Updated 2026-08-09 · every number sourced
Your payment processor is quietly costing you $4,270 a year.
A typical $25k/month store pays between 2.9% and 4.3% of revenue to
process cards — for identical service, moving identical money. Put your own numbers in
below and see what all nine options would actually charge you.
$29 one-time · instant access
The complete 6-processor teardown — every rate cited to its
official source, worked cost tables, decision guide, and the raw dataset as CSV.
Get the full teardown →
- Pay securely on Stripe (card / Apple Pay / Google Pay).
- Stripe emails you a receipt with a receipt number (e.g.
2670-1234).
- Come back and enter that number here to read and download it instantly.
Free summary: the real monthly bill
For a store doing $25k/month at a $60 average order:
| Processor | Monthly cost | Effective rate |
|---|
| Helcim (interchange-plus, est.) | $721 | ~2.9% |
| Braintree | $843 | 3.37% |
| Stripe / Shopify Basic / Square Plus | $850 | 3.40% |
| PayPal Advanced | $927 | 3.71% |
| Square (Free plan) | $950 | 3.80% |
| PayPal Checkout | $1,077 | 4.31% |
The spread is ~$4,270/year. Most operators never run this comparison.
Three things most operators miss
- Fixed fees punish small orders. At $20 AOV, PayPal Checkout's $0.49 fixed fee
pushes your effective rate to 5.9% of revenue.
- Shopify's math is rigged — in a documented way. Using a third-party processor on
Shopify costs an extra 0.6–2% on top of that processor's fees. On Shopify the lever is
your plan tier, not your processor.
- Surcharges stack. International card + currency conversion adds up to 2.5% on
Stripe — material if you sell cross-border.
What's in the full teardown
- All six processors: Stripe, PayPal (Checkout + Advanced), Square, Shopify Payments,
Braintree, Helcim — rate, fixed fee, monthly fee, chargeback fee, surcharges.
- Worked monthly cost tables at $5k / $25k / $100k volume and $20 / $60 / $150 AOV.
- A decision guide by platform, volume and order size — including the exact Shopify
plan-upgrade breakeven ($67.5k/mo in card volume).
- A hidden-costs checklist: dispute fees, instant-payout cuts, keyed-entry penalties,
ACH caps, and the legacy fees still being charged.
- The full raw dataset as CSV (28 rows) so you can model your own numbers.
- Every quoted number carries a source URL and verification date. Estimates are
labelled as estimates — no blogs, no aggregators, no guesses passed off as quotes.
Why trust these numbers
Every rate was pulled directly from the vendor's own public pricing page on
2026-08-09 — Stripe, PayPal, Square, Shopify, Braintree and Helcim — and the report
ships with a sources table listing each URL and exactly which figures it supports. Where a
number can't be quoted (Helcim's interchange component varies with your card mix), it is
marked est. with the assumption stated. Known gaps are documented rather than hidden.
$29 one-time · instant access
The complete 6-processor teardown — every rate cited to its
official source, worked cost tables, decision guide, and the raw dataset as CSV.
Get the full teardown →
- Pay securely on Stripe (card / Apple Pay / Google Pay).
- Stripe emails you a receipt with a receipt number (e.g.
2670-1234).
- Come back and enter that number here to read and download it instantly.
Already bought it?
Unlock with your receipt number →