Built by people who got burned buying locations.
Pinpoint grew out of Sweet Robo, which builds and sells vending machines — cotton candy, ICEE, ice cream, popcorn. Our customers kept hitting the same wall after buying: where do I put it? The locator industry’s answer was to take money up front and deliver a list of places that hadn’t agreed to anything.
So we built the scouting operation ourselves. Real people calling real venues, qualifying foot traffic, checking power and access, and getting a host agreement signed before a location ever counts as found. That operation has now qualified 26,311 venues and found 1,000+ locations for operators.
Pinpoint is that inventory, opened up. We sign with the venue, hold the agreement, and license the space to you — which means we have skin in the game when a location doesn’t work, and the ability to fix it.
Receipts
Figures from our operations system.
How we decide a venue is worth your machine
Foot traffic, verified
We ask for the number and we sanity-check it against the venue type and its public footprint. If it can't be supported, it's not listed.
Power and access, confirmed
An outlet where the machine goes and a path to get it there. Sounds obvious; it's the most common reason a placement fails.
A decision maker, signed
Not a manager who 'thinks it's fine'. The person who can sign a 12-month host agreement, has.
What we won't say
We won’t tell you what your machine will earn. Any figure we show is a venue’s historical foot traffic, not a revenue forecast — and we make that distinction on every page because it’s true and because you deserve to know. What we will tell you is exactly what a placement costs, what we guarantee, and what happens if it goes wrong. Before you pay.
Who writes these guides
Zach Downey runs Pinpoint Vending, a Sweet Robo company that scouts and negotiates venues for vending machine operators. He and the scouting team have qualified tens of thousands of venues and signed hundreds of host agreements across the country, and that first-hand work is the basis for the guides in our operator library. The numbers in those articles come from Pinpoint’s own scouting data and cited third-party sources; Pinpoint makes no representation about the income any operator will earn.
Check your area. Two questions, no account.
No account, no card, no call — until you want one.