How Sealed compares to what you might already use.
We're not trying to replace your POS, your card processor, or your dispute team. We're the cryptographic-receipt layer none of them ship.
| Sealed | Toast Now | Square Loyalty | Stripe Radar | VC startups1 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tamper-evident receipts | ✓ | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Public verifier URL per event | ✓ | — | — | — | partial |
| FSMA-204 trust pack (restaurants) | ✓ | — | — | — | — |
| USDA-205 chain-of-custody (farms) | ✓ | — | — | — | — |
| Chargeback evidence pack | ✓ | — | — | partial2 | — |
| Customer-scannable QR proof | ✓ | — | — | — | partial |
| Post-quantum signature | ✓ ML-DSA-87 | — | — | — | varies |
| Public-chain anchor | ✓ Base L2 | — | — | — | varies |
| SMB pricing | $99–$499/mo | $70+/mo | $45+/mo | volume-based | typically enterprise |
| Replaces your POS | — | ✓ | — | — | — |
| Replaces your card processor | — | — | — | partial | — |
1 Verifiable-credentials startups vary widely; this column captures the common pattern.
2 Stripe Radar surfaces dispute evidence — it does not seal it cryptographically.
Comparison reflects publicly-available product information as of May 2026. Corrections welcome at press@seal.epochpay.today.
When NOT to pick Sealed
- You need a POS. Toast / Square run the front-of-house. Sealed wraps the events they emit; it doesn't replace them.
- You need a card processor. Stripe / Square / Adyen move money. Sealed seals the records around the money flow.
- You don't care about audit trail. If your buyers, customers, and regulators don't ask "can you prove it?", Sealed is overkill.
When to pick Sealed
- Premium pricing depends on provenance. Organic farms, single-origin coffee, fair-trade producers — Sealed turns a claim into a public proof a customer can verify.
- You're an FSMA-204 high-risk-food restaurant. When the FDA calls, you hand them a sealed PDF in 4 hours instead of a shoebox of paper invoices.
- Chargebacks eat 1%+ of your GMV. Sealed shifts burden-of-proof from the cardholder to the arbitrator's verifier check.
- You want enterprise-grade crypto without enterprise pricing. Same engine, SMB price point, no middleman markup.