nobody was ever billed them by us. The one figure you can verify in ten seconds is ours: the G.O.A.T. app is on the App Store today, and the seller and developer on that listing is G.O.A.T. Coffee Co Inc. Not Neon Sky.

The arithmetic

One regular comes back. What did that just earn you?

Four sliders, your numbers, no sales maths. Set them to your shop and the page works out what winning people back is worth against what the plan costs.

Drag the sliders to match your shop, every figure moves with them.

What a regular spends per visit

Coffee and a pastry, say.

$9.00

Visits a month, when they're a regular

Daily habit is about 20. Twice a week is 8.

Regulars signed up to the card

Not your foot traffic: the people who joined. A busy independent is usually a few hundred after the first year.

400

Your gross margin

Coffee runs high. 70% is typical on drinks.

70%

Gross profit recovered, year one

$9,072

20 recovered × 8 visits × $9.00, at 70% margin, across the six months left after they come back.

We assume a quarter of your list drifts away over a year and that the win-back brings back one in five of those, so 5% of the list. Both are deliberately conservative; if we are wrong they are wrong in your favour.

Enrolling a guest moves their return rate from about 7% to nearly 30%. Toast + Resy, The Regulars Report 2026, measured on POS transactions. Read that one carefully: it compares enrolled against unenrolled guests, not a controlled trial, so part of the gap is simply that keener customers enrol. We would rather say so than lean on it, and the arithmetic above does not use that figure at all, only the numbers you entered. Recovery is applied across six remaining months rather than twelve, because a win-back lands partway through a year.

How the win-back actually reaches them

The win-back is the whole product. The message that goes to someone who used to come in weekly and quietly stopped. So it is worth saying how it gets to their phone.

Your members have your app, so the app notifies them, free, every time. Joining and installing are the same step here: the code by your till takes them to your app, and they sign in with a phone number. One of our Alberta shops took 659 members through that in three weeks.

Text is the backup, not the plan. It is there for anyone who removes the app or asks to be reached that way. Texts and email are included up to a monthly volume we agree with you in writing before you sign, the same way we agree the hosting rate, so there is never a surprise line item.

That number is yours. Want to go and get it?

Send a logo and we'll build the app. You decide after you've held it.

See your app before you buy it Call 587 209 0457

Where we fit

Your till already counts points. That's not the problem.

Whatever you run the till on probably sells a loyalty tier, and it does one thing: add stars, take stars off. Very few do anything about somebody who has quietly stopped coming in. That's what we build, and it works on top of the till you already have.

A barista handing a takeaway coffee across the counter to a smiling regular customer

It wins them back by itself

Came in weekly, hasn't been in for a month? They get a reason to come back, on their own timer, at a discount you cap. Nobody has to remember to run it.

It fills your dead shift

You know which hours are quiet. The app knows who orders at that hour and lives nearby. Those two facts have never been in the same place before.

Birthdays, set once

The highest-response message an independent can send, and the one nobody has time to send by hand. Set it once and it runs forever.

One customer, not four lists

Counter, order-ahead, delivery, online. Most shops have four lists that don't know each other. One record ends that, and it's your record.

The card

Simple enough to explain across a counter.

A punch card people lose, replaced by a bar that fills. These are the defaults. Every number is yours to set, and changing them later is included, not a change order.

Hands holding a phone at a cafe table beside a flat white and a croissant

2 ptsper pre-tax dollar spent

100points: any coffee or tea, free

170points, any specialty drink, free

~11visits to a free drink on a $5 ticket

Week one: you see it first

We build your app from your logo, your menu and your colours, and send you a link. You're holding it before the balance is due.

Week two: it goes live at your counter

Scan-at-the-till from day one, on whatever POS you run. Your staff need about ten minutes of training, and that's the bulk of the rollout. The App Store and Google Play listings under your own name follow, four to six weeks from the start, because Apple's and Google's review queues set that pace and we do not.

Then: it runs

We set the win-back, the slow-shift push and the birthday trigger with you, and they run. You get a monthly note saying what came back and what it was worth.

A worked example

What actually happens to one customer.

Nothing here needs you to do anything. This is the win-back running by itself on the settings you agreed once, on rules you can change any afternoon.

Week 1

She scans the code by the till

She scans the code by the till, your app installs, and she signs in with her phone number, done before her flat white is made. Your icon is now on her home screen, which is the whole point: that is the channel the win-back will use in week 12, and it costs you nothing to send.

Weeks 1–8

She comes in twice a week

Seventeen points a visit on a $9 ticket, two per pre-tax dollar. She crosses 100 in her third week and takes a free coffee. You've now got her order history, not just her money.

Week 9

She stops. You don't notice. Nobody would

New job, different route to work. There's no moment where a customer tells you they've gone. This is where a punch card ends and where almost all the loss is.

Week 12

The app notices, and does something

Four weeks quiet against her own pattern, so she gets a message: a free coffee on her next visit. You set the offer and the cap once. It fires on its own.

Week 12, later

She comes back

Costs you one coffee at cost. If she resumes twice a week for another six months that's about $330 of gross profit from one automatic message.

The figures follow the same arithmetic as the calculator above, a $9 ticket, twice a week, at 70% margin. Your numbers will differ; the mechanic won't.

The plans

One build fee. Two plans, one difference.

The build is a four-figure number, under $10,000. A deposit starts it, and the balance is not due until the app is running on your own phone. You are not taking a risk on something you have not seen, and we put the exact figure in writing on the call. After that it is two plans, same app, and the only difference is whether you send the offers or we do.

Standard

You write and send the offers. Everything else is identical.

See your app before you buy it

Your own app on the App Store and Google Play, under your name
Points, rewards, order-ahead, push
Win-back, slow-shift and birthday automations, set up with you at launch
Change rewards, menu, artwork and point values yourself, any time
Email support, next business day
No fee charged to your customers, ever

See your app before you buy it

We run it

Plus

We write and send the offers for you. Everything else is identical.

See your app before you buy it

Everything in Standard
We write, schedule and tune the campaigns every month
Seasonal and one-off offers built for you, not by you
Priority support, same business day
A monthly note: who came back, and what it was worth
Onboarding and staff training session included
Nothing is locked behind this plan: every automation ships in Standard. Plus costs more because it buys the hours, not a feature.

See your app before you buy it

On the App Store On Google Play Under your name, not ours

One shop is already running it

708members

23 daysfrom a standing start

176joined on the best single day

G.O.A.T. Coffee Co, Camrose. The app went live on 11 August with nobody in it. Twenty-three days later there are 708 people in their own customer list, all of them signed up in the app with a phone number, 176 of them on the busiest day. Those are counted from their live database today, not estimated.

You can check the other half yourself: open the listing on the App Store and look at the seller and the developer. Both say G.O.A.T. Coffee Co Inc., not Neon Sky. That is what owning it means, and it is verifiable before you speak to anyone.

The owner, in her own words

“I had the pleasure of working with David with NeonSky AI to develop our order ahead and reward points app for our coffee shop. He fully caught our vision and made it come to life, down to the last detail in a quick and professional manner. No tweak or suggestion seemed outside of his wheelhouse. He implemented every change and improvement efficiently. I would highly recommend NeonSky AI to anyone looking to build an app and I will continue to trust him to maintain and update ours.”

Sami Laferriere Owner, G.O.A.T. Coffee Co Inc., Camrose, Alberta

Which one are you? If you already send your own emails and post your own specials, take Standard. The app just gives you something worth sending. If that has been on your list for six months and never happens, take Plus and stop pretending otherwise. It is the same app either way.

More than one location?

Then the price is a conversation, not a table. Two shops and twelve are genuinely different jobs, and any number we printed here would be wrong for one of you. What does not change: one flat fee across every location, never a per-site charge, one customer list, and points earned at any shop spent at any shop. Tell us how many rooms you have and we will price it on the call.

The six months, said plainly

There's a six-month minimum term, and then it's month to month with no notice period. We're telling you that up front because we build the whole thing before the balance falls due: a deposit starts it, and the rest is not payable until it is running on your phone. The six months is what makes that safe for us to do, and it's the only commitment in the deal.

What it is not: a lock-in. After month six you can leave any month you like. Your customer list is yours to export on the way out, the store listings are already in your name, and we'll agree a hosting-only rate in writing before you sign so the app can keep running without us.

This isn't a prototype. The same platform is on the App Store today

An Alberta coffee company runs it with real customers, real points and real orders, on iOS and Android under their developer accounts. Yours is a separate build in your own accounts, on the same proven codebase. Ask and we'll open the listing on our phone and give you the owner's name, so you can ask them what it's been like instead of asking us.

Nothing to pay to find out.

We build it, you look at it, and only then do you decide. That's the whole risk.

See your app before you buy it Call 587 209 0457

Ownership

Whose name is actually on the app?

This is the question worth asking every vendor you talk to, and the answers are public. You can check all of them yourself in about five minutes. We did, on 29 August 2026.

What they sell	What the customer actually opens	Whose App Store listing
Toast Loyalty	No branded app. Guests use an email lookup link, or find you inside the shared Local by Toast app.	Toast's.
Loyalzoo	No branded app. SMS or email, or your card inside the shared Loyalzoo app.	Loyalzoo's.
Stamp Me	No branded app. Customers download Stamp Me and search for your business.	Stamp Me's.
Owner.com	A real branded app.	Owner's. Their account carries the restaurants' apps.
This	A real branded app on both stores, installed on your customers' phones. They join with a phone number, no account to create.	Yours. Your company is the seller of record.

Two of those are worth saying slowly. Three of the four have no app with your name on it at all. Your customers download somebody else's app and search for you inside it, or just type a phone number. And the one that does build a proper branded app publishes it under its own developer account: Owner's Google Play account carries a shelf of restaurant ones.

Ours goes out under your company. On the Alberta coffee app we already have live, the App Store lists the seller, the developer and the copyright line as the coffee company, not as Neon Sky. If you ever fire us, the listing, the reviews, the download count and the customers stay exactly where they are.

	A rented loyalty tier	This
Customer list	Exportable at best.	Yours. Export it any day.
Per-location fee	Every month, every site, forever.	None. Flat inside your band.
Cut of each order	Some charge your guest a percentage.	Nothing. We never touch your order flow.
POS lock-in	Usually tied to one till.	None. Switch POS and it doesn't care.
Up front	Setup fees are common, and due before you see anything.	A four-figure build. A deposit starts it, and the balance is due once you have seen it working.

Some vendors take a percentage of every order, charged to your own regulars. We charge your customers nothing, ever. Worth asking whoever else you're talking to what they charge yours.

Own it instead of renting it.

Same app, your name on the listing, no cut of your orders. Start with a logo.

See your app before you buy it Call 587 209 0457

Questions

The ones we actually get asked.

If yours isn't here, phone us and ask. You'll get the person who writes the code, not an account manager reading a script.

A cafe owner in an apron standing behind their counter

What do I pay to get started?

A four-figure build fee, under $10,000, and then a few hundred a month. We put the exact numbers in writing on the call, and a quote costs nothing. What matters is the order it happens in: a deposit starts the build, we build the whole thing, you look at it running on your own phone, and the balance is due before it goes live. The deposit comes off the build price, and there is no milestone invoicing in between.

Does it work with my POS?

Today it works with all of them, because it doesn't need them: the customer shows their code and your staff scan or key it. That's about three seconds at the counter and it works on Square, Toast, Lightspeed or a cash drawer.

A direct integration with Square and Toast is on the roadmap, not shipped. Whether the API is open on your particular plan has to be checked before anyone commits to a date, so we won't promise you one here.

Do my customers have to download something?

Yes, and they do. A code by your till takes them straight to your app on the App Store, and they sign in with a phone number. No account to create, no password, no form. It is about as much friction as joining a punch card, and at the end of it your icon is on their home screen instead of a piece of card in their wallet.

That is worth being blunt about, because it is the part that pays for itself: a customer with your app installed can be sent an offer for free, forever. One of our Alberta shops signed up 659 members this way in three weeks, and every one of them has the app on their phone.

What happens after six months?

It goes month to month with no notice period. Cancel in any month and the managed work stops: the campaigns, the changes, the support. The app itself is yours and keeps running on a hosting-only rate that we agree in writing before you ever sign.

What's included in "unlimited changes"?

Rewards, menu, artwork and point values, as often as you like, no hourly bill. Improvements we ship to the platform land in your app free.

What's not: a new screen or a new integration built for you alone is a change request, quoted separately. We wrote the whole boundary down in one place rather than wording it differently for every client, neonskyai.com/plan-terms.

Who actually builds it?

We do, a small Alberta shop, and you'll talk to the person writing the code rather than an account manager. The same build is live on the App Store today for an Alberta coffee company; ask and we'll open the listing and give you the owner's name so you can ask them instead of us.

Your own app on the App Store without the $25,000 quote.

First, the number everybody asks about.

One regular comes back. What did that just earn you?

How the win-back actually reaches them

That number is yours. Want to go and get it?

Your till already counts points. That's not the problem.

It wins them back by itself

It fills your dead shift

Birthdays, set once

One customer, not four lists

Simple enough to explain across a counter.

Week one: you see it first

Week two: it goes live at your counter

Then: it runs

What actually happens to one customer.

One build fee. Two plans, one difference.

Standard

Plus

More than one location?

The six months, said plainly

This isn't a prototype. The same platform is on the App Store today

Nothing to pay to find out.

Whose name is actually on the app?

Own it instead of renting it.

Two things we'd rather say ourselves.

Badly built loyalty just discounts people who were coming anyway

You can rent something cheaper than this

The ones we actually get asked.

Give us your logo. See your app tomorrow.