# How many stamps before the first reward?

Work it out from what the reward costs you to make, not from what the cafe down the road does. Below about six stamps most programmes stop paying for themselves. Above about twelve, people stop believing they will ever get there.

Source: https://fidella.app/guides/how-many-stamps-before-the-first-reward
Last reviewed: 2026-08-30

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Most businesses pick a stamp threshold by looking at what the venue down the
road does. That number encodes somebody else's margins, somebody else's visit
frequency, and quite possibly somebody else's guess.

Here is a way to arrive at your own.

## Start from what the reward actually costs you

The reward is not free to you, but it costs far less than its menu price. Say you sell a flat white for $5.50. The cup, milk, beans and labour come to
$1.65. That $1.65 is what the free one costs you.

## Work out what the visits earned

At a threshold of ten, a customer spends roughly ten times their average ticket
to reach the reward. If that average is $6, they have generated $60 of revenue
and you have given back $1.65 of cost.

That is 2.75 percent. Compare it against what you would pay for the same
outcome through advertising, and it is difficult to lose that comparison.

## The two boundaries

The arithmetic keeps working as the threshold falls, but two things happen at the
edges that arithmetic does not capture.

Below about six stamps, the reward stops feeling earned. It reads as a discount,
and discounts train customers to wait for discounts. You also start giving value
to people who would have come anyway, which is the fastest way to make a loyalty
programme unprofitable.

Above about twelve, the finish line stops feeling reachable. A customer who
visits weekly is looking at three months of commitment for one free coffee, and
most of them will quietly stop counting. A programme nobody completes is a
liability sitting on your conscience and, in some accounting treatments, on your
books.

## Use your own visit frequency as the check

Work out how many stamps a regular collects in a normal week. Then see how many
weeks it takes them to finish.

Ten stamps at two a week is five weeks, which is fine. Ten stamps at one a
fortnight is five months, which is not. If it comes to more than about six
weeks, either lower the number needed or give a stamp per item, so a bigger
order earns more than one.

## A worked example

A lunch bar with a $14 average ticket and 60 percent gross margin on a $12
rewarded item. The reward costs $4.80. At eight stamps the customer has spent
$112, so the programme costs 4.3 percent of that revenue. Regulars come twice a
week, so eight stamps is four weeks. That is a programme that works.

Move it to fifteen stamps and it costs you less on paper. In practice it is
worse. It is now two months of visits, and the number of people finishing will
tell you so.