Why Everyone Uses That POS (And Why I Built Another One Anyway)

I've spent most of my career standing next to a POS terminal. Sometimes lovingly. Sometimes wanting to throw it into a pool. If you work in restaurants, you know both feelings, usually in the same shift.

So today let's talk about the big names. The POS systems everyone actually uses. Why do thousands of cafes, bars, and noodle shops run on them? What are they genuinely good at? Where do they quietly drive you crazy? And then, yes, I'll tell you why I went and built KinDee on top of all that, because clearly the world needed one more opinion about receipts.

Let's be fair to everyone first. Then I'll be slightly unfair. That's how blogs work.

Loyverse: the people's champion

If you walk into a small cafe anywhere in Southeast Asia, Vientiane, Bangkok, Phnom Penh, Manila, there's a very good chance the tablet at the counter is running Loyverse. And honestly? There's a good reason for that.

The core app is free. Not "free trial" free. Not "free until you actually need it" free. Actually free: the register, the dashboard, even a kitchen display and customer display. For a small shop owner who just opened and is already sweating about rent, that's not a feature. That's oxygen.

Why people love it:

• It costs nothing to start, which is exactly the budget most new owners have
• You can set it up yourself in an afternoon, no consultant, no "implementation call"
• It runs on whatever cheap Android tablet you already own
• It even throws in a loyalty program for free, which most competitors charge for

Where it gets tight:

• The moment you grow, the add-ons start stacking up, employee management here, advanced inventory there, and suddenly "free" has a monthly bill
• It's built for simple operations. One counter, straightforward menu, done. Try running a busy restaurant with coursing, table service, and a proper kitchen flow, and you start feeling the edges
• Support and deeper features live behind the paid tiers

None of that is a scandal. Loyverse is honest about what it is: a brilliant starting point. It's the bicycle everyone learns on. The problem is when your business becomes a motorcycle and you're still pedaling.

Square: the smooth operator

Square is what happens when a payments company builds a POS, and it shows, in a good way. Everything about it is polished. The hardware is pretty. The app is clean. Taking a card payment feels like magic the first time.

Why people love it:

• Payments, POS, invoices, online store, one ecosystem, one login, one company to blame
• Genuinely beautiful design (yes, this matters; you look at this screen for ten hours a day)
• The free tier is real, and the paid tiers are predictable

Where it gets tight:

• Square really, really wants to be your payment processor, and takes its cut of every single transaction. That percentage looks tiny until you multiply it by a year of sales
• It's built around markets like the US. In Southeast Asia, where half your customers pay by bank transfer QR and the other half with slightly damp cash, the payments magic loses some sparkle
• Restaurant-specific depth arrives mostly in the paid restaurant plan

Square is the iPhone of POS systems. Gorgeous, seamless, and quietly holding your wallet the whole time.

Infrasys and Micros: the hotel heavyweights

Now let's talk about the big iron. Infrasys by Shiji and Oracle's Micros. If you've ever worked in a hotel restaurant, you know these two. They run the food and beverage of enormous hotel chains around the world, and I don't just know this from articles. I work with one of them in my backend every single day, right here in Vientiane. So this section comes with receipts. Pun very much intended.

Why hotels use them:

• They plug into the whole hotel machine, property management, room charges, finance systems. When a guest says "put it on room 412," that's these systems doing their thing
• They're enterprise-grade in the sense that they can technically handle hundreds of outlets across a whole chain
• And honestly? Many hotels use them because head office said so. That's not a joke. That's the actual business model

Where it gets painful, and I mean daily, personally painful:

• The price is heavyweight-boxing money. Licenses, modules, support contracts. You pay premium fees and then keep paying
• The design looks like it was frozen sometime around the invention of the touchscreen and never defrosted. Grey boxes. Tiny buttons. Screens that fight you
• The backend is genuinely difficult to learn. Not "takes a weekend" difficult, "we need to send someone for training" difficult. New managers stare at it like it's an ancient scroll
• And here's my favorite. With all those high fees, the system happily stores the accumulated garbage of what feels like every property in the region, old items, dead menus, ghost data from who knows where, all sitting in your backend forever. There is no clean way to clean it. I open mine every day and wade through it like a swamp. A very expensive swamp

And you can feel why it's like this the moment you touch it: these systems were built by programmers for a corporate checklist, not by people who ever ran a Friday night service. Every screen tells you that nobody who designed it ever had to use it at 8pm with a queue at the bar.

If you're a global hotel chain, fine, you have an IT department and a budget to absorb the pain. If you're an independent restaurant in Vientiane, this is buying a cargo ship to cross a river.

The comparison, at a glance

Four systems, four completely different answers to the same question. Here is who each one is really for.

Honest by design. Every "best for" above is a real fit, not a knock. The point is not that three systems are bad. It is that none of them was built for the fourth column's customer.

So why KinDee?

Here's the honest gap I kept running into, year after year, outlet after outlet: the free systems are too simple for a real restaurant, and the serious systems are built for someone else's country, someone else's payment habits, and someone else's budget.

I didn't build KinDee because the others are bad. I built it because I'm the guy standing at the pass at 8pm on a Friday, and none of them were built for that guy.

KinDee is built by an operator, not a boardroom. Remember what I said about the heavyweights being built by programmers who never ran a service? KinDee is the opposite. Every feature exists because something annoyed me during actual service. The kitchen display shows what the kitchen actually needs during a rush, not what looked nice in a demo. Coursing works the way a real dinner service flows. The interface assumes your newest staff member started yesterday and speaks a different language than your menu, because in this region, that's just Tuesday.

It's a real restaurant system, not a register with ambitions. POS terminals, kitchen display, guest-facing display, beverage inventory, reservations, staff attendance, the whole operation in one system that actually talks to itself. Not seven apps held together with hope and a spreadsheet.

It's built for here. Multi-language out of the box. Designed for how Southeast Asian venues actually run: the payment habits, the staffing reality, the languages your staff and your menu speak. This isn't a Western product with the prices converted. It grew up here.

And no payment toll booth. I'm not skimming a percentage of every coffee you sell. Your money is your money. Revolutionary concept, I know.

The honest ending

If you're opening a tiny shop tomorrow with three products and one tablet, genuinely, start with Loyverse. It's great, it's free, and I'd tell you that to your face. If you live in Square's ecosystem and it fits your market, enjoy it, it's lovely software.

But if you're running a real restaurant, courses going out, kitchen shouting, reservations coming in, staff rotating, inventory disappearing mysteriously (we'll talk about that another day), and you're doing it in this part of the world, then you've probably felt the gap I'm talking about. You've duct-taped the workarounds. You've paid for features you don't use to get the two you do.

That gap is exactly where KinDee lives.

Come try it. Worst case, you go back to your old system with a few new opinions. Best case, Friday night service gets a little less shouty.

And in this business, a quieter Friday is basically a miracle.