Why an app studio built pawn shop software
We make apps for beekeepers, baseball coaches and cold-plunge fanatics. A tool for pawn shop owners looks like a departure. It is the same idea, aimed at a counter.
Every app in the Adelyons catalog started the same way: a specific group of people, a specific job that nobody had done well for them, and a decision to do that one job properly instead of building a platform. A hive inspection logbook. A pitch-speed reader that does not need a radar gun. A timer for people whom clocks do not help.
Independent pawn shops are that kind of group. There are a few thousand of them in the United States, most with one store, and the software they run on was largely built for a different decade. The point-of-sale records everything and reports almost nothing an owner can act on. Which items have sat past 120 days, and what cash is tied up in them? Which categories actually make money once forfeits are counted? Is the asking price on that guitar in line with what guitars have actually sold for? The data to answer all of that is in the POS. The answers are not.
We do not sell a POS
The first decision was what not to build. Replacing a shop's point-of-sale is a years-long fight over habit, hardware and state reporting, and the shop loses if anything goes wrong at the counter. So PawnCounter does not touch the POS. It reads the export the POS already makes, often the same file the shop already files to LeadsOnline, and hands the numbers back. If a shop stops using it tomorrow, nothing at the counter changes.
The numbers we cared about
Two questions drove the design, and we wrote both up for anyone to read. The first is margin: what the public chains report, and what that implies for a single store. That is pawn shop profit margins, with real figures from the chains. The second is aged stock: at what point a markdown beats holding, and when selling off in bulk beats both. That is aged pawn inventory: when to mark down or sell off. The product exists to answer those two questions for a particular shop, from its own history, every week.
Same rules as the apps
Clear pricing, with a free tier that is genuinely useful: the plans are a free Profit X-Ray, then $79 or $149 a month with a trial. A privacy policy written to be read. A support inbox answered by the people who wrote the code, at support@pawncounter.com. And an honest list of what it cannot do yet, on the export guides page, rather than a demo that dodges the question.
We are in Council Bluffs, Iowa. If you run a shop and want to see your own floor in numbers, the free report takes a file and about two minutes.