Pricing that shows its work

Three parties are paid on every card sale

When a customer pays by card, the fee divides three ways. The largest share is interchange, which goes to the bank that issued the card. The card networks publish those tables, they vary by card type and by channel, and every processor in Canada works from exactly the same ones. A smaller slice goes to Visa and Mastercard themselves as assessment fees, and it is just as fixed. What remains is the acquirer margin: the fee the processor keeps for its part in moving the money.

That structure carries a blunt consequence. Two of the three layers cost the same no matter who you sign with, so every real difference between providers lives in the margin. A pricing conversation that talks about anything else is usually steering you away from that number. Our page on credit card processing walks through the layers in more depth; the short version is that the negotiation is smaller and simpler than the industry makes it look.

Flat rate and fitted pricing, honestly compared

Flat rate pricing charges one percentage on everything that comes through. For a brand new business doing modest volume, that simplicity has real value: one number, no tables, predictable to the decimal. The catch is that the single rate must sit high enough to cover the most expensive card that might appear, which means every transaction below that ceiling gets billed as though it were the dearest.

Debit is where the trade bites hardest. Interac debit is priced by the network in cents per transaction, yet a flat percentage treats a $150 debit tap like a premium credit card. Interchange plus reverses that: each transaction bills at its own network cost with one visible margin on top, so debit is billed as debit, basic credit as basic credit, and premium cards as what they genuinely are instead of what an average guessed.

The honest split between the models is this. Flat rate suits low or irregular volume where administrative simplicity is worth more than precision. Once a counter runs steady daily transactions, the case for a fitted structure strengthens, and it strengthens harder the more debit your customers use.

Why this page has no rate card

A published rate card can only be one of two things: a teaser that few businesses actually qualify for, or a padded number safe enough to hand anyone. Both are versions of the same blending problem this model exists to remove. Your true cost depends on your card mix, your average ticket, your channels and your monthly volume, and none of that is knowable before we read a statement.

So here is what fitted means, precisely. We take your most recent processing statement, price your actual transactions at their network cost, and quote our margin against that reality, in writing. It is not a euphemism for charging whatever the relationship will bear. The margin we quote is the margin that appears on every statement afterward, which means you can audit it monthly against the promise, and we think you should.

The fee lines that are not the rate

The percentage never tells the whole story. Statements also carry monthly account fees, statement fees, PCI compliance charges, sometimes PCI non compliance penalties, monthly minimums, and batch or settlement fees. Each looks trivial on its own. Stacked together they can quietly outweigh the headline rate, and on many agreements that is precisely the design.

Some of those lines are legitimate costs of running an account. Others should never survive scrutiny: a non compliance penalty on an account nobody helped you validate, a monthly minimum billing a seasonal business through its quiet months, a paper statement fee you never asked for. Every agreement we build settles these lines deliberately at signing instead of leaving them to accumulate.

The guarantee, and the way out

The margin we quote is the margin you get, in writing, before anything is signed, and it appears as its own line on every statement afterward, so you can audit the promise monthly. If switching means your current provider bills you to leave, in most cases we have closure costs waived or cover them ourselves, so an exit fee is rarely the reason to stay somewhere that no longer fits.

The first step costs nothing and commits you to nothing. Send a recent statement. We read it line by line and come back within 1 to 2 business days with what each layer is, how your agreement is built, and what a fitted one would look like. When the honest answer is that your current setup holds up, that is the answer you will hear. There is more on how the statement review works if you want the mechanics first.