Tap-to-pay rewards for independent shops
Light up your neighborhood.
Customers tap to pay at the shops on their block. Lux moves the payment onto cheaper rails and turns what the shop saves on card fees into rewards that bring them back.
Piloted with 10 independent shops in Santa Monica. Every one asked to keep it.
How it works
Tap. Pay. Get money back at the shops you love.
- 1
Tap at the counter
A small chip sits by the register. Customers tap their phone and they're done. Nothing at the counter gets replaced, and there's nothing new for staff to learn.
- 2
Every shop glows a color
Each hour a shop shows a color, from red (1% back) to violet (up to 10%). Quiet hours glow brightest. Paying with Lightning adds one more color.
- 3
Light up your map
Every visit fills in your own map of the neighborhood, color by color, as you find the places on your street.
5.9%
of a $10 coffee goes to card fees.
2.9% plus 30¢ comes to 59¢ on a $10 coffee. The corner café pays it on every small sale and gets nothing back. Lux turns that money into rewards that bring neighbors back.
Why Lightning
Money that moves like a text message.
Instant
Settles in seconds, not days.
Near-free
Fractions of a cent per payment.
Open
Works with any wallet. No gatekeeper.
A Lightning payer pays the shop directly, and Lux never holds the money. The shop keeps the fee it saves and passes it on: Lightning payers see the shop one color higher. Not on Lightning? A customer's taps roll up into one bank payment a week, which also costs the shop far less than a card.
For shops
Every corner café gets its own revenue manager.
Owners told us they love flexible rewards but don't have time to run them. So Lux runs them on autopilot. It sets each hour's reward from the shop's own rhythm: low in the rush, high when it's quiet. The whole month stays within what card fees would have cost.
- Learns. From each shop's visits and hours, plus weather, foot traffic and local events.
- Asks. When it isn't sure, it checks with the counter: “Busy right now?” Every answer makes it smarter.
- Owners lead. Pin the hours you already know. Autopilot fills the rest, and one tap overrides any hour.
- Proves itself. Every statement shows what Lux cost next to what a card terminal would have charged.
Autopilot is almost done. Owners can override any hour.
Why local
A street of independent shops is a neighborhood's immune system.
Owners who know your name. Money that stays and circulates on the block. The corner spots that make a street feel like yours. Lux makes choosing them the easy, rewarding default, and it grows the way neighborhoods do.
One corridor
A whole walkable street on Lux.
The next one
Neighbors bring their favorite shops on.
Nearby cities
Venice, Culver City, and on.
All of LA
Hundreds of neighborhoods side by side.
Every city
The same playbook, block by block.
Where we're going
Payments are the doorway. The neighborhood is the home.
Lux is growing into the app for your neighborhood: where your city, your causes and your favorite local artists live, right next to the shops.
Your city, in plain words
Short summaries of what the city council decided, written for the block you live on, and an easy way to have your say before the vote.
Volunteer and give
The food bank needs three people on Saturday. The school garden needs mulch. Find it, sign up, show up.
Clean streets, real help
Clear, current information on street cleaning and homelessness services: what's happening, who's helping, and how to pitch in.
Local creatives
The singer at Thursday jazz night becomes your neighborhood's celebrity. Picked for quality, the way a good speakeasy is.
These come after shops love Lux. Today we're focused on payments and rewards.
See it in action
Real payments, and the new app.
A minute of highlights: a customer paying by tap at a brewery in our pilot, a Lightning payment, and the new app for customers and shops.
Where we are
Early, and building the foundations right.
Learned
A real pilot
10 Santa Monica shops and about 150 customers paid by tap. Every shop asked to keep it. We paused to rebuild around what they taught us.
Built
A new app
Weekly bank payments, shop pages, digital stamp cards and a full toolkit for shop owners, all tested end to end.
Next
The relaunch
Bringing our pilot shops back on one Santa Monica corridor, then the next. The new app reaches the App Store with the relaunch.
Join us
Help light up your block.
Own a shop, want Lux at your favorite one, or just want to follow along? Leave your email and we'll be in touch.