Per-transaction fees
A percentage of the sale, plus sometimes a small fixed amount per transaction. On small tickets, the fixed portion matters more than the percentage — a fifteen cent fee on a three dollar coffee works out to five percent all on its own, before the percentage rate is even applied.
Recurring monthly fees
Charged whether you process a single transaction or a thousand.
- Monthly account or service fee
- PCI compliance program fee
- Gateway fee for online or virtual terminal access
- Statement fee
- Monthly minimum shortfall, if your volume falls below a set threshold
Incident fees
Chargeback fees, retrieval request fees, and returned batch fees. These are rare for most well-run businesses but expensive when they do happen, so it's worth knowing the dollar amounts in advance rather than finding out during a dispute.
Equipment costs
Hardware can be purchased outright, financed, or leased. Leases are where the worst deals tend to live — multi-year, non-cancelable terms on hardware worth a small fraction of the total payments made against it. Always ask directly which arrangement you're signing.
Assessment and network fees
Small fees charged directly by Visa, Mastercard and the other networks, separate from interchange and separate from your processor's margin. These are passed through at cost and are the same across every provider.
Fees tied to how you accept cards
Card-not-present fees for phone or mailed-in orders, address verification fees for online checks, and higher per-transaction costs for card-on-file or subscription billing all reflect the extra fraud risk of not having the physical card in hand.
One-time or occasional fees
Early termination fees for leaving a contract early, account setup fees, and chargeback representment fees for disputing a chargeback all fall here. These matter most when comparing contracts, since they only bite in specific situations.
How Digital Harvest structures this differently
We provide equipment at no cost so there's no lease to untangle later, and we walk through the full fee schedule with you before anything is signed — not just the headline rate. There's no long-term contract, so an early termination fee simply isn't part of the conversation.