4Labs PRO vs Loyverse

Loyverse is a free point of sale that, according to its website, more than 350,000 active merchants use worldwide, and its free plan is genuinely generous: checkout, catalog, basic inventory, a kitchen display and a mobile app at no cost. It publishes its pricing openly: unlimited sales history costs five dollars a month per store, employee management five per employee and advanced inventory twenty-five per store, plus taxes.

In Costa Rica the deciding difference is electronic invoicing: 4Labs PRO signs and transmits the v4.4 XML to the Ministry of Finance, polls it through to acceptance, and emails the customer their receipt. It also takes in your suppliers' invoices and works out the deadline to answer each one with the receiver message, which falls inside the first eight working days of the month after the invoice was issued. Loyverse does not issue electronic invoices to the Ministry of Finance, so that work lands in a second system.

Choose Loyverse if start-up cost is what decides and your operation fits on a counter: a corner store, a market stall, a two-person café. Its free plan is not a stripped-down trial, it takes real payments, tracks inventory and runs on a phone you already own. It is also the right call if you already issue electronic invoices elsewhere, for example with the tax authority's free invoicing tool, and if you do not plan to load recipes: without them, inventory by finished product gives you the same answer with less work.

Choose 4Labs PRO if your business is a restaurant in Costa Rica and tax paperwork is part of the shift. One system issues the v4.4 electronic invoice when you close the check, stamps the 10% service charge when the table opens, routes every dish to its kitchen station, deducts ingredients by recipe, counts the drawer bill by bill and closes the shift with a downloadable report. The useful question is not which one costs less today, but how many systems you will be maintaining in parallel six months from now.

Migrating to 4Labs PRO runs on CSV files and on a mandatory dry run. The catalog importer brings in products, prices and categories, and resolves which kitchen station each one belongs to against your branch's real stations. The opening inventory importer registers every ingredient with its lot, its cost and its expiry date. The dry run shows you, with the row number, what is about to be created and what is wrong before anything is written. Your old sales history comes across too, but into a separate table and never into live orders, because mixing it would deduct years of inventory from today's stock. And your receipt numbering picks up where your previous system left it.

4Labs PRO is not for everyone, and it is worth saying so before a demo. There is no free plan and no self-service: it is installed with hands-on help, the menu gets loaded and the team gets trained. The electronic invoicing is built for Costa Rica and only for Costa Rica, so if you invoice in Panama or Guatemala this is not the tool. Cost per recipe does not appear on its own either: someone has to load the recipe sheets, and while coverage is low the system would rather show no margin than an invented one. And if your business is pure retail with no kitchen, half the platform will go unused.