When a customer taps a card, the fee you pay splits three ways: interchange to the card’s issuing bank, a network assessment to Visa or Mastercard, and a markup to your processor. The first two are effectively the wholesale price of the transaction. The third is the game.
Flat-rate processors collapse all of that into one simple number — say 2.9% plus 30 cents — and simplicity is genuinely worth something on day one. But wholesale interchange varies enormously by card and context, and often sits far below the flat rate you’re quoted. The gap between what the transaction actually cost and what you were charged is the convenience fee you pay forever — on every sale, at your busiest, forever.
Flat-rate pricing is a subscription to not thinking about interchange. It gets expensive precisely when your business starts working.
Why a platform can price this differently
A standalone processor has one product to monetize: the payment. We don’t. Payments on Caytava live inside the platform your books already run on — so we can price acceptance on interchange economics, rebate rewards back on volume, and treat money movement as what it is: plumbing that makes the rest of the platform more valuable, not a toll booth.
That’s the basis of the guarantee: send us a recent Stripe or Square statement, and we’ll beat your effective rate — guaranteed, in writing. If we can’t, don’t switch. The same logic runs on the AP side, where flat-fee bank rails — same-day ACH, RTP, FedNow — undercut both wire fees and the bill-pay providers’ spreads.
The half nobody prices: the bookkeeping
Every processor charges you twice — once in fees, once in the monthly ritual of reconciling their payout report to your books. Deposits net of fees, refunds netted against sales, the spreadsheet that maps payouts to invoices.
On Caytava that work doesn’t exist. The processor and the ledger are the same system: a settlement posts its own entries — cash, fee, refund, sweep — against the exact invoice or bill it belongs to, the moment it happens. Tap-to-pay on a phone, a pay link on an invoice, a Friday payment run: each one is born reconciled.
What to do with this
- Pull your last processing statement and find your effective rate — total fees divided by total volume. Most owners have never computed it; most are surprised.
- Add the hours someone spends reconciling payouts each month. That’s part of the rate too.
- Send us the statement. We’ll price the same month on Caytava rails, line by line, with the guarantee attached.