Dispensary loyalty program software: springbig vs Alpine IQ vs Sprout, and what a cannabis rewards program really costs

Start by deciding whether you have a loyalty problem or a segmentation problem, because they need different products. If customers do not come back often enough and you have no structured reason for them to, you have a loyalty problem, and points plus a text club solves most of it. Your point of sale probably already does that, and the honest answer for a single store with a couple of thousand customers is to turn that on before spending anything.

If you already run a points program and the issue is that every promotion goes to your whole list at the same discount, you have a segmentation problem. That is where a dedicated platform earns its fee. Being able to send a different offer to a lapsed flower buyer than to a weekly concentrate customer, and to stop discounting the people who were coming in regardless, is worth more than the software costs at almost any real store volume.

From there the split is about scale and staffing. Alpine IQ is the deeper tool and the usual answer for operators running more than one location or anyone with a marketing person who will genuinely build and maintain segments. springbig is the faster rollout and the usual answer for a single shop that wants the program live in weeks with less configuration. Sprout makes sense mainly when you already run your demand through Weedmaps and want fewer vendors to manage.

One structural point worth keeping in view. All three tools work on people who are already your customers. They raise visit frequency and basket size among an existing list, which is a real and valuable job, but the size of that list is set somewhere else entirely.

This is the question the feature comparisons skip, and it matters here more than in most software categories, because the vendor you pick holds your entire customer database and operates your primary retention channel. springbig Holdings is a public reporting company, so unlike its private competitors its finances are a matter of public record and you can simply read them.

In its quarterly report for the period ended March 31, 2026, springbig reported net revenues of about $5.4 million for the quarter and a net loss of roughly $494,000, with cash of about $1.3 million against a working capital deficit of approximately $13.2 million. The filing states that these conditions raise substantial doubt about the company's ability to continue as a going concern for at least twelve months. It also discloses a notice of default delivered by noteholders on April 21, 2026 covering its 2024 secured convertible notes and term notes, and notes that as of the filing date those holders had not accelerated repayment or foreclosed on any assets. The company was delisted from the Nasdaq Capital Market in September 2023 and its stock has traded over the counter since.

Read that in proportion. A going-concern disclosure is a required accounting statement about liquidity, not a prediction that a business will stop operating. Companies carry one for years and trade out of it, and springbig is still selling, still supporting dispensaries, and completed an acquisition in 2025. Plenty of shops are running perfectly good programs on it today. None of this makes it a bad product, and the loyalty platform itself is well regarded.

What it should change is the contract, not necessarily the decision. If you shortlist springbig, prefer a shorter term over a discounted multi-year commitment, get the data export rights written down in specific terms covering format and notice period, keep an independent copy of your customer list refreshed on a schedule, and ask directly what happens to your data and your service if ownership changes. Those are reasonable questions to ask any vendor. Here you have the filings telling you to ask them, and the private alternatives in this category simply do not publish enough for you to run the same check on them.

Every platform on this page is a retention tool. It works on the customers who already found you, and it is good at that job. Not one of them puts a person who has never heard of your shop on your list in the first place. That distinction gets blurred in vendor marketing, and it is the reason owners sometimes buy a CRM to fix what is actually a discovery problem.

New customers in cannabis retail come from a short and unusually constrained set of channels, because a licensed THC dispensary cannot buy Google or Meta ads. What is left is search and the places people look before they drive: a verified Google Business Profile with accurate hours and answered reviews, an indexable menu on your own domain, and listings in the licensed directories buyers browse when they are deciding where to go. Those channels do the acquisition; loyalty software does everything after.

That first half is the part we handle. A claimed listing on Dispensaries is $99 a month with your live menu, daily deals, hours and a verified license badge, and it works alongside whichever loyalty platform you land on. The two do not compete. One fills the list, the other makes the list worth more. Buying the second without the first is the most common sequencing mistake in dispensary marketing budgets.