Imagine if you had to compete against restaurants that gave their food away—the way we compete with free POS solutions. Now imagine what eating at a free-food restaurant would be like.

For starters, you can forget about the whole ambience thing. Where food is free, the paper napkin is king—gleaming beneath the flickering fluorescent lights overhead. You cook the meal yourself: how good your dinner tastes depends on how well you cook. If there's an instruction in the recipe you don't understand, there's a cookbook you can follow (and after all, how hard can it be to learn to make a beurre blanc from a book). Take your time, burn as many pans as you need to—your dinner can wait until you get it right. You have to set your table, which can be hard to do when you're holding a plate of food in each hand. You have to bus and clean up (including scouring all those burnt pans).

Sure, there's help. Cooks are in the kitchen and a staff ready to serve your meal. For a fee. But, listen, the food's free. What can you expect?

It's really the same thing when you choose a free restaurant POS solution. Set up is hard—not just the user-not-so-friendly installation process, but menu entry and employee account creation and so on. It takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. If you run into an issue you've never handled before—from simple field mapping during data migration to complex coding of custom menu templates—you can look it up. Eventually you'll figure it out, but there's no rush. Getting up and running can take as long as it has to, and swallow as much of your time as it needs to—there's no SLA (Service Level Agreement) that guarantees you a time-to-launch. Don't forget: keeping it running—meal after meal and month after month—is all your job.

Here too, there's help. A telephone support staff is ready to assist. And here too, there's usually a fee for that help. But, the software's free. What can you expect?

There's one thing more: something for which no free-food analogy exists. And that's the transaction handcuff. You have no options when it comes to which transaction processor you use. With free POS you're forced into a long term contract with the processor the POS maker selects. Since this relationship is how the free POS vendor makes its money, there are no exceptions. Heather Clancy, an award-winning business journalist and contributor on ZDNet, published a post called Harbortouch gives away POS systems to capture transaction fees. In this post, Mrs. Clancy explains: "That's why Harbortouch Systems is giving its POS hardware and software away -- in exchange for a five-year commitment to its transaction processing services. You knew there was a catch, right? Especially since typical merchant agreements are usually in the three-year range." Click here to read the article.

In the end, the only way you can have a satisfying "free food" dinner is if you bring your own cook and serving staff in with you—an expensive night out. The only way you can have a satisfying "free POS" installation is if you bring your own technology expertise and resources to the task—an expensive solution. Without that knowledge and skill, free POS delivers delay, frustration and, ultimately, a POS solution that just doesn't hit the spot.