Decorate With Lights vs 76 Fence

The budget gap here isn’t just large—it’s decisive. 76 Fence’s AUV of $1.54M signals franchisees running high-ticket operations that can easily justify a meaningful software stack. By contrast, Decorate With Lights’ $42k AUV screams seasonal micro-businesses where even a $200/month POS subscription hurts. Software vendors live and die by willingness to pay, and on that dimension, 76 Fence wins so overwhelmingly that it swamps every other metric. The terrain tradeoff (franchisor-controlled procurement vs. approved supplier) actually sharpens the opportunity: with only one franchised unit and a single franchisor, there’s exactly one decision-maker to capture—and a corporate deal that embeds your software into the franchise system can yield near-100% penetration instantly, at a price point the AUV supports.

Decorate With Lights’ apparent TAM advantage—105 franchised units versus one—dissolves on inspection. The business is contracting at 13% YoY, and the per-unit revenue doesn’t fund professional software. Selling into a shrinking network of low-budget operators is a grind with low lifetime value and high churn. The approved-supplier model sounds open, but openness doesn’t matter when franchisees can’t afford the tools. The timing dimension (FDD 2026 vs. 2025) is a rounding error here; no software sale turns on a one-year filing delta when the underlying economics are this lopsided.

Verdict: 76 Fence.