Flat-rate pricing
One blended percentage, plus a fixed fee, on every sale, regardless of card type.
Flat-rate pricing charges a single, predictable rate (such as 2.9% + $0.30) on every transaction, no matter the underlying interchange. It's simple and has no monthly minimums, which makes it ideal for new or low-volume businesses, but it can cost more than interchange-plus as volume grows.
How it works
One rate per channel. The provider absorbs the difference between that rate and what each card actually costs, profiting on the cheap ones, regulated debit and basic consumer credit, losing on premium rewards, commercial, and international cards, then pooling the two across every merchant on the plan. In-person rates are lower than online rates. Manually keyed sales usually carry the highest published rate of the three.
The headline rate on the homepage covers one channel. Check the published fee schedule for the channel you actually sell through, and for the charges that sit outside the rate: currency conversion on foreign cards, instant-payout fees, chargeback fees, and hardware. Aggregator accounts also underwrite you after you start selling rather than before, so an unusual spike in volume or a run of disputes can trigger a review and a hold on your funds.
You are buying predictability and speed: published pricing you can read without a sales call, no interchange report to interpret, no negotiation, and fast onboarding, usually under the provider's own master merchant account. The cost of that is a rate that never improves as you grow, since the same percentage applies whether you take $2,000 a month or ten times that. The fixed per-transaction fee bites hardest on small tickets. That is where flat-rate merchants overpay most.
Worked example
At 2.9% + $0.30 online, a $12 sale costs $0.65 in fees. That is an effective rate of 5.4%. The same rate on a $250 sale costs $7.55, or 3.0%. Scale it up: $18,000 taken over 900 sales in a month costs $792, an effective rate of 4.4%. Small tickets, not the headline percentage, are what make flat-rate pricing expensive.
Frequently asked questions
- At what volume should I switch from flat-rate to interchange-plus?
- Somewhere above $10,000 to $15,000 a month in card volume is where most merchants start saving on interchange-plus, though the crossover depends on your average ticket and card mix. Below that, the monthly account and gateway fees on an interchange-plus plan usually cancel out the lower rate. Compare the two on your last three statements rather than on the headline numbers.
- Why is the online flat rate higher than the in-person rate?
- Card-not-present sales carry higher interchange and more fraud risk than a chip or contactless payment. The card is not physically read, so the issuing bank prices in the chance the buyer is not the cardholder, and the merchant, not the issuer, usually carries the loss on a fraud chargeback. Providers pass that gap on as a higher published rate for online and keyed sales.
- Does flat-rate pricing include every fee?
- No. Processing is covered, and usually the gateway and PCI compliance, but that is where it stops. Chargeback fees, instant-payout fees, currency conversion on foreign cards, and terminal hardware are billed separately by most flat-rate providers, and the original fee is often not returned when you refund a sale. Read the fee schedule, not the pricing page, and total the charges that apply to how you sell.