HelchPOS vs DINES
The closest comparison on this site: DINES also builds for food halls, festivals and multi-vendor venues, and does the two things we deliberately do not — process the card and trade through an outage. We are kitchen-first where they are payments-first, and our software is free where their card rate is the product.
| HelchPOS | DINES | |
|---|---|---|
| Counter till (POS)me&u and peazi connect to a till rather than being one. | ✓ | ✓ |
| QR ordering on the guest’s own phone | ✓ | ✓ |
| Kitchen screen (KDS)Square charges per screen; Lightspeed lists it as new. | ✓ | – |
| Self-order kiosk | ✓ | ✓ |
| One basket across several kitchens, paid onceThe food-hall question. The three general-purpose systems do not describe it. | ✓ | ✓ |
| Money split to each kitchen automaticallyWho gets what when one payment covered three kitchens. | ✓ | ✓ |
| A meal deal spanning two different kitchensBurger from one unit, drink from another, one price. Nobody else describes it. | ✓ | – |
| Loyalty for returning guestsOurs is one card for the whole hall rather than per kitchen. | ✓ | ✓ |
| Ingredient-level recipe costing, stock taken by dishHalf means stock counts exist without recipe-level depletion being described. | ✓ | ½ |
| A photograph of a supplier invoice becomes a delivery | ✓ | – |
| Rota, clocking, holiday and contractsDINES lists staff management without the employment record. | ✓ | ½ |
| An API for your own reports and apps | ✓ | – |
| Card payments processed for youOurs is the cross. HelchPOS records a card taken on your own terminal and never touches the money — deliberately, so you keep your acquirer and your rate. | ✗ | ✓ |
| Keeps trading with the internet downAlso ours. Kitchen bumps survive a drop; the till cannot complete a sale offline. | ✗ | ✓ |
| What it costs | £0for the software. A percentage only if you ever let us take the card payment. | On applicationPayments-led — the card rate is the product. |
Read off DINES’s own public pages on 2026-08-17 (fresher dates are marked in the text). A dash is not a criticism — it only means we would not assert it for them. Wrong about your product? Tell us and we will change the cell.
Who should pick whom
Pick DINES if…
You want one supplier for the till AND the card money, offline failover you can point at during a signal drop, and an established customer list you can ring. DINES publishes an in-person card rate of 1.4% + 10p (2.5% + 20p on mobile ordering, read 2026-08-29) with no software fee — a real, coherent model with real venues on it.
Pick HelchPOS if…
You want to keep your own card terminal and your own negotiated rate, pay nothing for software, and go deeper on the kitchen side: ingredient-level recipe costing, live gross profit, meal deals that span two kitchens for one price, and the full employment record — contracts, holiday accrual and working-time checks, not just a rota.
The long read, with the operating detail behind each row: HelchPOS vs DINES, at length → · the full seven-way table →
Or just try ours.
The software is free — not a trial. If it is not better by the weekend, close the tab.