What Regulr is
Regulr is a customer retention platform for local hospitality and personal-care businesses. It connects to the POS or booking system you already use — Toast, Square, Clover, Mindbody, Boulevard, Lightspeed — pulls 90 days of transaction history on day one, and starts running retention campaigns automatically from the moment you turn it on.
The campaigns cover the entire customer lifecycle: a first-visit follow-up sent 24 hours after a new customer shows up, a frequency-boost message when a regular slows down, a loyalty reward sent the moment they hit a milestone, a win-back text when they go past their normal visit interval, a reactivation sequence for clients who have not been seen in months. All of it personalized to the individual customer based on their actual order history, visit cadence, and spending pattern. None of it requires anyone on your team to write copy, schedule a send, or remember to do anything.
On top of campaigns, every customer is automatically enrolled in an Apple Wallet and Google Wallet loyalty pass (no app to download), and review collection runs through an RCS sentiment-routing layer that sends happy customers to Google Reviews and routes negative feedback privately so issues get caught before they become 1-star public reviews.
Why Regulr exists
Across local hospitality and personal-care, somewhere between 60% and 70% of first-time customers never visit a second time. Not because they were unhappy. Most of them just forget. The shop does nothing to remind them, and a competitor down the street eventually captures the next visit by default.
Every owner we talk to knows this is a problem. They just do not have a system for it. The CRM does not text. The POS does not segment. The loyalty app sends the same generic blast to everyone, and most of the time the owner forgets to use it at all. The systems that exist for independent local businesses are either generic enough to be ignorable or technical enough to require a marketer they cannot afford. There has been no middle ground.
Regulr is the middle ground. It is the marketing team a 12-person coffee shop or a solo-injector med spa or a family-owned restaurant would hire if they could afford one — except it costs $399 a month and runs by itself.
What we believe about retention
Retention is not one feature. Most of what gets sold as “customer retention” in local business software is really just loyalty programs. Loyalty programs are useful, but they are one of about a dozen mechanisms that move retention. The others — first-visit follow-ups, lapsed-customer reactivation, cadence-based rebooking, birthday campaigns, win-back sequences, sentiment-routed reviews — are at least as important and usually more powerful. Almost no general POS or CRM tool does them well, and almost no business is running all of them at once. Regulr is built on the idea that retention is a system of about ten mechanisms running together, segmented per customer, continuously.
The right amount of acquisition without retention is zero. Spending money to bring new customers in the door, with no system to bring them back, is the most common form of marketing waste in local business. The math is the most lopsided ratio in retail: spend almost nothing on retention, multiply your acquisition revenue by 3-5×. Regulr exists because we kept seeing operators run the opposite play.
What we believe about AI
Regulr is an AI-powered platform, but we are uncomfortable with how the term gets used in our category. AI is a tool, not a product. What actually matters for a coffee shop owner is whether the text message that goes out at 2pm on a slow Tuesday brings the right person back through the door. Whether that message was written by Claude, GPT, or a human is not the question. The question is: does it work, is it personalized, is it compliant, is it on-brand, and would the owner have actually sent it themselves if they had time?
We use AI heavily inside Regulr — five layers of context injection per message, 25 industry-specific playbooks, every send routed through Claude with the venue's POS data, sub-vertical, season, and tone preferences. But the user never sees a “generate text” button. They see a campaign that ran, a customer who came back, and a revenue number. The AI is the engine. It is not the dashboard.
What Regulr will not do
A few things we have decided this product will never do, even when other tools in our category do them:
- Fabricate case studies or testimonials. If you read a quote on this site, the quote is real and attributed to a real person who gave permission. We have one zero-tolerance rule about fake data — read the full version in our editorial standards.
- Send messages without explicit opt-in. The TCPA is not optional. Every customer in a Regulr venue's SMS list has explicitly opted in, with timestamps stored.
- Promise “set it and forget it” AI marketing. Anyone selling that to a local business owner is promising something they cannot deliver. AI works best when a human with context is overseeing it.
- Train models on customer data without consent. Customer data does not become training data. Period.
- Run affiliate links or sponsored content. When we recommend a competing product on this site, we are not paid to do it. We recommend competitors when they are the right fit for a reader's situation.
Who Regulr is built for
Regulr is built for independent local businesses where every customer is a name and every visit matters: restaurants, coffee shops, salons, barbershops, med spas, day spas, fitness studios, food halls. Not chains. Not franchises pretending to be independent. The 12-person coffee shop, the family-owned restaurant, the solo-injector med spa — the places that compete with chains and need to compete on relationships, not on price.
If that sounds like you, the fastest path is to read the playbook for your specific vertical: restaurants, coffee shops, med spas, salons, fitness studios, day spas, or food halls.
Get in touch
Questions about whether Regulr fits your specific situation, what the data infrastructure looks like, or what a 30-day rollout would actually involve — email brian@regulr.ai. We respond within 24 hours.
Or if you would rather start from the writing, the Regulr retention library is the most complete free resource on customer retention for local businesses on the internet.