Ask a small business owner what they pay to take a payment and most of them can give you a percentage. Ask them what they actually received on a given day and far fewer can, because the two are not the same number and the difference was removed before they ever saw it.
That is the part I want to change, and it is the only interesting thing about how I price this.
The amount your customer sent is not the amount you keep
Almost every way a small business takes money works the same way: the cut comes out of the payment on the way past. Your customer pays one figure, a smaller figure arrives, and every line in your books is net of a fee you now have to reconstruct if you want to know what you actually sold.
It is a small indignity in isolation. It is not small at the end of a year, when somebody — probably you, probably on a Sunday — is unpicking fees line by line to work out a gross figure that was perfectly well known at the moment of sale.
I do it the other way around. The payment arrives whole, in an account in your name, and I send you a bill at the end of the month like any other supplier. The fee is invoiced, never deducted. What your customer sent and what you reconcile are the same number, which means the arithmetic you do in January is arithmetic you do not do.
What I charge
Three rates, all of them on the public page, none of them requiring a call to find out.
Pay as you go — 0.75% per payment, no monthly fee. For taking payment occasionally, or for trying it. There is nothing to commit to and nothing to pay in a month where you collected nothing.
Business — $49 a month, and the rate drops to 0.25%. The monthly fee buys the lower rate. It is worth it once you collect enough that half a percent of your takings is more than $49 a month, and that crossover is a two-minute sum with your real numbers rather than something I should be guessing at here.
Nonprofit — 0.5% per payment, no monthly fee. A lower rate and no fixed cost, because a small charity has no software budget and the money is somebody's gift rather than a margin. I build for a Lansing ministry, so this one is not theoretical to me.
The percentage applies to the dollar value of the payment when it lands. No setup fee, no contract, no minimum volume, and no reserve held back.
And the terms nobody publishes
A rate is the easy half. These are the terms that actually matter on a bad month, and I would rather you read them now than discover them later.
Every payment is billed exactly once. A payment that arrives late lands on the next statement instead of being missed or double-counted. Anything held for review is not billed at all.
If a payment has no reliable dollar value, your bill stops. It does not get estimated. A guess that becomes an invoice is worse than a late invoice.
If you are 30 days late paying me, I stop issuing you new pay links — and the links already in your customers' hands keep working. That asymmetry is deliberate and it is the term I am proudest of. Your customer's money is not mine to interrupt. A dispute between you and me is between you and me, and holding a stranger's payment hostage to it would be indefensible however convenient it was.
Is it actually cheaper for you?
Honestly: sometimes, and I am not going to pretend the percentage is the whole story.
If you take a lot of small payments, a percentage with no fixed cost usually wins. If you take a few large ones, the $49 plan almost certainly does. If what is expensive about your current setup is not the rate at all but the hours somebody spends reconciling it, then the invoiced fee is worth more to you than either number, and that is the case I actually see most often.
What I will not do is quote somebody else's prices at you to make mine look better. You already know what you pay. Bring that figure and a normal month's takings to a call and the comparison takes about ten minutes.
What this does not do
A completed payment is final. There is no chargeback window. That removes a real category of fraud that currently lands on you — and it removes your customer's ability to reverse a payment, which makes this suit delivered, invoiced work far better than anonymous walk-in retail.
Your customer pays from their own wallet, in a dollar-denominated currency. That is the one mechanical fact worth stating plainly, because it is the thing that decides whether any of this fits your customers. No amount of good design changes it, and if your customers will not do it then this is the wrong product and I will tell you so.
It sits alongside what you take today. It does not replace cards.
Where this stands, plainly
The system is built, tested and deployed, and it is running on a test network — so no live money has gone through it yet. Before any does, two people who are not me have to sign off: an accountant on how a payment is valued in dollars, and an attorney on the terms.
I am taking calls now anyway, because the first businesses on it should be ones I have actually spoken to, and because the order of those conversations decides what gets built next. If you need to collect money this week, that is a fair thing to need and this is not yet the thing for it.
The reason I am comfortable selling it at all: the first business on it is my own. My trades company has put $216K through software I wrote and still operate, $192K of it collected, with under $650 more than 30 days late. I am not the vendor here waiting for a test customer. I am the first one.
The rest of what I charge for
Same principle — the price is on the page.
- Operations Audit — free, 30 minutes, no signup.
- Local SEO Audit — $1,500 one-time, delivered in about a week.
- AI Reliability Audit — $2,500 one-time, delivered in about a week.
- Ops-Automation Build — from $6,000 one-time, delivered in 2–4 weeks.
- LLM Integration Sprint — from $7,500 one-time, delivered in 2–4 weeks.
- Support after a build — $1–2K per month, optional, cancel with notice.
- Embedded engineering — a monthly retainer at 8–20 hrs/week, month-to-month, scope agreed each cycle.
One engineer on all of it. The person who writes it is the person who picks up.
If the expensive part of taking payment at your business is the admin around it rather than the rate, start where it is cheapest to start: the free website check takes a minute and needs no signup.
Then book a call and bring two numbers — what you collect in a normal month, and what you pay to collect it. Half an hour, and the honest outcome is sometimes that this does not fit you. I would rather lose a sale than sell a business a payment method its customers will not use.
