Case Study

How we shipped Dub Ledger — a cannabis POS built for compliance, not retrofitted

The challenge

Cannabis operators are stuck between two bad options: fragile legacy POS systems that were retrofitted from mainstream retail, and do-it-yourself spreadsheets that break the moment a regulator asks for an audit trail. The legacy tools — Cova, Dutchie, and their predecessors — charge thousands per month while still requiring manual METRC reconciliation every night. State compliance varies widely: METRC in California and Colorado, BioTrack in Florida and Pennsylvania, Leaf Data in Washington. When your audit trail lives across three portals and a half-dozen CSV exports, risk compounds fast.

We talked to many operators over the past year and heard the same pattern: they were paying premium prices for software that treated compliance as an afterthought. Checkout flows designed for clothing stores do not handle ID verification, purchase-limit checks, or batch-lot tracking the way a dispensary needs. The result is slow transactions, stressed staff, and end-of-day closeouts that stretch into overtime.

The build approach

We started with the counter, not the boardroom. Dub Ledger is tablet-first because that is where the transaction happens: the budtender scanning an ID, checking a purchase limit, and ringing up a sale while the customer waits. Every screen was designed for speed under pressure, with large touch targets, clear status indicators, and offline queueing when METRC is temporarily unavailable.

Compliance integrations are native — METRC, BioTrack, and Leaf Data — with no middleware layer adding latency or failure points. Audit trails are on by default, not a paid upgrade. Inventory adjustments, sales voids, and user logins are logged immutably so operators can produce records on demand.

The build is founder-led. Mike Berardi and Sam Leibowitz are on every onboarding call, every architecture review, and every support thread that touches compliance logic. When something breaks at 7 PM on a Friday, the people who wrote the code are the ones who respond.

We also built open data export into the product from day one. Operators own their data and can leave without migration fees or format gymnastics. If you outgrow Dub Ledger, you should be able to walk away with your customer list, inventory records, and sales history in standard formats.

What is live now

The Dub Ledger marketing site is live at dubledger.com, with a beta program open to design partners. Pricing is published at dubledger.com/pricing and follows a tiered model: Starter, Pro, and Enterprise. There are no setup fees, and every tier includes a 14-day free trial so operators can evaluate the system with their actual workflow before committing.

The POS itself is in active development with first design partners. We are iterating on checkout speed, receipt-generation workflows, and state-specific reporting modules in production-like environments before general availability. That means the features shipping next quarter have already been validated by operators running live transactions.

What you can take from this

If you are a cannabis operator evaluating POS vendors, here are five questions worth asking any platform — including ours:

We built Dub Ledger because we believe cannabis operators deserve the same software quality and transparency that other industries take for granted. If these questions surface concerns with your current vendor, we would be happy to walk through how we addressed them.