What a card terminal really costs

Four cost components

Almost every card terminal offer is made of these. Some vendors highlight one and stay quiet about the rest.

• Hardware: the purchase price or monthly rent of the terminal.
• POS system fee: the software’s monthly fee, sometimes a separate setup fee.
• Processing fee: a percentage of every card payment, sometimes plus a per-transaction cent charge.
• Settlement and extras: payout speed, currency conversion, receipt services.

Percentage or fixed fee

Percentage-based pricing is cheap at low volume and expensive at high volume. A fixed monthly fee is the opposite.

Work out your own break-even: if the processing fee is 1.5% and you sell €10,000 a month, you pay €150 a month. Compare that against a fixed €9 / month plus a separately billed processing fee, using your own numbers.

Three hidden costs worth asking about directly

These usually do not appear in the price list but in the general terms.

• Minimum billing: does the vendor charge a minimum monthly amount if your volume stays low.
• Card-type pricing: is there a different, higher fee for corporate and foreign cards.
• Termination costs: do you keep the hardware, and is there a charge for ending a fixed-term contract early.

How we price

€9 / month per card terminal for the POS system. If you use your own terminal, your card processor bills the processing fee directly to you — we take no share of it. With a Cashm8 terminal there is additionally roughly €0.10 per transaction. There is no minimum billing.