Card Processing Fee Comparison

1.4% plus 20p a transaction, against a flat 1.9%. The first one has the lower headline rate and is the dearer of the two on every basket under $40.

The reason is that a fixed fee per transaction is a percentage in disguise, and the percentage depends entirely on the basket. Twenty pence on a five pound sale is four per cent. On a hundred pound sale it is two hundredths of one. The advertised rate tells you almost nothing until you know your own average transaction — which is why the right answer can be different for your shop and your website.

This finds the exact basket size where the two structures cross, and tells you which side of it you are on.

Then it does the part that is essentially never quoted. A monthly fee adds a SECOND crossing, on volume rather than on basket size: how many transactions it takes before the monthly fee is worth paying at all. Both crossings are on the page, and the answer can be yes on one and no on the other.

It says when the headline rate does win, which is often. The point is not that cheap rates are a trick; it is that the rate on the advert is not the rate you pay, and the difference is arithmetic anybody can do in a minute once somebody has laid it out.

It names no processor and makes no claim about anybody’s terms. The rates and fees are yours to enter.

And it does not know how quickly each one pays you out, what they do about chargebacks, whether the terminal is rented, what leaving costs, or whether the cheaper one works with your till. Those decide plenty of real cases and none of them is arithmetic.

Save as many versions as you like and put any two side by side, figure against figure, with the better one on each line marked and the difference in its own column. That screen is the one that decides things, and it is the part a free calculator cannot do at all. In person and online have different basket sizes, so they have different answers.

One HTML file. No account, no subscription, no internet needed. Opens on Windows, Mac and Android; the readme explains the extra step on iPhone and iPad, where Apple blocks JavaScript in downloaded files and every tool of this kind is affected.

Everything lives in your browser on your device. Nothing is uploaded, which is why it works offline and why nobody else can see your figures — and it also means clearing your browsing data deletes it. The tool does not pretend otherwise: the header shows how long since your last export at all times, turns amber after three days and red after seven, and export is one click that produces a plain file you keep.