Card fees dwarf the software line.
Buyers compare the headline software price, which runs from $0 to a few hundred dollars a month. The number that actually decides what a POS costs is the card rate. At $40,000 a month of card volume on a $25 average ticket, the published rates in this table produce between $1,080 and $1,280 a month in card fees. At $150,000 a month it is $4,050 to $4,800. Either figure is a multiple of the software line it sits beside.
A card rate has two parts and both matter: a percentage of the sale and a flat fee on every transaction. The percentage dominates when tickets are large; the flat fee dominates when they are small. That is why the cheapest vendor at a $25 ticket is not automatically the cheapest at $8, and why a rate quoted to you as "2.4%" with the per-transaction fee left off is not a quote.
Only the vendors that publish a card-present rate on their own pricing page appear below. 6 of the 10 vendors we track do not: Toast, Lightspeed, TouchBistro, Revel (now Shift4 SkyTab), NCR Aloha (NCR Voyix), Heartland Restaurant. For those, the rate is the single most important term in the deal and the one you will have to extract in writing. Do not accept a comparison, including ours, that fills the gap with a number the vendor never published.
Monthly card fees by volume, $25 average ticket
Representative for restaurants and mid-ticket retail. Published card-present rates only.
| Monthly volume | Square 2.6% + $0.15 | Clover 2.3% + $0.10 | Shopify POS 2.6% + $0.10 | SpotOn 2.45% + $0.15 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $10K/mo | $320 | $270 | $300 | $305 |
| $25K/mo | $800 | $675 | $750 | $763 |
| $40K/mo | $1280 | $1080 | $1200 | $1220 |
| $80K/mo | $2560 | $2160 | $2400 | $2440 |
| $150K/mo | $4800 | $4050 | $4500 | $4575 |
Coffee shop scenario, $8 average ticket
Same volume, six times the transaction count. This is where the flat fee decides the winner.
| Monthly volume / tx | Square | Clover | Shopify POS | SpotOn |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $25K / 3,125 tx | $1119 | $887 | $963 | $1081 |
| $50K / 6,250 tx | $2238 | $1775 | $1925 | $2163 |
At an $8 ticket, 6,250 transactions a month turns every cent of per-transaction fee into real money. The 15c vendors pay $938 a month in flat fees alone and the 10c vendors pay $625, a $313 swing created entirely by a nickel. Across the published rates, Clover is cheapest here at $1,775 and Square dearest at $2,238. If your average ticket is under about $15, weight the flat fee at least as heavily as the percentage when you compare quotes.
The software fee and the rate are one decision
Two vendors here sell the same system at two price points, trading software fee against card rate, and both trades have a break-even you can calculate:
- Square charges $49/mo for Plus and takes the rate from 2.6% + 15c to 2.5% + 15c. Ten basis points on your volume has to exceed $49, so Plus pays for itself above about $49,000 a month of card volume. Premium at $149/mo buys another ten basis points, so it beats Plus above about $100,000 a month.
- SpotOn charges $55/station for POS Essentials and takes the rate from 2.79% + 20c to 2.45% + 15c. Because both parts improve, the crossover arrives early: around $5,700 a month per station at an $8 ticket, around $10,200 at $25, around $12,500 at $50. A station doing $40,000 a month is well past all three, so the free-software plan is the expensive one for most operating restaurants.
The pattern generalises. A $0 software tier is never free; it is a different payment schedule, and whether it is cheaper depends on a volume figure you already know. Ask for the software fee and the card rate as a pair on every tier, then work out your own crossover before anyone tells you which plan you want.
What to do with this
- Low average ticket, under $15: compare on the flat fee first. A nickel of difference costs more than 30 basis points of percentage at these transaction counts.
- Mid ticket, $25 to $60: the percentage dominates. Clover's published 2.3% + 10c is the lowest card-present rate in our matrix, which is the trade-off against its 36-month term.
- Keyed and card-not-present volume: ask separately. Keyed rates are far higher than card-present (3.5% + 15c on Square, 3.5% + 10c on Clover, 3.45% + 15c on SpotOn Essentials) and a business taking phone orders will not recognise its bill from a card-present comparison.
- Above $250,000 a year: published rates stop being the whole story. Square will discuss custom pricing at that threshold under its Pro tier, and the processor-owned systems negotiate as a matter of course. Get the published rate first so you know what you are negotiating against.
Rates read from each vendor's own pricing or fees page on 3 October 2026; per-vendor sources are linked on the matrixand on each vendor page. Fee figures in the tables are this site's arithmetic on those published rates at the volumes and transaction counts shown, so you can redo any cell: volume × percentage, plus transaction count × flat fee.