The cheapest POS in Saudi Arabia — and when cheap gets expensive

"Free POS" is never free. It is funded from somewhere else — payment processing, hardware financing, per-user fees, or a limited tier designed to make you upgrade. All of those are legitimate. The question is which funding model is cheapestfor your shop.

The genuinely cheap options

Hala — SAR 0–75/month, waived above roughly SAR 15,000 in monthly card sales. Earns on payments: mada at the regulated 0.8%, credit around 2.5% + SAR 1.\*

Geidea — SAR 0–115/month, waived above roughly SAR 15,000. Earns on payments: mada 0.8%, credit ~1.75–3%.\*

Odoo — one app free, then around SAR 51 per user per month. Earns on user count and on the rest of the suite.

Marn — around SAR 149/month.\*

Wameed — SAR 200/month at the entry tier, hardware purchased separately.

What each one is not telling you on the price page

Payment-funded systems tie your POS to your payment provider. That is fine until you want a better processing rate, faster settlement, or a different provider entirely. Leaving means losing the free software.

Per-user systems get more expensive as you hire. Five users at SAR 77 is SAR 385/month — more than any per-site plan in this list.

Free tiers are almost always limited on the rows that matter later: number of products, number of terminals, reporting depth, or branches.

Free hardware is financed by the contract. Work out the implied cost and what happens if you leave early.

The four situations where cheap becomes expensive

1. You carry stock and the cheap system has no inventory

Hala has no inventory module. If you carry stock, you will run it in a spreadsheet, which means it will be wrong within a month. A single stock-out on a fast mover during a weekend costs more than a year of the difference in subscription.

2. Your sales are mostly cash

A payments-funded system is only free if your card volume clears the threshold. A shop that is 70% cash pays the software feeand has the smaller feature set.

3. The internet at your location is unreliable

Of the cheap options, none is marked offline-capable in our August 2026 audit. An hour of not being able to sell on a Thursday evening is worth more than the monthly difference — and it repeats.

4. You grow

The cheap option is priced for the shop you have today. Adding a stockroom, a second branch, a kitchen or a delivery channel is either impossible or expensive on most entry tiers, and migrating systems at that point costs weeks.

The honest recommendation

If you are a stall, a service business or a single counter with no stock: take the payments-funded option. Hala and Geidea are good at what they do and you will save real money.

If you carry stock, have staff, or expect to grow: the SAR 200/month band is where the useful systems start, and the difference between SAR 0 and SAR 200 is recovered by a single prevented stock-out or a single caught discrepancy.

If your connection is unreliable: pay for offline. It is the one feature you cannot work around with effort.

How to test cheaply

Every serious vendor will give you a trial. Use it properly:

1. Import your real catalogue, not a sample
2. Run a full day of real sales on a quiet weekday
3. Unplug the router for twenty minutes during that day
4. Close the shift and reconcile the cash
5. Export everything and see what you get

If the system survives that, the price is the only remaining question. Ours is on thepricing page, and the full comparison across eleven systems is on thecomparison page.