Helcim fee calculator

An interchange-plus bill is three charges stacked on the same sale, and each has a percentage part and a per-item part. Interchange is the largest and goes to the bank that issued your customer's card. Assessments go to Visa or Mastercard for running the network. The markup, the only part your processor sets, goes to Helcim. The Helcim Fee Calculator prices all three and shows them as three lines, because the split is what decides whether switching processors is worth an afternoon.

Written out, monthly cost is interchange plus assessments plus markup, where each term is a rate times your volume plus a per-item fee times your transaction count. Helcim's markup at the entry band is 0.40% plus 8 cents card present and 0.50% plus 25 cents keyed or online, and both are a margin over interchange rather than a price. Reading them as a price is the mistake nearly every other Helcim calculator makes: multiply 0.40% by a sale amount and the result is out by roughly two percentage points, in the direction that flatters Helcim.

Interchange is not one rate, so this calculator does not treat it as one. It splits your volume across five card types, prices each separately, then adds them back up. The spread is enormous. On the same $30,000 month, a merchant taking nothing but regulated debit pays $334 and lands at 1.11%, while a merchant taking nothing but rewards credit pays $889 and lands at 2.96%. Identical volume, identical Helcim margin, 185 basis points apart.

The transaction count does more work than people expect. Both the per-item interchange and Helcim's 8 or 25 cents scale with the number of sales rather than their size, so a small average ticket is punished twice. Drop the salon in the worked example to an $8 average ticket and the effective rate goes past 4.7%. Under about a $15 ticket, the per-item fees are the thing to fix, and no markup negotiation will touch them.

Helcim publishes five volume bands and moves you down them automatically. Card present, the markup runs 0.40% plus 8 cents under $50,000 a month, 0.35% plus 7 cents to $100,000, 0.25% plus 7 cents to $500,000, 0.20% plus 6 cents to $1 million, and 0.15% plus 6 cents to $5 million. Keyed and online runs 0.50% plus 25 cents, then 0.45% plus 20 cents, 0.35% plus 20 cents, 0.25% plus 15 cents and 0.15% plus 15 cents. Above $5 million a month Helcim stops publishing and quotes custom pricing, so this calculator stops there too.

The band is applied on the average of your last three months of processing volume. A good December does not move you down a band on its own, and a slow quarter can move you back up one, so if your volume is seasonal the rate you pay in March is a fact about last winter. There is also nothing to apply for and nobody to negotiate with. That is unusual in this industry.

Because the discount costs nothing to take, there is no break-even in the usual sense. On a paid plan you pay a monthly fee to buy a lower rate, and the crossover is the volume where the saving covers the fee. Helcim charges no monthly fee at any band, so the crossover is simply the published threshold, and the only question worth computing is what crossing it is worth. On the worked example that is $33.33 a month and $399.96 a year, 7 basis points. The volume tiers mode in the Helcim Fee Calculator prices your month at all five bands at once.

Seven basis points is not a reason to restructure a business, but it is a reason to stop splitting volume across two merchant accounts, because the bands are measured per account. A merchant running $30,000 through Helcim and $25,000 through a legacy terminal account is priced at two entry bands instead of one $55,000 band, and pays for the privilege twice.

Visa and Mastercard publish interchange as downloadable rate tables covering several hundred programs, revised twice a year in April and October. The rate that applies to a given sale depends on the card product, the merchant category code, the channel, how the transaction authorized and how much data was passed with it. No calculator can know which program your next sale will land in, and a tool that prints one precise interchange figure for an unknown merchant is presenting a guess as a fact.

So the assumption is on screen and editable. Each band defaults to a named program off the current rate sheets: regulated debit to 0.05% plus 22 cents, non-regulated debit card present to Visa CPS/Retail Debit at 0.80% plus 15 cents, plain consumer credit card present to Visa Retail Credit Performance Threshold III at 1.51% plus 10 cents, rewards credit card present to Visa Signature Preferred at 2.10% plus 10 cents, and commercial to Visa Commercial Card Present at 2.50% plus 10 cents. Card-not-present defaults are higher across the board, which is why the channel question comes first. Tick the override box and every one becomes a field you can fill from your own statement.

The one band with no width to it is regulated debit. The Durbin Amendment caps interchange on debit issued by banks holding $10 billion or more at 0.05% plus 21 cents, with a further cent for issuers certifying compliance with the fraud prevention standards. The Federal Reserve's own Regulation II data for 2024 confirms the realized average on covered dual-message transactions at 22 cents, or 0.45% of value, and puts exempt debit, issued by banks under the threshold, at 61 cents and 1.41%. Debit is not one thing, and the gap between its two halves is larger than most merchants' entire processor markup.

The practical instruction is short. If you hold an interchange-plus statement from Helcim or anyone else, the interchange total is on it, usually as a pass-through line separate from the margin. Put that figure in and this stops being an estimate.

On the worked example the arithmetic is one-sided. Square Free charges 2.6% plus 15 cents in person, which on $30,000 across 500 sales is $855.00 against Helcim's $655.37, a difference of $199.63 a month and $2,395.56 a year. Take the same month online and Stripe's 2.9% plus 30 cents is $1,020.00 against Helcim's $850.53, a difference of $169.47 a month and $2,033.64 a year. Those are published rates multiplied out, not estimates.

The catch is that the gap is a property of your card mix, not of Helcim. Flat-rate pricing overcharges most on debit, because a regulated debit card costs the network 0.05% plus 22 cents and a flat rate bills it at the same 2.6% as a premium rewards card. The more debit you take, the bigger the saving from moving to interchange-plus. A merchant whose customers pay almost entirely on rewards credit cards sees far less of it, and on the numbers above would be paying 2.96% all in on Helcim.

Ticket size cuts the other way and can flip the answer. Helcim's keyed and online margin at the entry band carries 25 cents a transaction, which is a real cost on a small sale. Helcim's own pricing page says most merchants land near or below 2% in person and below 2.5% keyed and online. On this page's default mix the first claim holds, at 2.18% in person, but the second does not at a $60 average ticket: the same month online comes out at 2.84%. Raise the ticket to $150 and it falls to 2.43%, under Helcim's stated figure. Which one you get depends on your own numbers rather than on anybody's marketing.

The honest framing is that interchange-plus is a structurally better deal that asks more of you. There is no contract, no monthly fee and no cancellation fee at Helcim, so the switching cost is time rather than money. What you take on is a statement with more lines on it and a bill that moves when the networks move their rates. If nobody is going to read that statement, some of the value of the model goes unused.

Recurring billing costs more. Helcim adds 0.4% per transaction on automated subscription billing, on top of the volume band markup, which roughly doubles the margin at the entry band and more than triples it at the top one. For a subscription business that is the most important number on the page, and the one most easily missed, because it sits in a different table from the volume ladder.

Cards issued outside the US cost more, but not because Helcim charges for them. The card networks apply a cross-border fee that Helcim passes through inside the interchange-plus price: Visa adds 1.45% plus 3.6 cents, Mastercard 1.45%, Discover 1.30% and American Express 1.00%. Currency conversion is handled by the cardholder's own bank rather than billed to you. If a meaningful share of your customers are overseas, add that percentage to the relevant band in the interchange override rather than to the markup.

Then the fees that are not percentages. There is no monthly account fee, no monthly minimum, no statement fee, no PCI compliance fee, no setup fee and no cancellation fee. A chargeback costs nothing if the case resolves in your favor and $15 if you lose it, a materially better structure than a flat fee win or lose. ACH and EFT-PAD run 0.5% plus 25 cents capped at $6.00, with an extra 0.05% above $25,000, and a returned or NSF bank payment costs $5.00. Refunds carry no added fee, but the original transaction's fees are not returned.

Two things this calculator deliberately does not model. Level 2 and Level 3 interchange optimization, which Helcim supports, can move commercial card transactions into cheaper programs when the extra invoice data is supplied, and the saving depends entirely on data your systems may or may not pass. And the three-month averaging window means the band you are in today reflects volume you already ran, so a fast-growing business is always priced slightly behind itself.