What Card Processing Actually Costs a Business of One
Disclosure: We have an unapproved affiliate application with Square and an unapproved one with FreshBooks. Nothing on this page is an affiliate link and neither company has paid us anything. Note what the table below does: it ranks Square’s free plan mid-field, puts its $588 plan in a paragraph explaining why not to buy it, and concludes that the cheapest route is one nobody pays us for.
Over the last two weeks we costed every payment route we could verify, one vendor at a time. Put side by side, the same $1,000 invoice costs between $5.00 and $58.30 to receive. Nothing about the work changes. This page is the whole table in one place.
The one-line version
How you are paid matters roughly ten times more than which company processes it.
- 📈$1,000 invoice: $5.00 to $58.30. An 11.7× spread across twenty verified routes.
- 💰$25,000 invoice: $5.00 to $1,450.30. The spread widens to 290×, because the cheap routes are capped and the expensive ones are not.
- 🏦Every route under 1% is a bank transfer. Every route over 2.6% is a card. There is nothing in between.
- 🛠️The most expensive annual subscription on this site is $588 — which is the route difference on 11 invoices of $1,000.
Jump to: The full table What happens at scale Software vs routes Which one are you?
Twenty routes, one $1,000 invoice
| Route | Rate | On $1,000 |
|---|---|---|
| Stripe, bank transfer | 0.8% capped $5 | $5.00 |
| Stripe Invoicing, bank transfer | 0.8% capped $5 + 0.4% | $9.00 |
| PayPal, bank transfer | 1% capped $10 | $10.00 |
| Square Plus, bank transfer | 1% capped $10 — plan $588/yr | $10.00 |
| Square free, bank transfer | 1%, uncapped | $10.00 |
| Wave, bank payment | 1% | $10.00 |
| Square, card in person | 2.6% + 15¢ | $26.15 |
| Stripe via free software, card | 2.9% + 30¢ | $29.30 |
| Wave, card | 2.9% + 60¢ | $29.60 |
| PayPal, card | 2.99% + 49¢ | $30.39 |
| Square free, card online | 3.3% + 30¢ | $33.30 |
| Stripe Invoicing, card | 2.9% + 30¢ + 0.4% | $33.30 |
| Stripe, card keyed in by hand | 3.4% + 30¢ | $34.30 |
| Wave, American Express | 3.4% + 60¢ | $34.60 |
| PayPal, its own button | 3.49% + 49¢ | $35.39 |
| PayPal, overseas card | 4.49% + 49¢ | $45.39 |
| PayPal, Pay Later | 4.99% + 49¢ | $50.39 |
| PayPal, overseas button | 4.99% + 49¢ | $50.39 |
| Stripe, overseas + conversion | 5.4% + 30¢ | $54.30 |
| Stripe Invoicing, overseas + conversion | 5.8% + 30¢ | $58.30 |
Three things fall out of reading it top to bottom.
The cheap band and the expensive band do not touch. Everything at 1% or under is a bank transfer; everything at 2.6% or over is a card. There is no route at 1.8%. That is not a coincidence of pricing — a bank transfer is a message between two banks and a card payment carries interchange, fraud liability and a chargeback window. You are not paying for a worse product; you are paying for a different one.
The company barely matters. Stripe, PayPal, Wave and Square all land between $29.30 and $33.30 on a card. That is a spread of $4 across four companies — against a $53 spread between the cheapest and dearest route overall.
Two of the expensive entries are self-inflicted. Stripe Invoicing’s 0.4% and PayPal’s own button are both avoidable: use free invoicing software with your own Stripe account, and ask clients to pay by card rather than PayPal balance.
What happens as the invoice grows
| Invoice | Cheapest route | Dearest route | Spread | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $100 | $0.80 | $6.10 | $5.30 | 7.6× |
| $500 | $4.00 | $29.30 | $25.30 | 7.3× |
| $1,000 | $5.00 | $58.30 | $53.30 | 11.7× |
| $5,000 | $5.00 | $290.30 | $285.30 | 58× |
| $25,000 | $5.00 | $1,450.30 | $1,445.30 | 290× |
Why the ratio explodes. The cheapest route is capped — Stripe’s ACH fee stops growing at $5 and never moves again, whatever the invoice. Every card route is a straight percentage with no ceiling.
At $1,000 the gap is $53. At $25,000 it is $1,445 — on one invoice, for the same work, from a client who chose a different button.
Your software bill is a rounding error
This site has spent two weeks costing invoicing and scheduling subscriptions to the cent. Here is the uncomfortable summary of all of it.
| Annual subscription | Cost | Equivalent to the route difference on… |
|---|---|---|
| Setmore Pro | $60 | 1.1 invoices of $1,000 |
| Calendly Standard | $120 | 2.3 invoices |
| Invoice Ninja Pro | $140 | 2.6 invoices |
| Wave Pro | $190 | 3.6 invoices |
| Acuity Starter | $192 | 3.6 invoices |
| FreshBooks Lite | $276 | 5.2 invoices |
| Square Plus | $588 | 11.0 invoices |
Read the right-hand column as a sentence: the most expensive subscription we found costs the same as getting eleven invoices paid the wrong way. If you send more than eleven invoices a year — roughly one a month — then the payment route is a larger decision than every software choice on this site combined.
That does not make the software irrelevant. Reminders get invoices paid; deposits stop no-shows; calendar sync stops double-bookings. Those things earn their price on outcomes rather than on fees. But if you are optimising your costs and you start with the subscription, you are starting in the wrong place by an order of magnitude.
Which one are you?
Which one are you?
💵 I invoice US clients for four figures
Bank transfer through your own Stripe account, invoiced from free software. $5 flat, whatever the amount. This is the cheapest route in the table and it stays cheapest as you grow, because it is capped.
💳 My clients will only pay by card
Then you are choosing between $29.30 and $35.39 on $1,000 — a $6 decision. Take the cheapest configuration (Stripe via free invoicing software) and stop optimising; the remaining money is not in this decision. If you also see clients in person, 2.6% + 15¢ beats every online card rate.
🌎 My clients are overseas
Budget 4.5% to 5.8% and read the overseas breakdown. Two of those points are avoidable: invoice in your own currency, and drop Stripe Invoicing’s 0.4%. The bank-transfer escape does not cross borders.
🧾 My invoices are small and frequent
The fixed fee is your enemy, not the percentage — 30¢ to 60¢ per payment. On $100 that is up to 0.6 points on its own. Fewer, larger invoices is the only real fix; no processor on this page solves it.
📋 I am about to buy a $588 plan for a lower rate
Do the break-even first. Square Plus’s card discount needs $147,000 a year of online card volume to pay for itself; its Premium tier improves the online rate by nothing at all. Buy plans for features, never for rates.
What we could not verify
Country. Every rate here is the United States one. Stripe redirected us to a Japanese page on the first attempt, where the domestic card rate is an entirely different number; PayPal’s fixed fee ranges from 0.39 EUR to 49.00 JPY depending on the currency received. This table is not portable. Read your own country’s page.
Currency conversion spreads. PayPal applies one and does not publish it as a rate. The PayPal overseas figures are therefore best case.
Wise and Payoneer. Not in this table. Their receiving-account structure is designed to beat every row in it and we could not read their US pricing from where we sit. That is a real hole and it is the first thing we would fix.
The thing that actually decides it
Not the processor. Four companies, four card rates, four dollars apart.
What decides it is one sentence you have probably never put in an invoice: “Bank transfer details below; card payment link if that is easier.”
On a $1,000 invoice that sentence is worth $20–$25. On $5,000 it is worth $160. On $25,000 it is worth $1,445. It costs nothing to write, asks nothing of the client but a different button, and it will outperform every optimisation on this website put together.
Related: Stripe vs PayPal, What an overseas client costs you, Square Invoices, Wave and Best invoicing software for a business of one.