Self-service kiosks

Find out a kiosk stopped taking money today — not at cash-up

A jammed card reader on bay 3 looks exactly like a quiet afternoon. Both produce the same thing on your reports: no transactions. The difference is one costs you a day of revenue at that site, and by the time the weekly figures make it obvious, you have lost the week.

What you see

Every kiosk you operate, grouped by site, with its current state and what it has actually earned today.

  • Online / offline / unknown per machine, driven by a heartbeat interval you set — not a fixed guess.
  • Revenue by site and by machine, over any date range you choose.
  • Errors as they are reported, with your own code and message, tagged info, warning or critical.
  • A live map of every location, so a site with a problem is obvious at a glance.
  • Failed and refunded transactions counted separately from successful ones.

Why "offline" is your definition, not ours

A parking terminal that reports every 30 seconds and a car wash controller that checks in every 10 minutes are both perfectly healthy. A single fixed threshold would flag one constantly and the other never.

You set the offline window per organisation, so a machine is only late when it is late by your standards. Alerts fire against that same threshold, which is why they stay useful instead of becoming noise everyone mutes.

How it connects

PulseGrid does not talk to your hardware directly. Your software — whatever runs on the machine, or the middleware behind it — posts events to a REST API as they happen. That means no gateway to install, no agent to maintain, and no vendor lock on the device side.

The whole integration is five steps, and most teams have the first events flowing in an afternoon:

  • Create an org API key in the dashboard’s Developer settings.
  • Exchange it for a short-lived JWT at POST /api/v1/auth/token.
  • Create a location — a site, a store, a depot.
  • Provision terminals in bulk; each one comes back with its own ingest key.
  • Post transactions, heartbeats and errors using that key in the X-Api-Key header.

What it is not

PulseGrid is a monitoring and reporting layer, not a payment processor and not a device management platform. It does not take payments, push firmware, or remotely control machines. It tells you what your estate is doing and shouts when something stops.

If you need remote control of the hardware itself, you will want that from your kiosk vendor. PulseGrid sits alongside it.

Common questions

Does PulseGrid work with my kiosk hardware?

It works with any hardware, because it never talks to the hardware. Your software posts events over HTTPS, so if the machine — or the system behind it — can make a web request, it can report to PulseGrid.

How quickly does the dashboard update?

Events are stored the moment they arrive. The dashboard refreshes every 15 seconds while the tab is visible, and pauses while it is hidden so it is not polling in a background tab all day.

How many sites and machines can I have?

The Free plan covers 3 terminals and 1 user. Starter covers 25 terminals and 3 users. Pro is unlimited on both and priced per terminal. Locations are unlimited on every plan.

Can I get the raw numbers out?

Yes — analytics export to CSV on Starter and Pro, and every figure on the dashboard is also available through the same REST API that ingests your events.

How far back does the history go?

Seven days on Free, 90 days on Starter, and one year on Pro. Upgrading makes older data visible again, because queries are clamped to the plan window rather than the data being thrown away at the boundary.

See it with your own devices

Start free with three terminals. No card required, and the developer console has a simulator so you can watch events land before touching hardware.

Other setups