Coin vs. Card vs. App Payments: Revenue, Data, and Risk

By Jason Taken, business broker · HedgeStone Business Advisors · Updated 2026-09-04 · 9 min read

Adoption, With the Caveat

Source: CLA 2024 Laundry Industry Survey, 377 owner respondents, 2023 operations. Multiple responses were allowed. These percentages must not be added together, and the market must not be described as fully cashless — most stores accept several methods.

For scale alongside those figures, the same survey put the median store at 62 machines in 2,740 square feet producing $335,000 of 2023 gross revenue (Source: CLA 2024 Laundry Industry Survey). Payment hardware is priced per machine, so a store's machine count drives conversion cost as directly as its revenue does.

The Three Methods

Coin. Quarters in a drop. Universal accessibility, no processing fees, no network dependency, and no data. The costs are changer maintenance, coin handling and banking time, and theft exposure at the changer and during collection.

Card. A stored-value card, loaded at a kiosk or online, read at each machine. Produces machine-level data, allows remote price changes, reduces cash on site, and creates a stored-value liability. Costs hardware installed plus processing and support.

App. Mobile payment from the customer's phone, using a module at the machine. Removes the physical card and often the kiosk, produces the same class of data, and depends on the customer having a smartphone and a linked payment method.

Most stores that adopt card or app keep coin on at least some machines. That is not indecision — it is accessibility management.

What Does Each Produce for a Transaction?

This is the difference that matters most, and it is not about customer convenience.

A coin store's revenue can only be corroborated through deposits, a physical rebuild, water consumption, and attended collections. A card or app store adds an independent, machine-level record that reconciles against processor settlements.

Since evidence quality is the driver that most reliably moves a store through the 2.72x-4.50x multiple range, the data is worth more at sale than the convenience is worth in operation.

The Terms That Must Be Separated

Card and app reports are easy to misread. Six distinctions:

• Stored-value load — a customer adding money to a card or account. A liability, not revenue.
• Cycle revenue — a machine running a paid cycle. This is revenue.
• Management / test start — a free start by the operator. Exclude.
• Promotion / free dry — depresses revenue against usage; identify by period.
• Refund — reduces revenue.
• Unsettled transaction — authorized but not settled at period end; a timing difference.

A store growing its card base shows loads exceeding cycle revenue; one where customers are drawing down balances shows the reverse. Neither is a problem. Reporting either as revenue without the distinction is.

Cost Profiles

There is no universal answer to which is cheaper, and any page claiming one is generalizing across very different stores.

The item most often left out of the comparison is owner time. Collections, counting, and banking are hours every week. An owner valuing their own time at zero will conclude coin is cheaper; one valuing it honestly frequently will not.

Accessibility Is a Real Constraint

Removing cash entirely is a decision about customers, not technology.

In trade areas with lower banking access, a share of customers pay in cash because that is what they have. A store that removes the option loses those customers to the next store that has not — and the lost volume appears in the trailing twelve months the store will eventually be valued on.

The common compromise: keep coin on some machines, or install a cash-to-card kiosk so customers can convert cash to stored value on site. That preserves accessibility while capturing most of the data benefit.

Practical Guidance

If you own a coin store and plan to sell within a year: do not convert. You will pay for it and capture none of the data benefit, and the transition disruption lands in the period you are valued on. Instead, tighten collection logs and deposit reconciliation, which achieve much of the same verification effect for free.

If you are 12 or more months out: conversion is worth considering, primarily for the reporting. Keep a cash path.

If you are buying a card or app store: confirm hardware ownership, whether the operator account and machine mapping transfer, the processing agreement's fees and assignment terms, and the outstanding stored-value balance — which should be adjusted at closing.

If you are buying a coin store: expect to do more verification work, budget for attended collections across several weeks, and price the evidence gap rather than assuming the revenue is wrong.

Which Method Should a Store Actually Run?

Usually more than one, and the reason is that your customers are not a single group.

The instinct is to treat this as a decision between systems. In practice most stores that convert keep some coin capability, because a share of customers either prefer it or have no practical alternative. Removing that option entirely is a decision about who you are willing to stop serving, and in some trade areas that number is large enough to matter more than any efficiency gained.

Three questions settle it for a specific store.

Who are your customers, actually? Not demographically in the abstract — who is in the store on a Saturday. A trade area with a meaningful share of unbanked or card-averse customers is one where going fully cashless reduces revenue, and that is a fact about the neighbourhood rather than about the technology.

What does your equipment support? Compatibility with a card or app system depends on model, control generation and firmware. Some machines take a straightforward retrofit, some need adapters at higher cost, and some cannot be converted at all. That third group turns a payment decision into an equipment decision.

What do you want the data for? If the answer is only convenience, the case is weaker. If it is pricing flexibility, machine-level reporting and an eventual verification asset, the case is considerably stronger — because those benefits compound while the convenience does not.

What Does Each Method Cost You Over Time?

The comparison people make is fees against no fees, and it is the wrong comparison because coin is not free.

Coin costs labour and risk. Collection time, counting, banking, the change fund, and exposure to loss during collection — which is the hardest kind to detect because it leaves no record. None of that appears as an invoice, which is exactly why it gets treated as zero.

Card costs fees and creates records. A percentage plus a fixed per-transaction charge, which on small tickets makes the fixed component the larger consideration. Platform or per-machine software fees may apply, and they recur where hardware does not.

Apps add a platform layer and may carry their own fee structure, and the customer relationship can sit with the platform, not with the store.

Model all three per dollar of revenue rather than per transaction, and put the coin handling cost in at a real number, not at nothing. A store that concludes coin is cheaper without costing the collection time has not made a comparison.

What Should a Buyer Check Whichever It Is?

Four things, and they apply across all three payment methods.

Whether the revenue can be verified independently. On a card or app store, that means full machine-level exports for the longest available period, reconciled against deposits and returns. On a coin store, it means the six-source method — returns, deposits, processor settlements where any exist, collection attendance, physical rebuild from observed turns, and the water consumption cross-check.

Whether the data can leave with the store. Some arrangements tie history to the seller's account or make export difficult. A store whose records you cannot take is a store whose verification advantage does not transfer.

The outstanding stored value. On any system holding customer balances, that is a liability passing to you — money already received for laundry not yet done. Quantify it from the system and have it credited at closing.

The vendor agreement. Term, fee schedule, whether it is assignable, whether hardware is owned or leased, and what happens at the end.

None of these is about which method is better. They are about whether what the store claims can be established, which is the question that actually decides a price.

Summary

The industry runs a hybrid payment mix, not a cashless one. Coin offers universal accessibility and almost no data; card and app offer machine-level reporting that makes revenue verifiable, at the cost of hardware, processing fees, and a stored-value liability. The reporting is worth more at sale than the convenience is in operation — and removing cash entirely is a customer decision that deserves more thought than it usually gets.

The Next Step

This page is general information about laundromat transactions, not legal, tax, or investment advice, and not a guarantee of sale price, timing, or financing approval. Verify current rules with your own CPA, attorney, lender, and the relevant state or municipal agency before acting.