The Fee Stack Nobody Reads — Where the Second Price List Lives
Every tracked vendor has a headline price and a second one underneath it. Processing rates that change with your plan, per-transaction fees, volume caps, and a monthly charge to keep your own records. All quoted, all dated.
You compare software on the monthly price. Every vendor knows that, and every vendor has a second price list underneath the first one.
This is that second list, for four tracked vendors, quoted from their own published pages on 1 August 2026. None of it is hidden. All of it is on pages you can read today. Almost nobody reads them.
1. Your subscription tier changes your processing rate
This is the one that surprises people, because it inverts the usual advice about downgrading.
From Square's own fee page:
| Free plan | Plus | Premium | |
|---|---|---|---|
| In person (tap, dip, swipe) | "2.6% + 15¢" | "2.5% + 15¢" | "2.4% + 15¢" |
| Online | "3.3% + 30¢" | "2.9% + 30¢" | "2.9% + 30¢" |
| ACH via invoice | "1%, $1 min" | "1%, $1 min, $10 fee cap" | "1%, $1 min, $10 fee cap" |
| Manual entry / card on file | "3.5% + 15¢" | "3.5% + 15¢" | "3.5% + 15¢" |
| Afterpay | "6% + 30¢" | "6% + 30¢" | "6% + 30¢" |
Read the top two rows together and the subscription stops being a software purchase. The Plus plan buys 0.1 of a percentage point in person and 0.4 of a point online. So "cancel the subscription and use the free tier" is only good advice below a certain turnover — above it, you are cancelling a discount.
The break-even, worked from the published rates against a $49/month plan:
- In-person only: the 0.1-point gap is worth $49 at about $49,000 a month in card turnover. Below that, downgrading wins. Above it, the paid plan pays for itself and the features are free.
- Any meaningful online share: the 0.4-point gap does the same job at about $12,250 a month.
Note also the ACH row, which is the one nobody looks at: the free plan's 1% has no cap; the paid plans cap it at $10. On a $5,000 invoice paid by bank transfer, that is $50 versus $10 — the cap alone is worth the subscription that month.
And the two rows that do not move at all — manual entry at 3.5% + 15¢, and Afterpay at 6% + 30¢ — are worth knowing for a different reason. A business that keys cards by hand over the phone is paying 3.5% no matter which plan it buys.
2. Per-transaction fees, where the cents are the story
Wave's published rates:
*Starter (free):* "2.9% + $0.60 per credit card transaction" · "3.4% + $0.60 per Amex transaction"
*Pro ($19/month):* "2.9% + $0 per credit card transaction" for the first 10 transactions monthly, then $0.60 thereafter
Look at what the $19 buys: ten transactions a month at $0.60 each. That is $6.00 of value against a $19 charge. On the per-transaction line alone, Pro never breaks even — it has to be earning its keep on the other features, and you should check that it is.
And the 60-cent fixed component matters more than the percentage for small invoices. On a $40 invoice, 2.9% + $0.60 is a 4.4% effective rate. On a $400 invoice it is 3.05%. If you bill small amounts frequently, the fixed fee is your real processing cost and the advertised percentage is close to irrelevant.
One more, filed under things that should not be true: Wave's receipt-capture add-on is "$11/month" on the free plan and "$8/month" on Pro. The same feature costs more if you have not bought the subscription.
3. The cap is not on seats — it is on the thing you do
Smartwaiver's tiers, from its own pricing page, are volume caps:
| Plan | Price | Included |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | $19/mo | "up to 100 signed waivers" |
| Starter | $55/mo | "up to 300 signed waivers" |
| Business | $155/mo | "up to 1,000 signed waivers" |
| Premium | $199/mo | "up to 2,500 signed waivers" |
Divide it out and the per-waiver cost falls as you grow — about 19¢ each at Basic, about 8¢ at Premium. That is a normal, defensible volume discount and worth saying plainly.
The line that matters for a seasonal business is a different one: the same page lists a *Storage Plan at "$7/month to maintain data during inactive periods."***
Read that as an operator: a business that trades six months a year pays a monthly fee, in the closed months, to keep its own signed waivers reachable. It is disclosed, it is small, and it is exactly the kind of line that never appears in a comparison table — because comparison tables have a column for the monthly price and no column for the months you are shut.
*Their page also states "no contracts, no hidden fees,"* and on the evidence of the page that is fair — everything above is published. "Not hidden" and "not noticed" are different things, and only one of them is the vendor's job.**
4. The headline price is a promotion, and the add-ons are not
FreshBooks' published plan prices carry a 90%-off promotion: "$2.30USD/mo" displayed for Lite against a regular "$23.00USD/mo"; Plus "$4.30" against "$43.00"; Premium "$7.00" against "$70.00".
The number you will actually pay from month four is the second one, and it is ten times the first. When comparing tools, always compare the regular price — the promotion ends at the same time for everyone and it is not part of the decision.
And underneath the plan price:
- *Team members: "$11/mo per user", on every plan. That is close to half the entire Lite plan, per extra person* — so a three-person business on Lite is not paying $23, it is paying $45.
- *Advanced Payments: "$20/mo".*
- *Payroll: "$40/mo plus $6/mo per user".*
- *Client limits: Lite "5 Clients", Plus "50 Clients". The tier you need is decided by your client count, not by which features you want.*
What to do with this
The one calculation worth doing: your effective rate. Total processing fees for a month, divided by total card turnover, from your statement. Not from a rate card — the advertised percentage excludes interchange and scheme fees, and the fixed cents per transaction do not appear in it at all.
Then three questions:
- Does my plan change my processing rate? If yes, the subscription and the fee are one decision, not two, and you cannot cancel one without moving the other.
- What is my average transaction size? Under about $50, the fixed fee is your real cost. Compare cents, not percentages.
- What am I capped on? Seats, clients, documents, months of the year — find the meter before it finds you.
The honest counterweight
Payment processing is a real service with real costs, and nobody self-hosts their way out of card fees. Interchange is set by the card schemes; a processor's margin sits on top of it; the whole stack is regulated and audited. A vendor charging 2.9% is not overcharging you — most of that is not theirs.
So this page is not an argument against paying fees. It is an argument for knowing which price you are actually comparing — because the monthly figure in a comparison table is, for several of these vendors, the smaller half of what you pay.
And where a tool has no payment surface at all — a rota, a leave register, a waiver archive — there is no second price list, which is a genuine and underrated advantage of owning that layer. It is also the layer where owning is easiest, which is not a coincidence.
Next steps
- The SaaS Price Observatory — 82 vendors' headline prices, quoted from their own pages and dated
- Deliora — the self-hosted store built on exactly this fee math: sell your own digital products with the processor's fee as the only per-sale cut
- What a six-person café pays for software every year — where the Square tier break-even is worked through on a real bill
- Rent or own — the five-year math with both sides priced properly
Every rate and fee above is quoted from the named vendor's own published pricing or fee page, read 1 August 2026. Break-even figures are arithmetic on those published rates and are stated as approximations because your mix of card types and transaction sizes will move them.