Loyalty Interchange Protocol

Loyalty Interchange Protocol (LIP) is open-source loyalty infrastructure for restaurant technology teams. It best suits POS and ordering providers, multi-unit technical teams, and integrators prepared to build and run the connections themselves. Its restaurant-focused transaction model is substantial, but it is not a turnkey marketing product.

Overview

LIP covers the loyalty flow from enrolling or finding a member through evaluating an order, updating balances, earning or redeeming rewards, and handling reversals and refunds. Keeping these steps within one protocol can help a team align reward accounting with changes to restaurant orders, rather than treating loyalty as a separate points counter.

The order model spans items, modifiers, discounts, fees, taxes, tips, tenders, and totals, across channels such as drive-thru, kiosk, web, mobile, pickup, delivery, and catering. That makes LIP relevant to products that need consistent loyalty rules across varied restaurant orders. The trade-off is ownership: adopters must integrate those channels and operate the resulting system.

Key features

Programs can use points, visits or stamps, wallet credit, paid membership, or hybrid multi-account models. The checkout lifecycle includes ledger history and refund-safe adjustments, useful for teams that need a record of how balances change when transactions are reversed or corrected.

The /platform/v1 API extends beyond checkout to profiles, marketing consent, behavioral events, segments, campaigns, connectors, imports, analytics, and attribution. This gives an integration team a broad foundation for loyalty and engagement workflows, though the product's pre-1.0 status makes it a less suitable choice for operators expecting a finished marketing suite.

A typed Square Orders adapter includes webhook signature verification and synthetic certification fixtures. It offers a concrete starting point for Square integrations, but does not remove the need to validate and maintain an implementation in the adopter's own environment.

The reference guest wallet uses a responsive backend-for-frontend with OIDC Authorization Code and PKCE; access tokens and merchant credentials stay server-side. Customer sign-in itself remains external: a BFF must validate OIDC and map the identity to an opaque LIP member ID. Teams therefore need to supply identity and application integration rather than expecting LIP to provide a complete sign-in service.

Pricing

LIP's plan, Loyalty Interchange Protocol, costs nothing. It is an Apache-2.0 open-source stack intended for self-hosting, with tiered rewards, lifecycle automation, a customer portal, and API access. There is no paid tier described; the price does not remove the engineering and operating work involved in deployment and integration.

For local storage, the repository describes SQLite; multi-instance use can use normalized, tenant-scoped PostgreSQL storage. The reference stack can be started with Docker or Node.js 22 and newer. CSV member imports through the platform API are limited to 1 MiB and 1,000 rows, a constraint to account for when moving larger member lists.

Platforms

LIP supports API, Linux, self-hosted, and web use. Its documented deployment options—Docker Compose or Node.js 22 and newer with npm—favor teams comfortable managing infrastructure. The security policy calls for TLS, authentication on non-health endpoints, avoiding direct customer identifiers in logs and idempotency keys, and encryption of sensitive identity claims at rest; adopters need to implement those safeguards in their deployment.

Who it's for

LIP is a strong candidate for POS and ordering products, restaurant integrators, and multi-unit technical teams that want to embed loyalty across restaurant-specific channels and have developers to own the work. It is a poor fit for restaurants looking for a no-code way to launch campaigns without an integration team. LIP 0.2.0 is pre-1.0, and repository tests and fixtures do not establish independent adoption or production service-level performance.

Pros and cons

• Pros: The transaction lifecycle covers accrual, redemption, reversals, and refund adjustments, giving integrators tools to account for order changes.
• Pros: Multiple program models and a restaurant-specific order schema suit teams building loyalty across several ordering channels.
• Pros: The open-source self-hosted stack and documented SQLite and PostgreSQL options let teams choose a deployment suited to local development or multi-instance use.
• Cons: External identity and adopter-owned integrations require development capacity; LIP is not a ready-to-run restaurant marketing service.
• Cons: Pre-1.0 maturity and the absence of evidence establishing independent adoption or production SLOs may deter teams seeking an established production foundation.
• Cons: CSV imports cap at 1 MiB and 1,000 rows, which can complicate larger imports.

Alternatives

For teams that would rather use a freemium product than self-host restaurant loyalty infrastructure, meed offers Android, iOS, and web apps, with a free plan capped at 50 members and a Pro plan at $59 a month. LoyaltyLion may suit stores seeking a commerce-oriented option: its free plan is recommended for stores processing 400 orders or fewer per month, and it also offers a free trial.

Smile.io is another freemium option, with a free plan covering 200 monthly orders, 10 specialized reports, points, referrals, and discount and free-shipping rewards. Yotpo Loyalty has a free plan for basic points campaigns and referrals, with program awareness tools and Support Center tutorials.

ChatWhale offers a web-based freemium option with a 100-subscriber, one-Facebook-Page starting plan and a paid plan at $29 a month for up to 500 subscribers and three Facebook Pages. For an enterprise-ready SaaS approach, Annex Cloud Loyalty Experience Platform uses custom pricing. Comarch Accounts Payable Automation is another paid product with custom pricing, while Como is a paid alternative.

Browse more options in Loyalty Program Software and Restaurant Loyalty Software.

Verdict

Choose LIP if your team can self-host software and integrate loyalty into restaurant POS or ordering workflows; its breadth across transaction handling and program types is the central advantage. Look elsewhere if you need a turnkey marketing service, external identity management, or an established prebuilt product without an integration team.