Clover fee calculator

The formula has three parts and Clover publishes all of them: a percentage of the sale, a flat 10 cents per transaction, and a monthly software fee that does not move with volume. Card present, the percentage is 2.6% on the Starter plan, 2.5% on Essentials and 2.3% on any of the three Growth plans. Typed in, online or over the phone it is 3.5% on all five, and the 10 cent per transaction fee is identical everywhere.

That 10 cents is the smallest fixed fee among the mainstream US flat rate providers, and on small tickets the fixed fee is the whole story. On a $5 sale, 2.6% is 13 cents and the fixed fee is 10 cents, so the sale costs 23 cents, an effective rate of 4.6%. If your average ticket is under about $10, the gap between a 10 cent and a 30 cent fixed fee matters more than half a point of percentage, and negotiating the rate will not touch it.

The monthly software fee is the part every competing Clover calculator leaves out, and it is the part that decides the answer. A fixed monthly cost behaves like a fixed transaction fee scaled up: it dominates at low volume and disappears at high volume. On $10,000 a month the $84.95 Retail Growth fee is 0.85 percentage points of your effective rate by itself, more than the 0.30 points the plan saves on the percentage. On $200,000 a month it is 0.04 points and irrelevant. Switch the Clover Fee Calculator above to the monthly mode and the plan select re-prices the whole month rather than one sale.

Don't run a single payment through the effective rate bands on this calculator. Those bands judge a blended monthly rate, and an ordinary Clover rate on a $6 coffee looks terrible against them for no reason other than the fixed fee. Switch to monthly mode first, then read the verdict.

This is the single most useful thing a Clover merchant can learn and almost no calculator says it. Clover is a hardware and software brand, part of the Fiserv group of companies, and it is sold two ways: directly by Clover, and through banks, independent sales organizations and other resellers who sign the merchant, own the pricing and send the statement. Clover says so itself. Its pricing FAQ answers the question about termination fees by saying that contract terms and any termination fees "can vary based on your service provider, whether Clover Direct or among our trusted partners including Citi, PNC and Wells Fargo, or from more than 3,000 other financial institution partners that also sell Clover solutions in the US."

The consequence is concrete. Two businesses can run identical Clover Stations, on the same software plan, taking the same cards, and pay materially different rates, because the rate was set by whoever signed them. A reseller is under no obligation to use Clover's published structure. Many quote tiered pricing, where sales are sorted into qualified, mid qualified and non qualified buckets after the fact and only the qualified rate appears in the pitch. Others quote interchange plus. The Clover brand tells you nothing about which one you are on.

So use the rates in this Clover Fee Calculator the way an auditor would. They are Clover Direct's published online prices, read off clover.com on 5 September 2026. Take last month's statement, divide total fees by total card volume to get your real effective rate, and compare it with what this page computes for your volume and plan. If the statement is meaningfully worse and no line item explains the gap, the gap is your reseller's markup and it is negotiable. If it is better, there is nothing to do.

The same caution applies to anything quoting one Clover rate as fact. A page saying Clover charges 2.6% plus 10 cents is quoting the Starter plan on clover.com's own storefront. That figure is real. It is just not universal.

Read Clover's six vertical pricing pages together and one pattern falls out: the card present rate tracks the software plan and ignores the hardware. A Clover Go reader and a Station Duo both charge 2.6% plus 10 cents on Starter and both charge 2.3% plus 10 cents on a Growth plan. That makes the plan choice a simple piece of arithmetic, because the 10 cent per transaction fee is identical on every plan and cancels out.

Starter and the Growth plans differ by 0.30 percentage points. A Growth plan at $84.95 a month therefore pays for itself at $84.95 divided by 0.003, which is $28,316.67 of monthly card present volume. Restaurant Growth costs $89.95, so its crossover is $29,983.33 a month. Below those figures the free Starter plan is cheaper on card fees, and the paid plan has to justify itself on features instead.

The Essentials plan at $29.95 is the interesting case, and the arithmetic says something unflattering. Essentials saves 0.10 points against Starter, so it needs $29.95 divided by 0.001, which is $29,950 a month, to break even. But a $84.95 Growth plan saves 0.20 points against Essentials for $55.00 more, so it overtakes Essentials at $27,500 a month. Those thresholds are the wrong way round: by the time Essentials beats the free plan at $29,950, Growth has already beaten Essentials. On the $84.95 plan families, Essentials is never the cheapest of the three at any volume. On the restaurant family, where Growth costs $89.95, it is cheapest only in a window fifty dollars wide, between $29,950 and $30,000 a month. Buy Essentials for what it does, not for what it saves.

One more figure before a sales call. Clover prices extra devices as an increment on the software fee: the retail Advanced bundle publishes $104.90 against $84.95 for the single device bundle, and the dining bundles publish $109.90 and $129.85 against $89.95. Each step is $19.95, so a second Clover device adds $19.95 a month. That is subtraction on Clover's published prices rather than a figure Clover states, so confirm it on your quote.

Clover charges 3.5% plus 10 cents for a card that is not physically present, and that rate is the same on all five plans. Clover's own pricing FAQ is explicit about what counts: it describes a "typed-in" fee for transactions "where the card is not present, like an online sale or phone order." So an ecommerce order, an invoice paid by card, a virtual terminal payment and a phone order all land on the same 3.5% line.

A plan upgrade does nothing for card not present volume, and that is where this gets expensive for a mixed-channel business. Take the same $30,000 a month across 600 transactions from the worked example, but assume every sale is keyed or online rather than tapped. On Retail Growth that is 3.5% of $30,000, which is $1,050.00, plus $60.00 of per transaction fees, plus the $84.95 plan fee: $1,194.95 a month at an effective rate of 3.98%. The identical volume taken card present on the same plan costs $834.95 at 2.78%. The gap is $360.00 a month, and no plan on Clover's published schedule closes it.

That reframes the question for anyone selling both ways. If a meaningful share of your volume is phone orders or online sales, the thing to price is not which Clover plan you are on but whether Clover should carry that channel at all. A Clover merchant is free to run ecommerce elsewhere while keeping Clover on the counter. It also makes the mechanical fix worth real money: getting a card dipped instead of read out over the phone is worth 1.2 percentage points, which on a $75 ticket is 90 cents.

Two smaller line items belong in the same column, because they are percentages of your money. Rapid Deposit, Clover's instant funding option, costs 1.75% of the amount moved, so habitual use on a $30,000 month costs $525 on top of everything above. Clover Capital is repaid out of card sales and priced with a factor rate rather than an interest rate, which is a different kind of arithmetic entirely.

Clover publishes both a purchase price and a 36 month subscription price for the same devices, and comparing them is the clearest arithmetic on the whole pricing page. The Compact terminal is $349 outright or $16 a month for 36 months. Sixteen dollars times thirty six is $576, so the subscription costs $227 more than buying, a 65% premium, for the same box. The retail Station Duo bundle is $180 a month for 36 months against $1,899 plus $84.95 a month to buy, so once you subtract the software fee both routes pay, the hardware share of the subscription is $3,421.80 over the term against $1,899 to own it.

That premium is not automatically a bad deal. A subscription is no money down and includes a warranty and an equipment protection program, so paying $227 to avoid a $349 outlay can be rational. The premium should be a decision rather than a surprise, and very few Clover merchants are shown it in dollars.

The terms are where it gets sharp, and Clover states them plainly. Its FAQ says subscriptions "are non-cancelable and ineligible for refunds." At the end of the term you choose to purchase or return the equipment, and if you do nothing, "your subscription term will be extended at the same monthly charge." To stop that you have to tell Clover at least 30 days before the term ends. An auto extending agreement that keeps billing after the hardware is paid for several times over is the most common complaint in this category.

The genuinely bad version is a third party lease. Clover devices bought or leased from other entities "cannot be used with other payment processors," so a leased Clover is not a device you can take elsewhere if the rate turns out to be poor. Non cancelable four year terminal leases at forty or eighty dollars a month, on hardware worth a few hundred, are a fixture of this industry. Before signing anything with a monthly figure and a term on it, run it through the terminal lease versus buy calculator on this site, which turns the payment into an implied interest rate.