Short answer. PerkClub and Magic Stamp are different categories of product. Magic Stamp is a digital stamp card with a physical Bluetooth stamper — simple, well-loved, and priced at £39–£99/month. It rewards visits that already happened. PerkClub is a white-label subscription platform that books recurring revenue before customers walk in — typically £2,500/month from 100 members at £25. Pick Magic Stamp if you only want the simplest possible loyalty programme. Pick PerkClub if your problem is predictable monthly cashflow. Many cafés run both for the first six months and then drop the stamp card.
Who is Magic Stamp for?
Magic Stamp is for the café, salon or barber that wants to move from paper stamp cards to a digital programme without thinking about it for more than an afternoon. The product is genuinely well-designed. Setup takes hours, not weeks. Staff training is about ten minutes. The Bluetooth stamper is satisfying to use, which sounds trivial but it isn't — staff who enjoy using a tool actually use it.
The pricing — £39–£99/month — is approachable for a single-site café and easy to expense. There are no hidden POS integrations. Customers don't need a separate app — most cafés run Magic Stamp through a wallet pass (Apple Wallet, Google Wallet) so customers don't have to download anything new.
The honest case for Magic Stamp is that it does one thing well: it digitises stamp cards, which means you stop printing cards, you stop losing cards, and you start collecting basic customer data on visit frequency. For some businesses, that's exactly what they need.
Who is PerkClub for?
PerkClub is for the business owner who's looked at the maths on a stamp card and concluded that lifting visit frequency by one or two visits a month isn't enough. They want guaranteed monthly cashflow under their own brand — the Club Pret model, but for an independent.
The arithmetic is direct. A subscription at £25/month with 100 members books £2,500/month, or £30,000 a year. That number is roughly the rent on a B-grade UK high street unit. Cover rent before you open the till and you've changed the question your business is trying to answer.
PerkClub is intentionally focused. It does not do stamp cards. It does not do email marketing. It does one thing exceptionally well: book recurring revenue under your brand, billed by Stripe, with no POS integration required.
What's the actual difference between a subscription and a stamp card?
This is the question that decides which platform you should be on. They are not different versions of the same thing.
A stamp card rewards a visit that already happened. The customer buys nine coffees, the tenth is free, you've discounted by ~10%. The mechanic is reactive. It lifts repeat-visit rate among customers who were already coming. It does not change cashflow timing.
A subscription prepays for a future visit. The customer pays £25 today for the right to claim a drink a day for the next month. You have £25 in the bank before they walk in. The mechanic is proactive. It changes both visit frequency and cashflow timing.
Repeat customers spend 67% more per visit than first-timers (Business.com), and 79% of daily coffee drinkers say a loyalty programme influences where they buy (National Coffee Association, 2025 NCDT). Both stamp cards and subscriptions move those numbers — but only subscriptions book the revenue in advance.
The metaphor that lands with most owners: a stamp card is a discount. A subscription is a contract.
Where Magic Stamp is the stronger pick
Pure simplicity. If "I just want to stop printing paper cards" is your actual ask, Magic Stamp is the right tool. PerkClub is overkill for that job.
Hardware delight. The Bluetooth stamper is one of the few pieces of hardware in retail tech that staff actually enjoy using. That matters for adoption.
Approachable pricing for very small operators. £39/month is a low-risk number. If you're running a single-site café with margins under pressure, the entry tier is genuinely friendly.
No customer commitment. Stamp cards don't ask the customer to commit to anything. There's no monthly bill on their statement. For some customer bases — particularly less price-confident, less metropolitan markets — a stamp card converts more easily than a subscription.
Where PerkClub is the stronger pick
Recurring revenue, not just engagement. This is the headline. PerkClub books cash. Magic Stamp lifts engagement. If your business problem is "I need £2,500 of guaranteed monthly cashflow", Magic Stamp does not solve that.
Cashflow timing. Subscriptions invert when revenue arrives. You are paid for the visit before the visit. That changes how you negotiate with suppliers, how you plan staffing, and how you survive January.
Customer commitment. A subscriber who's paying £25/month is in. They don't switch to the place across the street for a flat white tomorrow because they've already paid for yours.
Margin protection. A 10% stamp-card discount on a £4 flat white costs you 40p of margin. A £25/month subscription customer who visits 12 times a month costs roughly the same in marginal product cost — but you've already booked £25, not lost 40p.
Branded and yours. Both platforms are your-brand. The difference is that PerkClub gives you a contract with the customer, not a promise of a future discount.
Which should you pick by scenario?
"I want to stop printing paper stamp cards." Magic Stamp. PerkClub is the wrong tool for that specific job.
"I want £30K of booked annual revenue." PerkClub. Subscriptions are the only mechanic that delivers that.
"My customers are price-sensitive and won't commit to a monthly bill." Magic Stamp first, then test PerkClub on your top quintile of regulars.
"I want to replicate Club Pret in my café." PerkClub. That's the entire reason it exists.
"I want to do both." Run Magic Stamp for casual customers, PerkClub for committed regulars. They don't conflict and they target different cohorts.
Pricing: how do they actually compare?
Magic Stamp publishes pricing of £39–£99/month, depending on tier and feature set. The cost is predictable. The cost-per-customer falls as you grow.
PerkClub charges a flat monthly platform fee plus standard Stripe processing on member billing. See the PerkClub pricing page.
The honest comparison isn't price-to-price — it's revenue-to-revenue. A successful Magic Stamp programme might lift annual revenue by £2,000–£5,000 through marginal repeat visits. A successful PerkClub subscription with 100 members books £30,000/year. Different orders of magnitude, different problems solved.
What if you ran both?
A pattern that works well in practice for the first six months of a subscription launch:
Keep Magic Stamp as your low-commitment loyalty rail for casual customers. New people come in, get a wallet pass, collect stamps over a few weeks.
Run PerkClub as the upgrade path for regulars. When a customer hits, say, eight stamps, your staff invite them to "go subscriber" — fixed monthly fee, no more counting stamps. The stamp card becomes the entry point and the subscription becomes the destination.
After six months, most cafés find they can drop the stamp card entirely and run PerkClub alongside their email list. Some keep both indefinitely. Either is defensible.
For a fuller treatment of how subscriptions, stamp cards and points compare across business types, see subscription vs stamp card vs points.
Bottom line
If your problem is "I want a digital stamp card", Magic Stamp is the right tool. If your problem is "I want £30K of guaranteed annual revenue under my own brand", PerkClub is. They aren't really competitors — they're solving different problems. If you'd like to talk through which fits your café, the PerkClub team is happy to walk through your numbers.
