Most "small business POS" isn't small. It's a countertop terminal you buy or lease, a card reader that only talks to that terminal, a monthly contract, and an onboarding call. That's fine for a café with a counter. For a one-person operation — a single farm stand, a weekend craft table, a coffee cart, a church bake sale — it's a coat three sizes too big.
A micro POS should mean the opposite of all that. The smallest useful till is the one that adds nothing you don't already have.
What "micro" should actually mean
Three things, and if a system misses any of them it isn't really micro:
- No hardware to buy. The till is the phone or tablet you already own. No proprietary terminal, no dock, no reader you're locked into.
- No wall to get over. A catalog you can stand up in an afternoon — priced tiles, a few photos — not an item file that takes a season to get live.
- No commitment to find out. A free plan you can take a real sale on before you decide anything. Not a countdown, not a card-on-file to "start" — an actual free tier that stays free.
TallyTill's free plan, Stand, is exactly that: no card to sign up, no time limit, and it doesn't expire. You can put in five products and ring a live sale today, and if the stand stays a stand, it stays free. The pricing page has the full picture, including where the paid tiers pick up if you grow.
From nothing to your first sale
That's the whole thing. No lane to build, no terminal to provision.
When "micro" needs to become "two"
The nice property of starting this small is that growing costs almost nothing. If one table becomes two — a second lane at the market, a second stand at the fair — you pair another device you already own off a QR code in minutes. Adding a new till, step by step covers it. You're not re-buying a system; you're adding a tablet.
How it stacks up against the usual suspects
If you're weighing this against the tap-to-pay app on your phone or a Square setup, the honest comparison is about what happens when the vendor isn't a cashier — self-serve lanes, unattended shelves, catalog-driven checkout. We laid both out plainly:
- TallyTill vs phone tap-to-pay apps: which one do you actually need?
- TallyTill vs Square for unattended and self-serve checkout
And if your micro operation is a farm stand specifically, the produce-pricing craft — no barcodes, no fixed weight — is its own short read: your farm stand catalog, June to October.
Keep reading
- From zero to first sale: your TallyTill setup checklist — the fastest path to a working till
- Cashless self-serve kiosks for pop-ups and grab-and-go — when the micro till becomes an unstaffed lane
- Adding a new till: QR device setup, step by step — going from one device to two
You can start free — no card, no time limit and have a micro till running on a device you already own before the afternoon's out.