Questions operators actually ask.

No — it's built for exactly this. The Hobby plan covers up to 15 machines for $20.99/mo, sized for a single operator running their own route, not a company with a back office. Most of the tools in this space price their cheapest plan for operators well past 50 machines.

Add a location, add a machine, and a QR code is generated automatically — print it or download the PNG and stick it on the machine. You can also bulk-import a full machine list from a CSV instead of adding them one at a time.

No. Customers scan the QR code with their phone's camera, which opens a normal web page — no app, no account, no login. You use the dashboard in a browser; there's nothing to install on your end either.

Yes — try the live demo. It walks through the exact customer report flow and shows the ticket landing on a dashboard board in real time.

You get a heads-up in the dashboard once you're close, so you can upgrade before you hit it — there's no silent overage billing or surprise charge. Pricing stays flat: three plans, by machine count, nothing metered per ticket or per customer report.

Yes. A card is required to start the trial, but nothing is charged until it ends 14 days later, and you can cancel any time before then from Settings → Billing with no charge at all.

Every plan supports employee accounts you can assign tickets to. The account owner is always included free; each additional teammate is a flat $7.99/mo (or $79.90/yr on annual billing), the same price regardless of which plan you're on.

Yes — annual billing works out to 2 months free compared to paying monthly, on every plan and on seats.

Yes, no contract and no cancellation fee. Manage or cancel your subscription any time from the Stripe billing portal, linked directly from Settings → Billing.

Three fixed categories: a refund request, a machine outage (won't dispense, broken, out of stock), or a product suggestion. Keeping the categories fixed instead of customizable is deliberate — it keeps the form fast for a customer standing at a machine, and keeps your board consistent across every location.

No — refunds are tracked, not processed. A customer tells you how they'd like to be paid back (Venmo, PayPal, Cash App, or cash), and you send it yourself and mark it sent on the ticket. That means no transaction fee skimmed off every refund you approve, and you keep full control over who actually gets paid.

Refund requests are only accepted within a 3-day window of the claimed purchase — anything older is automatically rejected on the form itself. Beyond that, every refund claim is run through automatic fraud detection the moment it's submitted — see the next question for how that actually works.

Every refund claim gets scored automatically against real signals: how many refund tickets that same contact has filed in the last 90 days, how many claims have hit that machine (or that whole location, across different machines) in the last week, whether a photo was attached, and whether the claimed amount is unusually high. A 🚩 or ⚠️ shows right on your ticket board — you don't have to open a ticket to see it — and a company-wide "Flagged Accounts" list surfaces repeat submitters even if they're spreading claims across several machines specifically to avoid a per-machine pattern. Every flag also explains itself in plain language ("3 refund tickets from this contact in the last 90 days," "no photo attached") rather than handing you an unexplained score to just trust. It's included on every plan, and you can watch it catch a repeat claim live in the demo.

No — never. Customers give one-time contact info (name, email, sometimes phone) per ticket. There's no login, no password, and nothing for them to manage afterward.

They get an email when their ticket is submitted, and one more when you start working on it. That's it — they never see a "resolved" notification, your internal notes, due dates, or who on your team is assigned. What happens on your board stays on your board.

Yes, up to three photos per ticket — useful for a jammed slot or a damaged product, and it's optional.

Yes — the model is Company → Locations → Machines, so you can add as many locations and machines as your plan allows under one account and one login.

Not currently — MachineSOS is built around one company per account. If you're running a franchise or multi-brand operation with 300+ machines, this product isn't sized for you yet; reach out and we'll let you know if that changes.

Owners see every ticket across every location and machine. Employees only see tickets assigned to them, and can view (but not create, edit, or delete) machines and locations — enough to do the job without full account access.

Yes — every table enforcing your data is protected by row-level security at the database layer, not just in the app's frontend, so one company's data is never reachable from another company's account, even in the event of an application-level bug. Customer submissions never go through a direct, unvalidated write either — every report passes through a validated endpoint first.

Reissue it from the machine's page in one click — the old code stops working immediately and a new one is generated, without losing any of that machine's ticket history.