Local Business POS — built for Filipino retailers, priced for them too

The problem

Two bad options for Filipino retail SMEs:

• Global POS tools (Square, Shopify POS, Lightspeed) — polished, but priced in USD and built for markets where nobody pays via GCash, nobody needs BIR receipts, and “sari-sari pricing” isn't a real concept.
• Paper ledgers or Excel — free, but they don't scale past one location, and you can't check your store from home.

The gap: a proper POS that speaks Filipino retail — GCash, Maya, cards, BIR-compliant receipts, sari-sari-friendly inventory — at a price sari-sari owners can actually afford.

Constraints

• Target price sub-₱500/mo. Global tools charge $50+/mo. Needed to keep runway costs low enough to make ₱500/mo work.
• PH payment rails. GCash + Maya + PayMongo, not Stripe (which doesn't do GCash directly here).
• BIR compliance out of the box. Bureau of Internal Revenue receipt format, daily Z-report. Not an add-on. Not “build it yourself.”
• Works on cheap hardware. A used tablet or a mid-range phone. No dedicated hardware required.
• Owner check-in from anywhere. The owner is usually not at the store. They need to see today's numbers on their phone while doing something else.

What I shipped

• One-flow checkout with GCash, Maya, cards (all through PayMongo), and cash. No mode-switching mid-transaction.
• Inventory with low-stock alerts and supplier tracking. Restock reminders that don't require a dashboard visit.
• Sari-sari-friendly pricing — item, pack, or bulk pricing on the same product. Coke can vs. Coke pack of 6 vs. Coke by the case, one product, three price rules.
• BIR-compliant receipts printable or emailed, plus a daily Z-report in the correct format.
• Owner mobile dashboard — today's revenue, top items, low-stock alerts, in a mobile-first view.
• Multi-cashier with per-cashier accountability (who rang up what shift).

The hard parts

PayMongo webhooks and reconciliation. Payment providers here are less mature than Stripe. Webhook delivery isn't always instant, retries aren't always clean. I built a background reconciliation job that verifies every transaction against PayMongo's API within an hour. The store never has to guess whether a GCash payment cleared.

BIR receipt format. The BIR has specific requirements — sequential invoice numbers, tax breakdown, TIN, business name. I built the receipt template as a first-class part of the system, not an afterthought. Every sale generates a compliant receipt automatically, printable to a small thermal printer or emailed as PDF.

Keeping infra costs low enough for ₱500/mo pricing. Supabase free tier + Vercel free tier gets a store 90% of the way there. I engineered around per-tenant limits so the base plan clears margin at that price point.

Result

Live in stores across Manila and Cebu. Owners run it themselves from a phone or a cheap tablet. Cashiers use it on shared devices with per-cashier PINs.

The price point makes it accessible to businesses that would never have adopted a “proper” POS otherwise — sari-sari stores, small pharmacies, neighborhood bakeries. They graduate from a paper notebook straight to something that scales, without stopping at the expensive middle stage.

What I'd do differently

Underestimated how much training content matters at this price point. Sari-sari owners aren't SaaS-native. Short video walkthroughs in Tagalog would've helped a lot. Building them into the onboarding flow now.

Takeaway

Building for markets that global tools ignore is one of the highest-leverage things a Filipino developer can do. The tech isn't harder. The empathy is what most global builders don't invest in.